‘The arts revitalize’: How a downtown theater could help CCU, Myrtle Beach

Coastal Carolina University took its first step toward getting a theater in downtown Myrtle Beach on Thursday morning. The project comes as Myrtle Beach is looking to bring new life to its downtown area.

The cultural arts center could cost the City of Myrtle Beach millions, depending on how talks with the university move forward. On Thursday, the CCU Board of Trustees voted to move forward in negotiating the terms with the city, a major step toward the theater actually coming to fruition.

On Tuesday, Myrtle Beach City Council decided to purchase the property, with the Downtown Redevelopment Corporation, chipping in $1 million. The city will go back for a separate vote on whether to spend $5.6 million on renovations to the three properties along U.S. 501 in downtown Myrtle Beach.

If the city moves forward with the renovations, they will take out a $5.1 million loan for the purchase.

The terms of the lease gives CCU free rent for the first five years, after which the university will pay $95,000 per year. Before moving in, however, the university is expected to move $400,000 of their own theater equipment from their current location on 79th Avenue North.

“This is a really great thing for the community and it’s positive,” Myrtle Beach Mayor Brenda Bethune said last week before the vote. “It’s a really great collaborative partnership and will really help with what we’re trying to do downtown and what our priorities are.”

What ever happened to the theater?

The price tag on the theater has some questioning the decision, including council members Mike Lowder and Phil Render who voted against this specific project but support redeveloping the area. Myrtle Beach Council decided to hold off agreeing to paying for the renovations until a later date.

The goal is for this investment to bring businesses to the Superblock, which has worked for other cities nation-wide and in South Carolina.

There is no shortage of people studying the intersection of the arts and the redevelopment of a downtown area. In 2014, The Atlantic magazine published an article featuring Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania as an example of arts bringing businesses to the center of the city.

CCU theater department chair Kenneth Martin said he has seen the formative power of theater in both his students and in cities.

“I lived in Columbus, Ohio, and there was a district there that was really awful,” he said in an email. “A theater opened in the area, and soon was followed by a couple of restaurants. Galleries opened, a few pubs opened, and within a short span of time an area that was very sketchy became one of the trendiest places in town.”

That success has been seen elsewhere in the state. In the heart of downtown Greenville there is the Peace Center, which brings in off-Broadway shows like “Hamilton: An American Musical” to the upstate.

The Peace Center opened in downtown Greenville in the early 1990s, in the first stages of the city’s own redevelopment plan. Since then, Greenville has become well known for its vibrant downtown community.

Tara McNamara, spokesperson for the the center, said a lot of locals say before the Peace Center there wasn’t much reason to come downtown and many people avoided it. Over the years, the center and other businesses gave people a reason to venture downtown.

The city started to grow at the Peace Center and those first businesses that moved downtown. McNamara said that now the center accounts for over $30 million in investment downtown. She said big shows bring in people from out of town and lead to more traffic for nearby businesses.

“We reach out into the community,” McNamara said.

A chance to learn

The Peace Center offers public classes and lectures for its patrons, but it isn’t directly affiliated with a university theater department. The potential cultural arts center in Myrtle Beach would have a public university as its tenants.

Martin hopes a downtown theater would help the students in his department by giving them more time in front of a live audience. This will continue CCU’s mission of giving students to give students as much professional experience as possible.

Students will help run the complex, he said, and that will teach them about different aspects of what makes a theater work. And the shows will be able to run for longer, giving more chances for people to attend.

“Giving the students longer runs in front of larger audiences will give them a better opportunity to understand what it is like to work in regional professional theater,” he said. “It will make our program one of the few in the country with this opportunity.”

This story was originally published November 16, 2018 at 3:19 PM.