Walk past the old Duffy Street building on Main Street this summer and you will see plywood where windows used to be, scaffolding along one side, and a chain-link fence keeping foot traffic at a respectful distance from the work. It is not much to look at yet. But what gets built inside that shell, and who gets to lease space next to it, tells you more about where Ocean Drive is headed than any single new restaurant opening ever could.
Here is the detail that should stop you: when the Worley family decided what to build first inside a 40,000-square-foot redevelopment stretching up Main Street, they did not start with the restaurant. They started with Melt Ice Cream Shop, a business that had spent eight years crammed into 240 square feet next door. Owner Brandon Causey told WMBF News that he had been operating in that tiny footprint since 2017 and finally had room to do more. That is not how big redevelopment projects usually work. The math typically favors the highest-paying tenant first, which on a beach-town Main Street usually means a chain with deep pockets and a proven lease format. Here, phase one belongs to a scoop shop.
What's actually behind the plywood
The building under construction has history most people driving Highway 17 or golf-carting down Main Street never clocked. It opened in 1948 as Hardwick's Cafeteria and ran under that name until 1999, according to NMB Times, before becoming the Duffy Street Restaurant. That is more than seven decades of the same footprint serving meals to the same stretch of Ocean Drive. Now it is being gutted and rebuilt as a two-story dining destination, which was still unnamed as of the most recent reporting on the project, and it marks the opening move of a much larger project the Worley family has named Shag City U.S.A.
The name is not incidental. Main Street is where the Carolina Shag took shape in the 1940s, when dancers filled the clubs and pavilions that once lined this stretch, and the dance was later named South Carolina's official state dance. A project called Shag City U.S.A. is explicitly staking its identity on that history rather than treating Main Street as generic beachfront retail space.
Once complete, the full development will run from the old Duffy Street site all the way up to the McMillan Real Estate building, according to the project's developer, H.G. Worley Jr. That is more than 40,000 square feet and 24 new business spaces, all landing on a stretch of Main Street that residents already walk daily between dinner and the beach.
The leasing rule that separates this from a typical remodel
Here is where the story gets more interesting than a simple construction update. According to reporting on the project, the Worley family is not leasing to whoever can afford the highest rent. Their stated approach is to screen tenants specifically for family-owned, local businesses, deliberately avoiding what one report described as a generic strip-mall feel. Worley put it plainly in comments to local media: the goal is a mix of retail, restaurants, and experiences that visitors and locals will actually want, not a lineup of interchangeable storefronts.
That is a meaningful bet in a resort market. National chains offer predictable rent and lower vacancy risk. A locals-only screening process trades some of that predictability for character, and it only works if the surrounding foot traffic already values character over convenience. Ocean Drive's Main Street has that in spades. It is the birthplace of the shag, home to Fat Harold's Beach Club and the OD Shag Club, and the site of the twice-yearly Society of Stranders gatherings that still draw thousands of dancers to Main Street every spring and fall. A developer betting on local-only leasing here is betting that the neighborhood's identity is worth more long term than the guaranteed rent check from a regional chain.
The taco stand that got there first
While Shag City U.S.A. works through permitting and construction, another piece of the same story is already open and serving food. OD Taco Co. began operating this spring in the space that used to house Fenway Grill on Main Street, with a target opening date of May 15, 2026. It is a Worley family project too, and it is explicitly described as temporary. H.G. Worley Jr. has called it a springboard into a new era of owner-operated family businesses on the family's Main Street properties, with plans to relocate the taco stand once the surrounding redevelopment is finished.
The Worleys have also recently bought and reopened the historic Ocean Drive Barber Shop, another small, local, decades-old business getting new life under family ownership rather than being sold off or left vacant. Put together, OD Taco Co. and the barber shop reopening are not isolated moves. They are the same local-first playbook the family is applying at Shag City U.S.A., just moving faster because they did not require new construction.
What's changing on your walk to dinner this year
If you live near Main Street or make the drive down from Cherry Grove or Crescent Beach for dinner most weeks, here is what is actually different about this stretch right now, not what a vacation blog will tell you to expect someday:
- Melt Ice Cream Shop is set to open its new flagship location as phase one of Shag City U.S.A., expected to be complete by the end of 2026, giving Causey room he has not had since 2017.
- The old Hardwick's Cafeteria and Duffy Street Restaurant building is being rebuilt as a two-story dining spot, unnamed as of the most recent reporting, with construction underway and final permitting in progress as of early 2026.
- Once Melt moves into its new space, construction on the next phase of Shag City U.S.A. begins, eventually filling 24 spaces between the Duffy Street site and the McMillan Real Estate building.
- OD Taco Co. is already open in the former Fenway Grill spot, serving tacos, burritos, and quesadillas as a temporary concept ahead of a planned move once the surrounding development wraps.
- The historic Ocean Drive Barber Shop is back open under Worley family ownership, another small piece of the same local-first pattern.
None of this replaces the rhythms Main Street already has. Music on Main still runs Thursday nights through the summer at the Main Street Horseshoe. The Society of Stranders still brings its Spring Safari and Fall Migration crowds to the same clubs that have hosted shaggers for decades. What is changing is the built environment those rhythms happen inside, and the Worley family's bet is that keeping the tenant mix locally owned protects rather than dilutes what already draws people here.
Why this is worth watching past this year
Most Main Street corridors in tourist towns eventually drift toward whatever tenant can pay the most, and that usually means regional or national chains that could be anywhere. Ocean Drive's Main Street has resisted that drift longer than most nearby beach towns, and the fact that a 40,000-square-foot redevelopment project is explicitly built around a no-chain leasing philosophy, with an ice cream shop as its literal first move, is a real signal about how the people who own this stretch of real estate think about its future. Whether that holds up through all 24 planned spaces remains to be seen. But the early evidence, a scoop shop before a national tenant, a barber shop reopened instead of redeveloped, a taco stand run by the same family that owns the ground under it, points toward a Main Street trying to stay recognizable to the people who already live around it.
If you are curious how changes like this ripple into property values, rental demand, or what it means for your own home near Ocean Drive, that is exactly the kind of local context Alexandria Bevier tracks day to day. Let's Connect and talk through what is actually happening on your stretch of the Grand Strand.
