Ask anyone who works on Center Street how business was this summer and you'll get some version of the same answer: rough. The Pineapple Hut's manager, Taylor Connor, called it one of the slowest stretches the soft-serve shop has seen since it opened in 2019. Two blocks away, Kate Ferrara and Melissa Anderson watched their new pop-up shop, Surfer Betty Surf Shack, pull in less than $100 on some days after opening in April, right into the middle of a construction zone. A server who works the island told the Post and Courier it was one of the slowest seasons since the pandemic.
That's the story everyone on Folly heard all summer, and it's true. But it isn't the whole picture, and the missing half matters if you live here.
Mayor Chris Bizzell has a different number. The traffic counter on the connector bridge, the island's only way in and out, logged more cars coming and going this year than at the same point last year. Short-term rental occupancy on Folly was also up slightly, according to AirDNA data Bizzell cited. People kept coming to Folly Beach in roughly the same numbers, or more. What changed wasn't demand for the island. It was whether that demand could physically reach the businesses lining one particular half mile of road.
What Center Street Actually Looked Like This Summer
Since last fall, Center Street has been fenced off with orange safety barrels and construction equipment as the Center Street Stormwater Infrastructure Improvements Project tore up the road to replace pipes that had never been touched since they went into the ground in the 1940s. City Administrator Aaron Pope called it the largest and costliest stormwater upgrade the city has ever taken on, and the price tag backs him up: more than $7 million, funded mostly through the South Carolina Infrastructure Investment Program.
The project was originally supposed to wrap by May 2026. It didn't. By early July, visitors were describing ten-minute walks across a street that used to take thirty seconds, and business owners were watching a summer's worth of foot traffic get rerouted around fencing and equipment staging. For a seasonal storefront like Surfer Betty, which chose its Center Street and West Erie Avenue corner specifically for visibility, that meant the one asset the location was built around, people walking past, simply disappeared for months.
This is the part of the story that's easy to miss if you weren't watching closely: the disruption was hyper-local. It hit the shops fronting that specific stretch of pavement. It didn't touch the island's actual pull.
A Few Blocks Away, Nothing Slowed Down
While Center Street dealt with excavators, the rest of Folly kept running on its normal calendar. Koko's on the Pier, the tiki-themed relaunch of the old Pier 101 space on the Folly Beach Fishing Pier, opened March 25, 2026, and spent the entire disrupted summer building a following, not losing one. It's part of the Tides Folly Beach family of restaurants alongside Pinky's on the Beach and Roasted Coffee + Shop, none of which sit on Center Street and none of which had to compete with a construction fence for foot traffic.
The Warrior Surf Foundation, the veterans' surf therapy nonprofit based on Folly, didn't adjust its calendar around the construction either. Its event lineup rolled on as scheduled. And the Folly Beach Farmers Market kept setting up every Wednesday in the Island Bar & Grill parking lot, same vendors, same rhythm, including regulars like photographer Chase E. Barker and Olinda Olives and Olive Oil.
None of that is a coincidence. It's the same demand that showed up in the bridge traffic counter, just spending its time and money somewhere other than the one street that was hardest to get to.
What Actually Comes Back This Month
By August 6, city officials said the major underground work was done, pipes laid and connected, and what remained was finishing work: paving, tree planting, and new rain gardens. Public Works Director Eric Lutz said the wider pipes are already showing their effect during heavy rain, and the project is on pace to close out by September.
What that means for the street once the fencing comes down:
- A net gain of roughly 35 parking spaces once construction wraps, since the project removes 4 parallel spots for green infrastructure but adds 39 new ones across the project area, according to the city's own project page.
- Six new rain gardens and permeable Powerblock pavers designed to let stormwater soak through the surface instead of pooling on the road.
- New streetlights, currently being installed by Dominion Energy, plus replanted palmetto trees and reinstalled commemorative bricks along the sidewalks.
- Roughly three times the underground capacity to hold water at high tide before it drains into the marsh, according to Planet Follywood co-owner and city council member DJ Rich, who's been fielding complaints about the project from both sides of the counter all summer.
That last point is worth sitting with. Center Street has flooded regularly for decades, backing up into surrounding neighborhoods during hard rain and high tide. The same disruption that shut down foot traffic to a soft-serve shop for a summer is also the reason that street won't flood the way it used to.
Two Dates Worth Circling
If you want to see the difference between "slow summer" and "normal summer" side by side, September gives you two chances.
Pinky's on the Beach is throwing a full-day Labor Day Beach Jam on Monday, September 7, running from noon into the night with a headline set from Miami-based DJ KONFLICT starting at 6:30 p.m. It's the kind of event that requires exactly zero foot traffic on Center Street, because Pinky's sits on the sand, not the road.
Five days later, on Saturday, September 12, the Warrior Surf Foundation holds its 5th Annual Foam Frenzy Classic at the Washout, running from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. It's one of the events that never paused for construction, because it never depended on Center Street in the first place.
Both are happening the same month the fencing is supposed to come down for good. If you've been avoiding downtown Folly since spring, this is probably the first weekend that avoidance stops making sense.
The Real Takeaway for Anyone Who Lives Here
The complaint you heard all summer, that Folly had a bad season, was real for the people who own storefronts on Center Street. But it was never a story about Folly Beach losing its pull. The bridge counter and the rental occupancy numbers say people kept showing up in the same numbers, or slightly more. What broke down was access to one stretch of road, not demand for the island itself.
That distinction matters if you're trying to read what this summer says about the neighborhood you live in. A construction project is temporary, even a sixteen-month one. Whatever kept people driving over that bridge all summer, despite a torn-up main street, is not.
If you're weighing what a summer like this means for property values, rental performance, or timing a move on or off the island, that's exactly the kind of local read that doesn't show up in a portal listing. Lori Petersen has been tracking these shifts on Folly Beach and the surrounding barrier islands for years. Reach out for a free valuation and a conversation grounded in what's actually happening here, not just what the headlines said.
