Walk Center Street this week and you are still dodging orange barrels, temporary fencing, and a sidewalk that disappears every few hundred feet into gravel. It has looked this way, in one form or another, since last fall. If you live here, you already have a story about the parking spot you lost or the lunch spot you gave up walking to because getting there meant crossing the street twice.
So here is the part that will not match how the summer felt. According to Mayor Chris Bizzell, the traffic counter on the Folly River bridge has logged more cars coming and going this year than at the same point last year, and short-term rental occupancy on the island is also running slightly ahead of last year, per data the city pulled from AirDNA. A summer that felt, to a lot of business owners, like the quietest since the pandemic was, by the numbers the city is watching, a busier one. Both things are true at once, and the gap between them is the actual story of what happened on Center Street this year.
A $7 million reason for the mess
The project responsible for all of it is the Center Street Stormwater Infrastructure Improvements Project, a more than $7 million overhaul funded largely through the South Carolina Infrastructure Investment Program. City Administrator Aaron Pope has called it the largest and costliest stormwater upgrade since the pipes beneath Center Street were first installed, which he has dated to the 1940s, though other reporting on the project puts the pipes at roughly four decades old. Either way, nobody had touched what was under that street in generations, and the crews doing the digging this year found exactly what you would expect from infrastructure that old: redundant water lines, gas line conflicts, and delays that pushed the work later into the season than anyone planned.
Planet Follywood co-owner DJ Rich, who also sits on city council, has watched the timeline stretch from the inside on both sides of the table. What contractors originally hoped might take nine months settled into something closer to sixteen once the unexpected finds piled up, and Rich has pointed out that a twelve-to-sixteen-month window was always the realistic range, even if everyone on Center Street was quietly hoping for the shorter end of it.
The finish line is close now. As of August 6, the major digging and pipe work was done, according to Pope, with new pipes laid and connected and the remaining weeks reserved for finishing touches: repaving, tree planting, new rain gardens, and Dominion Energy swapping out streetlights. Live 5 News reported August 17 that crews are targeting a full completion date at the end of this month. Mayor Bizzell has described the new rain gardens and permeable pavers as a way to let stormwater drain through the surface itself, cutting down the pooling that used to turn Center Street into a shallow lake after a hard rain.
Who actually paid for the barrels
The traffic counter numbers are real, but they flatten out something that residents living through this summer already know: the pain was not distributed evenly.
Surfer Betty, the beachwear trailer that co-owners Melissa Anderson and Kate Ferrara set up on the corner of Center Street and West Erie Avenue this past April, picked that spot specifically for its visibility and foot traffic. Then the visibility disappeared under a maze of fencing and staged equipment. Ferrara has said some days brought in less than one hundred dollars in sales, and Anderson put the toll simply: this is normally the time of year a small business squirrels away money for the slow months, and instead they have had to get creative just to stay open.
That is the mechanism worth understanding if you live here. A rising tide of overall island traffic does not automatically lift a single storefront that just opened four months ago, has no history with regulars, and sits directly in the construction footprint. The businesses that came through the summer fine were the ones with an established customer base, a destination draw, or a location the construction never touched. The businesses that struggled were the new, small, and exposed ones.
The dining scene that opened anyway
Which is what makes the pier's newest addition worth noting. Koko's on the Pier, at the base of the historic Folly Beach Fishing Pier, opened earlier this year from Avocet Hospitality Group, the same operator behind Tides Folly Beach and the beloved Pier 101 restaurant it replaced. The concept leans into Folly's own history: its name and cocktail menu nod to Kokomo's Lounge, the 1950s watering hole that once anchored the pier's social scene before fire took the original structure. Koko's has joined Charleston County Parks and Recreation's Moonlight Mixer series, which began its 2026 run on May 1, giving the pier a recurring evening draw that has nothing to do with Center Street traffic at all.
Just down the sand, sister property Pinky's on the Beach debuted in July 2025 with its own oceanfront footprint, giving Avocet two distinct venues under one roof, as food and beverage director Halee Brinson has put it: Pinky's right on the beach, Koko's out over it, two different vibes, both oceanfront. Neither restaurant needed Center Street to be walkable this summer. Both sit close enough to the sand and the pier to pull their own crowd regardless of what was happening two blocks inland.
What actually resets on the calendar, and when
Construction winding down is one clock. It is not the only one running out this month. Three separate rules that govern daily life on Folly change on three different dates between now and early October, and residents who track the wrong one tend to be surprised.
| What changes | Current rule | New rule takes effect |
|---|---|---|
| Surfing in the swim zone (2nd St East to 3rd St West) | Restricted 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. | Opens fully September 15 |
| Dogs on the beach | Barred 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily | All-day access returns October 1 |
| Beach-wide festival calendar | Quiet stretch | Mermaids & Mateys returns October 3 |
The surf restriction and the dog restriction both trace back to the same city ordinance, the one that fines violators up to $1,092 and treats Memorial Day through Labor Day as the island's high-traffic window. Once that window closes, the rules loosen in sequence rather than all at once. Surfers get the swim zone back first, in mid-September. Dog owners wait two more weeks before their pets can be on the sand at any hour again, a rule the city has held to for years and one longtime residents plan trips around without thinking twice about it.
Then comes Mermaids & Mateys on October 3, the costume-and-community festival that has become one of Folly's more reliable fall gathering points. It lands close enough to both calendar resets that, for the first time all year, the sidewalk will be clear, dogs will be free to be on the sand at any hour, and the surf zone will be fully open, all at roughly the same moment the street closes down for a parade of tails and pirate gear instead of construction equipment.
Reading the whole season together
None of these threads explains Folly Beach on its own. The construction numbers do not tell you why Surfer Betty had one-hundred-dollar days while Koko's on the Pier drew a Moonlight Mixer crowd down at the water. The traffic counter does not explain why a summer that felt slow to the people working it produced occupancy numbers that were actually up. And the beach ordinance dates do not mean much until you line them up against the festival calendar and realize the island's actual reopening is not one event but a sequence, spread across six weeks, each piece clicking into place on its own schedule.
What ties it together is a simple fact about how Folly absorbs disruption. The island's overall pull, its bridge traffic, its rental bookings, held up fine this year. What suffered was anything without an anchor: a pop-up on the wrong corner, a sidewalk nobody could reach. That distinction matters if you are trying to understand not just what happened this summer, but what kind of resilience this island actually has, and where it runs thin.
If you are watching this island from a distance and wondering what its rhythms are really like on the ground, that is exactly the kind of texture worth having before you make any decision about a place to land here. Mary Catherine Masi lives in these details year-round and is glad to talk through what a season on Folly Beach actually looks like, barrels, festivals, and all.
