Home Care In Conway, SC

Starbucks is opening a new location in Conway as construction sees more development coming to the Grand Strand area.

The new Starbucks is at the intersection of Singleton Ridge Road and Highway 544, across from McDonald’s and the coffee brand’s natural rival, Dunkin’ Donuts. Construction Contractor Drew Yarbrough said the exterior, currently painted white and brown, is complete, but the interior is still a work in progress.

Yarbrough estimated completion of the interior would take one to two months. The location will also have a drive-through. A media representative for Starbucks did not return a request for comment before publication.

The new location is part of a broader global expansion for the company. Starbucks plans on adding 17,000 new stores by 2030, bringing its international total to 55,000 by 2030, Axios reported in November 2023.

Starbucks already has two Conway sites, including one at Coastal Carolina University and several others throughout the Grand Strand. Starbucks already added a new Myrtle Beach spot in October 2023 on Dick Pond Road, The Sun News reported at the time.

The new development is one of two in the area. Behind the new Starbucks, land has been cleared and sidewalks were paved. The tract of land is at 1482 Highway 544 and is owned by Pinnacle of SC INC, according to Horry County Land Records. Kirk Hanna is the registered agent for Pinnacle of SC, according to South Carolina Business Filings, but he did not return a request for comment before publication.

It’s unclear what the project is, but the plot of land has had development slotted for it previously.

In 2018, while owned by a different company, the property applied for three commercial and stormwater permits for multi-family apartment and student housing called The Pinnacle, according to Horry County Land Records. There was a multi-family development 174 units proposal for the roughly eight acres of land, according to Horry County Council’s Dec. 18, 2018 agenda.

The proposal was approved on a second reading Dec. 18, 2018, but was deferred at the Jan. 10, 2019, Horry Council Meeting before receiving final approval, and it’s unclear if the new site work is related to this previous plan. The land’s market value is about $1.5 million, according to Horry County Land Records.

This story was originally published January 25, 2024, 5:00 AM.

CONWAY — Tony Zack did a quick doubletake as he rounded the corner of Laurel Street and Second Avenue during his Monday evening walk.

Why was a 10-foot skeleton standing beside the city planning office? By the time he noticed the plastic pumpkin-laden trees and the 12-foot grim reaper scarecrow, it clicked: Conway was again dressing up as Halloween.

“They named the city Halloween,” said Zack, who has lived in Conway for about 17 years. “I know it was just (a stunt, but) it’s a lot of fun. It’s just different.”

Rebranding Conway as the city of Halloween is also lucrative. What started as a gimmick by local officials last year to generate some seasonal buzz morphed into a monthlong celebration that provided a boost in fall tourism to the city of 27,000-plus.

Conway officials reported an 18 percent average increase in retail and restaurant sales, and a nearly 6 percent increase in hospitality revenue. The city’s downtown saw more than 20 times the number of visitors that it did the previous October.

“This little thing that we did that really didn’t cost us anything was huge for the city,” said City Administrator Adam Emrick, who is scheduled to speak next month at the International City/County Management Association conference in Austin, Texas. His session is titled “Halloween, South Carolina: How we won October.”

Unlike South Carolina’s tourism engine on the coast, Conway, which sits about 15 miles outside Myrtle Beach, doesn’t see big summer crowds. For many beachbound tourists, the city is essentially a gas stop on the way to the ocean.

Recognizing Conway’s peak tourism season runs from September through May, city officials in recent years refocused their marketing, promoting events in the fall, winter and spring.

“When we made that change, it changed everything for us as a downtown and we have seen so many returns on those investments, and we want to continue to do that,” said Hillary Howard, executive director of Conway Downtown Alive, which promotes city tourism. “We want people to be proud of where they live. We want people to come visit them because they live in Conway, not because they’re close to the beach.”

The idea for a seasonal rebranding emerged in January 2022 when Emrick was planning the city’s fall events.

Conway had already enhanced its decorating by placing hundreds of plastic jack-o-lanterns in trees in 2019 and later hanging black hats over the fountain beside City Hall to create a “witches’ garden.”

