Women's Clothing Boutique in North Mount Pleasant, SC

MT. PLEASANT, S.C. (WCBD) – A proposed retail village in North Mt. Pleasant is raising concerns for some residents nearby.

Plans for the nearly 15-acre property located across Highway 17 from Oakland Market and Lowes include a racquet club with tennis and pickleball courts, retail, restaurants, office space, and a luxury pet boarding facility.

Developers say it will add to the livability in town.

A proposal and results of an impact assessment were presented to the town’s planning committee on Tuesday.

“The primary anchor of this is going to be a racquet facility,” said Mt. Pleasant Councilman Jake Rambo. “A racquetball, tennis facility which I think will be a great addition to the Town of Mt. Pleasant.”

But Mayor Will Haynie says the current proposal is different from the original plan that was presented to Mt. Pleasant Town Council a few years ago.

“These other things, all though there was a small retail component of that, the dog kennel and all that is new. And what we saw today is the tennis center, which is why we originally brought it into the town, is not in phase 1 that’s in phase 2,” said Mayor Haynie. “How do we know that we’ll ever even have the tennis because now the dog kennel and the retail are phase one and that’s a very different thing than I voted for when we brought into the town years ago.”

The pet boarding facility is raising concerns from the church next door, The Church at LifePark.

“We’re very concerned with the nuisance noise of dogs,” said Robbie Wiksell, a church member.

He describes the church campus as a quiet refuge away from a busy town and believes the pet facility will negatively impact that.

“We’re concerned we’re being set up to be continuously annoyed and in conflict with the dog development. We will then be in conflict with the town continuously asking for relief,” said Wiksell.

He hopes that town leaders will reconsider the location of the pet facility to be as far from the church as possible.

The developer switched the outdoor kennel portion of the boarding facility to the other side of the building further from the church, but both Mayor Haynie and Councilmember Rambo say the livability impact needs to be looked at further before the plans are set in stone.

“We have to look hard at what’s the buffer? What’s the placement of something like a kennel that could generate a lot of noise for a church next door,” questioned the mayor.

The planning committee approved the impact assessment and moved to push the proposal forward to be heard in front of the full town council next Tuesday, July 12.

Two new retail shops are ready to launch in a Target-anchored shopping center in North Charleston.

“Opening soon” and “Now hiring” signs are posted in front of Advance Auto Parts and Popshelf in North Rivers Towne Center at 7250 Rivers Ave.

They are splitting a formerly 31,433-square-foot vacant space next to a recently opened Buy Buy Baby store. The retail center is owned by LBX Investments of Los Angeles.

Popshelf is a new concept from Dollar General that offers home furnishings, party items, toys and beauty products. It’s geared toward the suburban shopper with a household income between $50,000 and $125,000, higher than Dollar General’s lower-income targeted customers.

Opening dates for the new stores have not been announced.

Tool time

Tool giant Harbor Freight plans to set up shop in Summerville.

The Calabasas, Calif.-based retailer recently signed an extended lease for a 16,000-square-foot structure to be built at 388 E. 5th North St., also known as U.S. Highway 78, about a block south of the Berlin G. Myers Parkway, according to Dorchester County land records.

The 1.43-acre site, owned by Henbell Summerville HFT LLC of Augusta, Ga., sits east of a Spinx convenience store and gas station and next to Sawmill Branch. It also abuts a retail center where Planet Fitness and Palmetto State Armory are located.

Harbor Freight’s lease is for 15 years with five five-year renewal options. The agreement also grants the tenant the first right of refusal to purchase the property.

On the way

In northern Mount Pleasant, Red Bird Hospitality Group LLC plans to open a new Bohemian Bull tavern and beer garden in January in a 6,143-square-foot space at 2668 U.S. Highway 17.

The East Cooper franchise location for the bar and grill is the former site of Carrabba’s Italian Grill. It’s also near the newly opened Cabana Burgers & Shakes at 2664 U.S. Highway 17.

Bohemian Bull’s flagship venue is on Folly Road on James Island. Another restaurant is in Greenville, with a new site coming to Mauldin in the Upstate and another in Grapevine, Texas.

What’s cooking?

A Connecticut-based restaurant specializing in rotisserie chicken is close to opening in the Charleston area.

El Pollo Guapo recently applied for its state alcohol license at 1130 Folly Road on James Island where Black Magic Café operated before closing its last Lowcountry location in September after 13 years.

The new restaurant will offer whole roasted chickens, sides, tacos, rice bowls, salads, desserts and other items.

The company’s website says it plans to open by the end of the year and bring a food truck.

Cleaning up

Not one but two car washes are on the way to the Centre Pointe development in North Charleston.

