A chimney is a mechanical device. What is it venting? If it is abandoned, I would suggest you "unlove" the brick. If you intend to open the space up, then analyze the structure that may are attached to the chimney and determine what it will take to make sure things are structurally sound. From experience, I can tell you that this is a nasty job. I did it on a large fireplace and the space and openness is great. That is not really nice brickwork (sorry) and will not compare to the benefit of the open space.

Jack I appreciate your input but budget is a huge concern of mine and imagine that removing the chimney is going to be very costly. You can't really tell from the pic but the opposite wall is going to come down so that will open tremendously. Any thoughts of how to incorporate it? I'm in an amazing neighborhood in charleston and features like these are adding immense value to homes especially if j can come up with a creative way to build it up into a wine storage area or bar

Not even sure if you could really re-tuckpoint that mess at the bottom without it all coming down and being rebuilt. Is the chimney being used for anything?

All you would have to do to remove it is take it apart from the top down, patch the roof and ceiling, and for the leftover bricks either keep them for various uses like landscaping or put an ad out to sell them.

If it has to stay, there really isn't a way to incorporate it if it is in the middle of an open area, it would basically act like a pillar to walk around.

A lot of times the brick and mortar work isn't finished nicely if the chimney was originally intended to be inside a wall. We had a similar chimney in our kitchen and elected to close it back in. There wasn't a good way to incorporate it into our space without making it look like an after through and it would have been a huge amount of work to make the mortar look nice.

If you're in a historic neighborhood, your chimney isn't really "yours", it is or may be part of the historic fabric of the home, and therefore the neighborhood. Demolition is forever. And expensive.