“We were trying to figure out how we were going to up the ante,” Emrick said. “We just couldn’t figure out what we were going to do. What are we going to do to make it more?”

Emrick had previously tweaked the design of the city logo, adding ghosts and bats to make it look like a haunted house for October promotions. He started the same task again, this time looking for something more powerful, something iconic. On a whim, he substituted the city’s name with Halloween.

“That looks awesome,” he remembers thinking. “What if we did that?”

He asked other city staff and they liked the idea. Then he called the mayor. She was in, too.

For the month of October, Conway would be called Halloween.

With everyone on board, Emrick began planning what he dubbed Project October. The idea wasn’t just to temporarily change the city’s name, but to build a calendar of community events focused on the season. The goal was to encourage businesses and nonprofits to join in the fun, so it wasn’t just a bunch of city-sponsored festivities.

City officials asked the organizer of the Christmas boat parade to offer a Halloween boat parade. They went to First United Methodist Church and asked them to plan an event around the church’s pumpkin patch. The chamber of commerce’s annual meeting even took on a Halloween theme.

City officials also looked for gaps in the schedule. Where there were voids, they scheduled movie showings and created a haunted trail called the Forest of Fear.

“I do think downtown Conway does lend itself to the spooky season with our live oak trees and our dripping Spanish moss and our spooky alleyways,” said Howard of Conway Downtown Alive. “It just lends itself to this type of décor, so why not play up on the assets you have, right?”

The move proved to be successful for some city businesses. Conway’s downtown restaurants, in particular, reported significant revenue increases between October 2021 and October 2022, due to the increased traffic.

Crafty Rooster saw a 21.48 percent increase, Groucho’s Deli saw a 21.34 percent increase, Crooked Oak Tavern saw a 19.75 percent increase and Chanti’s Pizza saw a 14.98 percent increase, according to city records.

Chris Snyder, the owner of Crooked Oak Tavern, said the decorations help draw large crowds, which bolsters his restaurant’s busiest season. He said he enjoys how Conway decorates downtown for not only Halloween, but also for Christmas and other holidays.

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“That’s one of the things (customers) say they love, especially new people that have moved here,” Snyder said. “They love that small-town feel and that everything’s always decorated for different seasons and different holidays.”

Conway’s turn as Halloween is unique in South Carolina.

Officials with the S.C. Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism couldn’t find any records of other Palmetto State cities or towns changing their names for promotional purposes.

Nationally, there are some examples. Glendale, Ariz., briefly became Swift City during Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, and Mayo, Fla., was temporarily called Miracle Whip.

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“But most of those have to do with creating marketing buzz for big businesses,” Sam Queen, SCPRT’s director of corporate communications, said in an email. “As a state, we promote fall as South Carolina’s ‘cooler kind of summer,’ so kudos to Conway for creatively capitalizing on the season.”

So where does Halloween, er, Conway go from here?

City officials estimate they will hang close to 3,000 plastic pumpkins in the coming weeks. They purchased additional orange ones for the city, as well as teal pumpkins to decorate Coastal Carolina University, pink pumpkins to adorn Conway Medical Center and blue ones for Horry-Georgetown Technical College.

Emrick said the city originally wanted to buy 2,000 additional orange pumpkins for this season, but they were only able to get 500.

“We go to every Walmart and buy them out,” he said. “We’ve been doing that since 2020. Every Walmart in the county we go to.”

Additionally, this year the city purchased 10 10-foot skeletons, three 12-foot skeletons, a 12-foot scarecrow and a 12-foot mummy. The idea is to be fun without going too scary.

“We have to stay ‘Haunted Mansion,’ not ‘Exorcist,’” Emrick said.

Along with the décor, an array of Halloween and fall-themed events are already planned for October in Conway, including festivals, movie nights, wine tastings, pumpkin patches, parades, haunted trails and a pickleball tournament.

The city also plans to hold a Halloween golf cart and Coastal Carolina University homecoming parade Oct. 28, and continue its annual Ghost Walk Oct. 18-21.

