Rainbow Row is a series of thirteen historic houses at 79 to 107 East Bay Street. It originally fronted the Cooper River, but the land was filled in later. Merchants built stores on the ground floor and homes above.
A fire in 1778 destroyed much of the neighborhood. After the Civil War the area slid into near slum conditions. In the 1920s, Susan Pringle Frost, who founded the Society for the Preservation of Old Dwellings, bought six of the buildings.
In 1931, Dorothy Haskell Porcher Legge bought 99 through 101 East Bay and painted them pink, based on a colonial Caribbean color scheme. Other owners followed. By 1945 most of the houses had been restored.