What’s New in Downtown Conway SC This Summer

For most of the last decade, living in Conway meant treating downtown and the Highway 501 shopping strip as two separate errands. You walked the Riverwalk on Saturday and drove out to Myrtle Beach on Sunday because there was nothing to walk to on the 501 side and nothing to buy on the downtown side. That gap is closing this summer, and the pieces filling it are worth knowing by name.

This is a rundown for people who already live here. If you have been away from Main Street for a couple of months, several storefronts have changed, a food truck series is midway through its first season, and the old mall out on Church Street is unrecognizable from what it was in April.

The Sundays You Still Have Left This Summer

The most immediate change to a resident's weekend is a new event series at the Town Green at 200 Laurel Street. Gathering on the Green: Sunday Fundays is organized by Tommy and Megan Festa of The Clever Cleaver food truck and co-presented with Lemons and Dough, and features up to nine food trucks, live music, games, and balloon animals across five Sunday afternoons from June through August 2026, running 3 to 8 p.m. and free to attend.

Two of those Sundays are still ahead as of this writing:

• Sunday, August 9 — 3 to 8 p.m. at the Town Green
• Sunday, August 23 — 3 to 8 p.m. at the Town Green

The food truck lineup rotates across dates, so no two Sundays are exactly alike. The Festas relocated The Clever Cleaver to Conway in the summer of 2025, and the series exists because Tommy Festa brought the idea to Conway City Council, which approved it on June 1, 2026, with the first Sunday Funday on the calendar two weeks later. The turnaround is unusually fast for a city event, and it explains why the format is deliberately flexible: if attendance holds, next summer likely expands.

The practical read for residents is that the Town Green is now programmed on Sunday afternoons in a way it never has been. If you have been defaulting to the beach or to a screen, there is a third option twelve minutes from most Conway addresses.

Two New Coffee Shops, on Opposite Ends of Town

Coffee is a fair proxy for how a small downtown is trending, and Conway added two independent shops on either side of Main this year.

A Coffee Movement, owned and operated by Abel and Michelle Wilson, debuted at 1120 3rd Ave. in downtown Conway after years of running as a mobile coffee van serving specialty drinks across the Grand Strand. The shop makes all drinks in small batches on site and offers filter coffee, Americanos, lattes and cappuccinos, matcha, hot chocolate, and signature drinks including an "Everything Latte" with house-made vanilla, lavender, and honey syrups, plus a brown butter maple latte. The space is small, which is intentional. It is a sit-and-stay shop, not a drive-through queue.

The counterpoint is on the other side of town. Retired Marine David Steadman is opening a second Liberty Brew Coffee at 1801 Main St., planned as a drive-thru hub with outdoor seating in the "Liberty Brew fashion" of red, white, and blue. Liberty Brew Coffee plans to debut in summer 2026, though an official opening date has not been announced. The original location sits at 3080 Highway SC-90.

If you keep a mental map of Conway, this is the useful pattern: sit-down third-wave downtown, drive-thru community coffee on Main. Between the two, you can build a morning around either speed or slowness without leaving town.

The Coastal Centre Is Actually Open Now

For twenty years, the Coastal Centre at 16th Avenue and Church Street was the joke you told about Conway retail. Once anchored by Kmart, Goody's, and Winn Dixie, city administrator Adam Emrick called it "pretty much dead" before Rise Partners of Chattanooga launched a $60 million redevelopment with a Sledgehammer Ceremony. Rise Partners purchased the property for $14 million in October 2024 and launched the $60 million redevelopment the following July.

What matters to a Conway resident this month is that the "coming soon" phase is over for a meaningful chunk of it. Rise Partners delivered approximately 112,000 square feet of new national retail tenant space in the early months of 2026, and the revamped center has already welcomed Five Below, HomeGoods, and Ulta Beauty, with additional tenants confirmed for later phases including a Walmart Neighborhood Market, Chipotle, and J Peters Grill & Bar, the latter expected to occupy the former Kmart garden center space, which will be converted into a corner restaurant with a patio.

Here is where things stand right now:

Coastal Centre sits along the Highway 501 corridor that links Conway directly to Myrtle Beach, a stretch traveled daily by hundreds of thousands of residents, commuters, and visitors making their way toward the coast. The plan on file also includes pedestrian walkability improvements, a central turf area with seating and cornhole, and an ice cream shop.

The number that matters is not the $60 million. It is the miles saved. For a household in central Conway, the closest Ulta and HomeGoods used to be a thirty-minute drive down 501 into Myrtle Beach traffic. As of this summer, both are ten minutes away.

Why the Riverwalk Extension Changed the Math

The reason this all reads as connected rather than as a scatter of unrelated openings is a piece of infrastructure most people underestimated when it finished. The Town Green sits close to Conway's Riverwalk, the city's most popular pathway, which now runs from Kingston Lake and the Waccamaw River north to 4th Avenue following the latest expansion completed earlier in 2025. That linkage between the Riverwalk and Main Street has been drawing more foot traffic into the downtown corridor.

Before the extension, the Riverwalk dead-ended in a way that let you turn around and go home. Now it delivers you within a block of the Town Green, which is where Sunday Fundays sit, which is a block from A Coffee Movement, which is a short drive from a fully occupied Coastal Centre. Each of these on its own is a modest update. Stitched together, they describe a downtown that has finally solved its "one thing at a time" problem.

The clearest evidence is on the calendar itself. The Coastal Centre redevelopment arrives as Conway prepares for other potential commercial projects on its eastern and western edges, and coupled with the planned redevelopment of the former Santee Cooper power plant property and increased interest in the city's downtown, city councilman William Goldfinch hopes the growth will eventually attract brands like Target and Publix. Whether that happens is a separate question. What is not a separate question is whether Conway residents now have a wider set of Saturday options than they did in 2024. They do.

What's Coming After Labor Day

The fall pipeline is already scheduled. Worth putting on the fridge:

• September 11–20 — Burger Week across downtown restaurants
• October, all month — Conway Halloween Celebration
• October 8 and October 22 — Witches Wizards & Wine, 5:00 to 7:30 p.m.
• October 14–16 — Conway Ghost Walk, 6:00 to 8:00 p.m.
• November 6 — CCU Homecoming Parade, 3:30 p.m.
• December 3 — City of Conway Christmas Tree Lighting, 6:00 p.m.
• December 10 — Rivertown Christmas Celebration and Living Windows, 6:00 to 8:00 p.m.
• December 12 — Conway Chamber of Commerce Christmas Parade
• December 31 — Conway's New Year's Eve Fireworks Display

Burger Week is the one to watch this year specifically because it will run against the newly opened Coastal Centre food tenants. It is the first fall event that will test whether the two sides of Conway actually feed each other or compete.

The Point

Conway spent a long time being a place where the interesting news was the news that had not happened yet. This summer, several things happened at once. A new event series took root on the Town Green. Two independent coffee shops opened on opposite ends of the same downtown. A dead mall came back with tenants people will drive to. And a Riverwalk extension quietly made all of it feel like one place instead of three.

For anyone thinking about how their neighborhood is changing, or considering a move within the Conway area or from farther out along the Grand Strand, the pace of change downtown is worth watching. If you would like to talk through what any of it means for your street, your block, or your plans, Carrie Gerald and Brittanie Valipour know this market by name and address. Contact Us whenever you are ready.