Despite the popularity of the spooky spectacle, city officials know that not everyone is on board with living in Halloween. Yet city leaders insist the Conway-as-Halloween supporters greatly outnumber the detractors. Hence their efforts to expand the festivities.

Among the fans are Tony and Stacey Zack. As they walked past the decorations this week, they pointed out how their relatives marveled at Conway’s transition to Halloween last year.

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“Halloween’s my favorite time of the year,” Stacey Zack said. “My parents live in Hartsville. … They were like, ‘We need to do this in Hartsville. We need to do this in Hartsville.’ They love it.”

For many supporters, the idea of Conway playing Halloween makes perfect sense.

Isn’t this the season to pretend to be something else?

CONWAY, S.C. (WMBF) - The recent closure of Conway Pediatrics at 907 Bell Street is confusing for some parents on how to access their kid’s records.

A sign on the door reads, “The practice is for sale and unless someone buys it, we will begin the process of closing the business. Sorry.”

“State and federal law both have requirements for how long providers are supposed to keep medical records,” SCDHEC compliance and privacy officer Marti Phillips said.

She said while patients have a right to their records if they’re looking for specific information, they can access it without a provider.

“If you’re trying to say, I don’t know, what vaccinations they’ve had, there is a law, I think it went into effect in 2017, that immunization providers in South Carolina have to report that immunization to DHEC,” Phillips said. “So it could be something you could follow up with DHEC.”

The South Carolina Board of Medical Examiners said a practice should notify parents at least 30 days in advance of a practice closure.

However, some parents whose children went to Conway Pediatrics said they showed up for appointments to find the doors closed.

Practice owner Lynda Courtney declined to be interviewed but said her business sent letters in the mail.

She said anyone looking for records should reach out to the office and that they have someone coming in to work on transferring records.

Dr. Eugenia Cooper Merchant, who is registered to practice at Conway Pediatrics, said she left the practice at some point in the last month.

She said Courtney would need to be contacted for information about patient records.

“She has to tell you all of those things because even though I’m a physician there, she’s the one who owns and controls the practice,” Merchant said.

However, DHEC said physicians are the ones responsible.

“The law is even called the South Carolina Physicians Patients Record Act, so it really puts that burden on the physician,” Phillips said.

The South Carolina Department of Labor, Licensing, and Regulation said patients can file a complaint with their department if they still can’t access their records.

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The worst of it was 2018 and the aftermath of Hurricane Florence, whose torrential rains swelled upland rivers and sent all that water rushing back toward the coast. But that wasn’t the only flooding event that April O’Leary has experienced since moving to Conway — now even sustained heavy rains can overwhelm Crabtree Canal, a waterway which runs near her home in the Sherwood Forest community.

“If there’s an event that has both localized rain and rain moving downstream from our headwaters, it’s a compound flood — and that’s particularly problematic for Crabtree Canal,” O’Leary said. “It can’t handle that much water or rainfall.”

The flooding was so bad after Florence that water filled living rooms, and residents of the area had to park their cars on a patch of high, dry ground nearby, and paddle kayaks to get to their vehicles and go to work. The city began acquiring properties near Crabtree Canal through a FEMA buy-out program, and one day former Conway public works director Kevin Chestnut looked at the open land left behind and wondered about creating a stormwater retention project that would help mitigate flooding in the area.

That once-aspirational goal reached a major milestone recently when FEMA awarded Conway a $2.17 million grant to build a stormwater and park project in the area most affected by flooding near Crabtree Canal and the surrounding swamp of the same name. Robinson Design Engineers, the Charleston-based environmental engineering firm attached to the project, plans for the retention area to mimic a Carolina bay, which is a shallow, elliptical depression common in the state. The project was named Chestnut Bay after the former Conway administrator, who retired after being diagnosed with ALS.

“He was such a great asset to the city,” said Mary Catherine Hyman, Conway’s deputy city administrator. “He always could see things that others didn’t. He could look at a project from different angles, and find solutions and problems that others didn’t see. And he’s sorely missed here, but we’re so glad we can honor him with this project.”