Whistle Express, part of Charlotte-based Magnolia Wash Holdings, is building its first South Carolina location beside Mellow Mushroom on Tanger Outlet Boulevard while Tommy’s Express plans to take over the former Burger King site at Centre Pointe Drive and Tanger Outlet Boulevard near Walmart and Tanger Outlets.

Michigan-based Tommy’s Express has two other locations in the Charleston area on Ashley Phosphate Road in North Charleston and Trolley Road in Summerville. Opening dates have not been announced for either location.

Rolling in

A luxury rental transportation business recently added a second U.S. location in Charleston.

Double Black Transportation has set up an office at 310 Broad St. on the peninsula along with an off-site vehicle lot at 1211 Palm St. in Hanahan.

The company’s other location is in Jackson Hole, Wyo.

Case Resor is the owner of both businesses, which offer party buses for weddings, concerts and other social outings.

NORTH CHARLESTON — A discount grocery chain soon will open its second Charleston-area store not far from its main competitor.

Lidl plans to welcome customers on Oct. 19 in the newly opened Ross Dress for Less-anchored Cedar Grove Shopping Center on Dorchester Road in North Charleston, 3 miles east of no-frills rival Aldi.

A ribbon-cutting ceremony is set for 7:40 a.m. at 8849 Dorchester Road for the $11 million new store.

The first 100 customers in line before the ribbon cutting will receive a gift card, with amounts ranging from $5 to $100. Shoppers can enter to win a $500 Lidl gift card, sample store items and take advantage of special giveaways.

About 80 percent of the German-owned chain’s products are its own brand. And like Aldi, it requires customers to bring their own bags. Additionally, the grocer offers many items — other than food — that change each Wednesday.

The new 29,089-square-foot store is more than two years in the making.

The Lidl building’s shell was completed several months ago, but interior work stopped in the spring and early summer because of needed equipment that was slow to arrive. Work resumed inside the store by late summer.

A small sign on the door signals the shop’s grand opening. The store will be open 8 a.m.-9 p.m. daily.

The Arlington, Va.-based grocer plans to open a third Lowcountry store in the Dick’s Sporting Goods-anchored Bowman Place Shopping Center on Bowman Road in Mount Pleasant, but its arrival has been delayed.

In early 2021, Lidl signed a 15-year lease with options for up to 15 more years at the Mount Pleasant site, which is about 2 miles north of Aldi in the Plaza at East Cooper Shopping Center on Johnnie Dodds Boulevard.

Workers renovated the 20,000-square-foot future Lidl space where a kitchenware store once operated and built a 6,000-square-foot addition on the backside of the retail center for the new East Cooper store.

By late spring, the “Coming Soon” sign at the entrance was removed and work halted at the site.

“We are still in the planning process for Mount Pleasant, and we hope to have a better sense of timing later next year,” Lidl spokeswoman Chandler Spivey said.

Lidl opened its first store in 1973 in Germany with three employees and 500 products. Today, it has more than 12,000 stores, operates in 32 countries and employs 360,000 people.

The grocer established operations in the U.S. near Washington, D.C., in 2015 and opened its first U.S. locations in 2017. It now has more than 170 stores across nine East Coast states.

The Lidl grocery chain is a division of the Schwarz Group of Germany. It has one other store in the Charleston region at 435 St. James Ave. in Goose Creek. It opened in 2017.

Note: This story has been updated with opening ceremony information provided by the grocer.

MOUNT PLEASANT, S.C. (WCBD) – Proposed changes to the zoning for Carolina Park Elementary School in north Mount Pleasant have some parents fighting back.

Jonathan Mars is one of the nearly 1,100 parents who have signed a petition asking CCSD leaders to not rezone the school.

“There’s a failure of the district to address overcrowding in our school. So because of that, they’re really creating options that are going to penalize a lot of kids in different parts of north Mt. Pleasant, notably here in Carolina Park,” explained Mars, a father of two children who attend Carolina Park Elementary.

The problem he, and other parents, want to draw attention to is that children who live closest to the school may not be able to attend depending on which, if any, rezoning option is chosen.

Mars says many kids walk or ride their bikes to Carolina Park Elementary and changing that would mean more traffic on other roadways like Park West Boulevard and Highway 17 which are already heavily congested with school traffic during certain hours of the day.

“Don’t take kids away from the school that they live closest to. In Carolina Park right now there are people who don’t live here who will be able to send their kids here but people that live closest to it can’t,” said Mars. “So we think geography should play a role. Don’t make parents drive by their school every day, take their kids off their bikes, and bring them to a school that they don’t need to go to because there’s one right here.”

The Charleston County School District’s (CCSD) Department of Planning and Real Estate provided board members with three options for the proposed rezoning at a meeting on May 18. They are below:

The district said with residential growth in north Mount Pleasant, they’re expecting the population at Carolina Park Elementary to reach its peak during the fiscal year 2025. Projections from the district show the peak at 1,051 students before slowly falling back down in the following years. Carolina Park Elementary’s capacity is 968 students.

