The Surfside Beach Pier Reopened in 2024. This Is the Year It Actually Opened.

Walk out onto the Surfside Beach Fishing Pier this month and you'll pass a hot dog cart, a lobster roll truck's kiosk, an ice cream counter that's been there since day one, and a diner that took almost as long to open as the pier itself took to rebuild. Look south toward Garden City and you might see a stretch of beach closed off with orange fencing while an offshore dredge pumps sand onto the dunes. Look north and that same beach is already wider than it's been in years.

Both of these things are true at the same time, on the same walk, this August. That's not a coincidence of timing. It's the tail end of two separate ten-year rebuilds finally landing in the same season, and neither one gets the credit it deserves because everyone already thinks the story ended back in 2024.

Two Rebuilds, One Summer

Hurricane Matthew tore the old wooden Surfside Beach pier apart in 2016. The town spent years on permitting, funding, and construction before the new concrete structure passed its final inspections and reopened to the public in March 2024, timed to coincide with the town's 60th birthday celebration. That's the version of this story most people already know, and it's the reason a lot of locals assume the pier situation has been settled for two years.

It hasn't. A pier with no restaurants open is a very long dock. For most of the time since that 2024 reopening, that's essentially what Surfside Beach had. Drippy's Homemade Ice Cream got its build-out done in step with construction and opened immediately. Everything else took far longer. The Whistling Duck, the pier's first actual restaurant, didn't open until November 24, 2025, offering wine and charcuterie service overlooking the shoreline. The Surf Diner, the tenant everyone in town had been asking about since before the storm even, didn't get its certificate of occupancy and start serving until early 2026, nearly two full years after the structure it sits on reopened.

Meanwhile, the beach in front of all of it is on its own separate clock. The Grand Strand Beach Renourishment Project, run by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Charleston District, is restoring roughly 26 miles of coastline eroded by hurricanes Ian and Debby, and it started in North Myrtle Beach back in December. It moved south through Myrtle Beach, where crews wrapped sand placement on July 3, and only then reached Surfside Beach and Garden City, the project's final segment, known internally as Reach 3.

So the pier's commercial rebuild and the beach's physical rebuild have been running on two completely different timelines that neither started nor finished together. They just happen to be converging in the same few weeks, which is why this particular August looks different from any other summer since 2016.

What Actually Took So Long on the Pier

The gap between "the pier reopened" and "the pier's businesses opened" wasn't a rounding error. It was a genuine, multi-year standoff.

• September 2025: Surfside Beach's Town Council voted 5 to 2 to hire an attorney to review the Surf Diner's lease agreement, after the restaurant reserved its space more than a year earlier without opening or, according to the town, paying rent.
• October 2025: Mayor Robert Krouse told local reporters he expected the diner open "before the season starts" in 2026, while acknowledging the exact date was still unclear.
• February 2026: Krouse announced the diner finally had its certificate of occupancy and the owners had made payment, calling it "a long time coming." Around the same time, longtime resident Kristin Grega told reporters she was glad to see it opening and looking forward to supporting a local business.
• April 2026: The Town Council unanimously approved four new kiosks for the pier: Sip It, a non-alcoholic drink stand; Surf Dawgs, run by local owner Vince Grimaldi; Loaded Lobster, a lobster roll operation from commercial fisherman Nicholas Dimeglio; and Riccardi's Italian Ice.

That last approval matters more than it sounds like on paper. Getting four small food vendors onto a public pier had been stalled for nearly a year over safety and permitting logistics, according to town officials at the time. Grimaldi, who's operated in Surfside Beach for years, called the approval something "we've been after this a long time" for.

Add it up and you get a pier that reopened structurally in 2024 but didn't reach full commercial occupancy until the spring of 2026. Perry's Bait and Tackle, the pier's other original tenant, handles the fishing licenses the town requires before anyone can cast a line off the end, which means the whole apparatus, fishing included, only started functioning as intended once that shop and the diner were both up and running.

Why Surfside Was Last in Line for the Sand

The renourishment work happening right now isn't random either, and knowing the order explains a lot about why Surfside's beach looked thinner than its neighbors' for the past several years.

Reach 3, the segment covering Surfside Beach and Garden City, is roughly 800,000 cubic yards of sand spread across about 7.5 miles of shoreline, according to Horry County. Sand placement in Surfside Beach began in early July, and under a mid-July revision to the plan, the work zone was extended to run from the Garden City line north to just before the Third Avenue South swash, a change from the original plan to stop at 12th Avenue South.

By late July, crews had finished the section from 14th Avenue South to 6th Avenue South and moved on to the area around Fifth Avenue North, working their way toward Myrtle Beach State Park. The stretch between Third Avenue South and Fifth Avenue North had already reached its target elevation on its own, meaning no additional sand was needed there, which the town's own update called a positive sign for how the rest of the schedule was tracking. Closures during active work run in roughly 1,000-foot blocks that last two to three days at a time, so the specific stretch that's fenced off changes week to week.

The whole southern phase, Surfside Beach and Garden City together, is expected to wrap by late August. Once it does, the section south of Garden City Pier down to public beach access point 27, near Marlin Quay Marina, will be the last piece placed, and after that, only final tilling and dune fencing remain, work the Corps says won't require further beach closures.

None of this is because Surfside got skipped or deprioritized. It's simply where a 26-mile project moving south from North Myrtle Beach was always going to end up last.

The Overlap Won't Last

Right now, if you time your walk right, you can experience both halves of this decade-long rebuild in the same afternoon: sit down at the Surf Diner or grab a lobster roll from the new kiosks, then walk toward Garden City and watch a dredge crew still finishing the sand that supports the whole structure. By September, both projects should be done, the pier fully tenanted and the beach fully restored, and the story will just be "Surfside Beach's pier and beach are in good shape," the same flat sentence every town along this coast eventually gets to claim.

Mayor Krouse put it plainly when the pier's new logo and first restaurant were unveiled: the pier is the symbol of the whole town, and the goal was always to be known for it again, the way Surfside Beach was before Hurricane Matthew took the old one down. What's easy to miss is that being known for it again required two entirely different kinds of rebuilding to finish in the same year, almost by accident.

If you live here, this is the month to notice both halves while they're still visibly in progress. It won't look like this again.

If you're weighing a move to a beach town where you can actually watch the place come back to life street by street, Megan Parker knows this stretch of the Grand Strand block by block. Let's Connect.