A ‘constructed wetland’

While Carolina bays are not exclusive to South Carolina, the S.C. Department of Natural Resources reports that around 5,000 of them have been mapped in the Palmetto State. No one is certain how they were formed—one theory is that they are the remains of ancient, shallow lakes—yet they are universally ovular in shape, aligned along a northwest-to-southeast axis, with sand rims on either side. They range from 30 feet to 3 miles in diameter, and their interiors may be filled with swamps, water, or remain dry.

Undisturbed Carolina bays also collect rainwater and help prevent flooding. The artificial Carolina bay crafted by Robinson Design Engineers, which will replace what is currently the intersection of Freeman and Godfrey avenues, will have a permanent pool depth ranging between 12 and 18 inches, but can store a maximum of three feet of water during a storm event.

Chestnut Bay will include vegetation of various heights, in addition to flood protection berms built from excavated material. The area around the man-made bay will also include a boardwalk, children’s play area, fishing pond, and restrooms, allowing the 7.8-acre site to function as a community park when it’s not being employed as a flooding mitigation device.

Currently, “runoff in the neighborhood is going through stormwater pipes and ditches and straight into the canal,” Hyman said. “This will bring it into a constructed wetland, so it’s infiltrated into the ground. Some of it will be taken up by the trees and the plants, and that will slow it down and filter the water before it reaches the canal — which is where we see the problem now, because that’s where the flash flooding comes from.”

The other part of the project involves resorting Crabtree Swamp’s natural floodplain. Crabtree Canal was dug in the 1960s by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in an effort to help drain nearby tobacco farms. The resulting sediment was simply piled onto the adjacent banks, “creating a very steep, unstable levee system with failing banks and an unstable channel bottom that isolated the remaining floodplain, increased water velocities, and eliminated habitat and fish spawning grounds,” according to researchers at Coastal Carolina University, which is located in Conway.

Conceptual designs by Robinson Design Engineers call for adding features like flow-through channels, side slopes, and depressions, all of them designed to help mitigate the effects of post-storm riverine flooding by allowing the swamp’s floodplain to hold more water.

“Big rivers in my mind are like interstates, and some of these smaller rivers feeding into them are kind of like on-ramps,” said Joy Brown, resilient communities program director for the South Carolina chapter of The Nature Conservancy, which has partnered with Conway on the project. “So, the water was having a problem draining out of some of these communities, because that interstate was draining those big floodwaters, and these on-ramps were getting backed up. So, the hope is that this project can more safely hold that water while these big rain events have the time to drain out.”

Added O’Leary: “Any enhancements we can make to Crabtree Canal in conjunction with projects like manmade Carolina bays would make a big difference, especially for flash flood events and even riverine flood events.”

‘Do we want to do something?’

Since 2016, the South Carolina chapter of The Nature Conservancy has engaged in a program called the North Coast Initiative that explores potential environmental issues in Georgetown and Horry counties. It was in community meetings involved with that project that the organization was first made aware of the flooding problems in Conway, where the city was buying out homes to move people away from the areas most affected by flooding from Crabtree Canal.

“That area has been razed. It’s been taken all the way back to green,” said Brown, of The Nature Conservancy. “The city will have to maintain that property in perpetuity. So, do you just want to send people out and let them mow grass forever? Or do we want to do something? Because it was situated very near Crabtree Swamp, we saw some opportunities to maybe utilize that as kind of a storage area.”

A $40,000 grant from Boeing allowed The Nature Conservancy to contract with Robinson Design Engineers for a conceptual design on the Chestnut Bay project — which in turn, helped the city land the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grant from FEMA. A dedication ceremony for the Chestnut Bay initiative was held in November, although breaking ground on the project — much less finishing it — remains still to come.

Under the terms of the BRIC grant, Hyman said, all engineering and design on the project must be completed by December of 2025. “However, we’re hoping to be done prior to that date,” she added. “And once that engineering and design is done, we will procure a contractor to begin construction.”