“So, there’s an overcrowding issue but then if you look at their forecast, I’m also wondering, and other parents are wondering, why we can’t use portable classrooms to kind of fix that two-year delta where the population starts to decline,” said Mars.

If rezoning should occur, students impacted would be transferred to Laurel Hill Primary School or Charles Pinckney Elementary School which are both located in Park West.

Below are attendance predictions for both schools:

Another question parents are asking is why Carolina Park Elementary can’t be expanded to accommodate a growing population.

According to the website for the Carolina Park neighborhood, the school is “expandable to 1,200.”

During the 2020 general election, Charleston County voters chose to implement a 1% sales and use tax to fund education projects. In a long list of projects included on the ballot, number 3 on the list was “Design, construct and equip an expansion at Carolina Park Elementary School.”

“If you want to feed kids that don’t live in Carolina Park, or don’t even live in Mt. Pleasant, into this school, then you need to expand it,” said Mars. “And there was a one percent tax in 2020 where this was one of the things that when they funded education that was going to be taken care of.”

If pushed forward, this would be the second rezoning in the school’s five years of operation. A rezoning plan was adopted in 2020 and put into effect for the 2021-2022 school year because of the same reasons.

News 2 reached out to CCSD for an interview, but the district was unavailable.

CCSD is looking for public input on this proposal at their next regularly scheduled board meeting which will be held on August 23rd at 6 p.m.

After that, the board will take comments into consideration and is expected to make a final decision later in the fall.

Carolina Park Elementary opened in 2017 and is rated “Excellent” by the state Department of Education. The land for the school was donated to the town by Carolina Park.

A new game-and-restaurant venue is on the way to the growing town of Mount Pleasant and will serve as the flagship operation, with two other locations planned across the Southeast.

Crush Yard will offer eight pickleball courts, shuffleboard and other activities along with backyard bites, beer and wine at the vacated site of a former gun and fishing gear merchant.

Plans call for an opening this winter in the 38,773-square-foot space formerly occupied by Palmetto State Armory at 3365 S. Morgans Point Road in the northern end of the state’s fourth-largest municipality.

Crush Yard also will feature an outdoor space in the back with fire pits where patrons can listen to live music and play games such as cornhole and giant Jenga-like features.

The name was selected because players often use terms such as “crushing it” for someone playing well, according to Andrew Ladden, chief marketing officer and an investor in the enterprise. “Yard” came into play because of the outdoor element planned for the site, he said.

Visitors can pre-book courts through an app, and the new venue will offer memberships, both annual and month-to-month. The more patrons play, the more they can earn freebies that include complimentary drinks, snacks and merchandise, Ladden said.

Members can enter tournaments where they will be matched with players of similar skill levels and will have court-booking preference.

The site will include self-serve ordering kiosks along with self-pour beer, wine and soft drinks.

The menu will include hamburgers, cheeseburgers, chips, dips, chicken dishes, house-made cotton candy and healthier options such as lettuce wraps.

“We are debating adding pizza, too,” Ladden said. “We want people to come and hang out, even if they don’t play pickleball.”

Ladden, who lives in New Jersey, has partnered with four Charleston investors and others outside the area to produce the flagship Crush Yard. Others are planned in Orlando and Nashville in 2023, with expansions into other cities in the future, he said.

The business partners plan to spend $5 million to $10 million to upfit the former Palmetto Armory space with a kitchen, interior renovations that will include a balcony, a façade facelift and backside exterior improvements.

Ladden said the investors selected Mount Pleasant for the first venue because its a sought-after community in the Charleston area.

“We think it’s the right kind of audience for pickleball,” Ladden said. “It’s sweeping through suburban neighborhoods throughout the country, and Mount Pleasant is a popular suburb in the Charleston area. There are not a lot of places like this there. It seems like a really natural fit.”

Earlier this month, MIX, an “eatertainment” project that will offer food, drinks, axe-throwing, duckpin bowling and other indoor games, announced it will move into the former space where Butcher & The Boar restaurant was located in Brookgreen Center off Coleman Boulevard. A November opening is targeted.

“There is a trend of dining with athletic entertainment,” Ladden said. “People want to do stuff. They want to get up and move around. They want to do something and not sit still.”

Construction on the former gun shop has not begun. Investors are now drawing up plans to present to the town, and Ladden is hopeful the new business will open by late fall, but he realizes plans and permitting take time.

“It could be December or even January,” he said.

Palmetto State Armory moved from Mount Pleasant to a former Bi-Lo supermarket store in West Ashley, where it opened earlier this year.