To residents like O’Leary, who started a group called Horry County Rising to lobby for wetland protections to help stem flooding, it can’t come soon enough. “The Chestnut Bay project will help slow, store, absorb, and evaporate rainwater before it discharges into Crabtree Canal. It will help prevent flash flooding, and improve water quality,” she said.

“I believe the project will help improve flood conditions, but it’s not going to reduce our risk. If we could replicate this project on a much larger scale and scope, it could make a real difference, but one project will not solve the flooding we experience.”

Replacing lost value

As a bio-retention area designed to hold stormwater, Chestnut Bay is the type of nature-based approach that The Nature Conservancy tries to encourage — one that falls in line with similar efforts like the restoration of sand dunes and oyster reefs, and the “living shoreline” created on Gold Bug Island near Mount Pleasant, which transformed a heavily eroded area into one that now supports oysters and marsh grass.

In the case of Chestnut Bay, “everybody brought some creativity to the table,” Brown said. “The city of Conway was already thinking through new and different solutions — like putting boat cleats on the roofs of some buildings down by the river so people could access them through the top if they got flooded, and making portable fuse boxes people could remove if there was flooding in certain areas. So, they already had a lot of creativity going into this, but by bringing in Robinson Design Engineers and The Nature Conservancy and thinking through more natural options, it was just a great partnership. And we would love to see more of these projects.”

Hyman, who lived in Sherwood Forest during Hurricane Florence, said residents of the area are eager to see the project started. “It’s not only a stormwater infrastructure project, but it’s also going to serve a lot of other roles,” she said. “I think it will really improve the value of a neighborhood that has been hit so hard by these floods and will really help with the property values and just the overall morale of the neighborhood. They’re really excited.”

O’Leary said she’d like to see the project replicated throughout the watershed, in addition to Crabtree Canal widened. But for someone who’s endured three 500-year flooding events in five years, Chestnut Bay offers a hopeful first step.

“Our community has lost a tremendous amount of value because it flooded,” she said. “Creating an amenity like the Carolina bay that will include a park for recreation helps communities like ours recover some of what has been lost. Also, there’s no such thing as recovery when you flood. There is a grief that’s unspeakable, and many families feel forgotten about. Projects like these, supported by our elected officials and created by municipal staff, show affected communities that they care about us, even this many years later.”

CONWAY, S.C. (WPDE) — Love is in the air in the city of Conway.

The town has once again captured the hearts of residents and others with their festive decorations as Valentine’s Day approaches.

This isn’t the first time Conway has gone all out for a holiday.

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Residents ABC15 spoke with Sunday said they absolutely love how the city embraces every opportunity to decorate the streets.

The City of Conway has decorated the downtown area with Valentine's Day signs and colorful.

“We came down here for Halloween, we did the Christmas pictures, and this was the first year for Valentine’s, so we had to come down here for Valentine’s too," said AmberLee Dixon, a Conway resident.

Whether you choose to spend your Valentine's Day with your significant other, or with your close friends, the city's charming ambiance has something for everyone to enjoy.

Conway is very familiar with expressing a certain appreciation for holidays.

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In 2022, the city went all out for a spooky season and even rebranded themselves as 'The City of Halloween South Carolina' to boost fall tourism.

Dixon said her kids absolutely love the seasonal stunt.

“So, our best friends are in town because it was my daughter’s birthday, so we wanted to take little best friend pictures with our girls," she said.

Dixon is an avid photographer and said the decorations make for a perfect picture.

“I personally love it because I love pictures, so I like having picture props. Even just the murals on the walls. Those are so cool too," she said.

TOP STORY: Conway transforms into 'City of Love' for Valentine's Day movie nights

She added that she and her kids adore the city’s initiative to bring loved ones together.

“I love that they do things to involve families together, even just like we did the best friends with the little girls. It’s just like fun little things that the kids love. The lights definitely at night- kids love light up things. So that’s just like magical to them," Dixon said.

The festive décor not only brings family and friends together, but it also generates money for the city and local businesses.

For the 2022 Halloween season, city officials report an 18% revenue increase.

The city is also hosting movie nights as another way to share the love with the community.

The next one is on February 9th.