Myrtle the Turtle and dancing under the clock. What Myrtle Square Mall meant to locals
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Rickey Poppell needed to come up with a mascot.
He worked in marketing and management at the Myrtle Square Mall from 1989 to 1994 and created a club for local kids. The club was supposed to make the kids feel important and attract them to the mall, and Poppell wanted a mascot to represent the group.
Poppell met with a local advertising business to brainstorm ideas, and an animal with four legs, tail, shell and propensity for besting rabbits in races came to mind.
“It was just basically a little sketch of a turtle,” Poppell remembered in an interview with The Sun News. “So that gave me the idea to create a mascot for the kids club and call it Myrtle the Turtle.”
Poppell got a suit made, and the turtle appeared in a television commercial, the 1994 Sun Fun Festival parade and other events along the Grand Strand. He added that the mascot helped connect locals and the Myrtle Square Mall.
“That way the kids had not only a little membership, a little connection to the mall personally, but then they would also hold their birthday parties and special events like that,” Poppell said. “And, of course, Myrtle the Turtle would make an appearance at all of those.”
It wasn’t Poppell’s first rodeo in the mall industry.
Poppell spent 20 years working in the mall space across the United States doing promotional events with celebrities like Colonel Sanders in Louisville, Muhammad Ali in Philadelphia and others.
He worked at the Myrtle Square Mall from 1989 to 1994, the last mall he worked at during his career. Opened in 1975, the mall stayed open for over a decade after Poppell left before being demolished in 2006.
Burroughs & Chapin’s forerunner firm, Myrtle Beach Farms, built the Myrtle Square Mall. Burroughs & Chapin did not return a request for comment before publication.
Coastal Grand soon took Myrtle Square’s place, and the Grand Strand had three open malls until much of Murrells Inlet’s center got knocked down in 2024.
Poppell now runs a marketing agency and has returned to the area since leaving Myrtle Beach in the early 2000s. The shopping center was like many others Poppell worked at, but it also symbolized how much the area has changed since the turn of the century.
Previously, Myrtle Beach thrived during vacation season but turned into a ghost town after the summer ended. For Poppell, the destruction of the Myrtle Square Mall marked the end of one era and the start of another.
“Burroughs & Chapin obviously felt that it’s time for a bigger mall, so they tore it down and built Coastal Grand (Mall),” he said.
What did the Myrtle Square Mall mean to locals? Memories and connections to family
For Grand Stranders like Bettie Olivieri, memories of the mall intertwine with memories of her late husband, Gerry Olivieri.
In 1979, Bettie participated in a fashion show at the mall by the Belk department store. She’d lived in the area since she was a kid, and a friend helped her get involved with the show later as an adult.
The runway went under the clock hanging from the roof at the mall’s center, with the numbers 1 through 12 suspended from the ceiling. Olivieri was proud of her ability to tell time on the clock, although it may not have been a skill worth mentioning on one’s resume.
Typically, the models walk the runway before turning back, but Bettie decided to do something different. Her soon-to-be husband was in the large crowd, and she invited him to start dancing with her underneath the mall clock.
“When I got to the end of the runway, I motioned him to come up, and then we started dancing,” Bettie said. “It was just kind of a thrown-in thing.”
It was a special moment. Olivieri recently discovered she still had the blue, flowing dress while going through her belongings after Gerry recently passed away. Dancing was also how the couple met before getting married in 1980.
Bettie danced since childhood, met Gerry at a Myrtle Beach night club — who was wearing a three-piece suit and two-tone shoes— and the pair’s first date was out dancing.
“He was one of the best dancers in Myrtle Beach,” She said in an interview with The Sun News.
The mall holds other sentimental memories for Olivieri.
She remembered that people used to sit underneath the mall clock and socialize with other residents. In a place where locals gathered, the clock was a focal point.
Olivieri and her cousin walked through the mall when she first had her daughter. She “lived” at Morrison’s Cafeteria and often perused the stores. She even wears a piece of the mall today, as Olivieri bought her wedding ring at the Myrtle Square Mall.
“It was just so friendly, and it just had a warm feeling about it that I have never in my life felt in another mall,” She said.
Myrtle Square Mall proved friendly for newcomers to the Grand Strand, too.
Chris Fazio is now a police officer in Hanover, New Hampshire, but in 1989, he worked security at the Myrtle Square Mall. A former disc jockey who worked in the broadcast industry for 35 years, Fazio arrived in Myrtle Beach in 1987 to attend Coastal Carolina University.
It was an ideal position in an already ideal situation. Fazio’s dad owned a home in the area he lived in for free. Fazio cruised Ocean Boulevard at night after work with friends and went to the beach before class.
“You couldn’t beat that anywhere,” he said in an interview with The Sun News.
He wanted to get a part-time job, and working security for a local firm seemed like a good position, considering his interest in pursuing a career in law enforcement. Some of the other older guards were former cops who told stories from their time walking the thin blue line.
The mall gave him a front-row seat to one of the worst natural disasters in the Grand Strand’s history. When Hurricane Hugo blasted the Myrtle Beach area in September 1989, Fazio had to work security to prevent looters from ransacking the place.
Police had to lead him past a roadblock to get to the empty Myrtle Square Mall, where he witnessed the storm’s full force at the front entrance facing the ocean.
“As far as you could see, like north to south, was just these black hotels. They didn’t even have emergency lights on. The whole town was just pitch black,” Fazio said. It was crazy.”
The rest of Fazio’s time working security was tame by comparison.
Fazio said the Myrtle Square Mall beat didn’t elicit any Paul Blart-esque heists or robberies. He had to deal with shoplifters from time to time, but Fazio said it was a low-key job in one of the area’s busiest locations.
For him, the mall is part of the Myrtle Beach he loves to remember. The area is different now than it was then.
Former fields turned into sprawling developments in the interim. His father passed away in 2022, buried in Garden City, and the family sold the house. Yet the nostalgia remains, and the Myrtle Square Mall is part of that.
“It was a place that reminds you of a better time,” He said. “Malls were still the cool things ... it was just iconic.”
The Myrtle Square Mall closed two decades ago. The land hasn’t been re-developed since
That iconic place is gone, but a similar-capstone-like property hasn’t taken place since.
For Olivieri, the mall served as a reminder of a different time in the Myrtle Beach area. Horry County’s population has almost doubled since the beginning of the 21st century, and the Myrtle Square Mall wasn’t big enough to meet the seeming demand this created.
Now, the mall site is empty aside from those parking lots — one of the few visible signs of the mall’s existence. The property has sat that way for almost 20 years.
Events have used the mall site for events like Myrtle Beach Jeep Jam and parking for the Myrtle Beach Classic, but plans to replace it with something new have yet to come to fruition.
It’s not because of a lack of plans, though. The Sun News reported in May 2006 that B&C developed a mixed-use development plan for the property with commercial and residential components.
Mixed-use communities are a popular re-development tool for bringing business to large tracts of land. In 2008, Market Common opened at the former site of an Air Force base and became popular. However, mixed-use projects sometimes generate controversy and strong feelings from locals and nearby neighborhoods.
Even proposed expansions in Market Common prove divisive. Residents and the City of Myrtle Beach raised concerns regarding a planned rental property project in the area that spurred worries about increasing traffic and decreasing property values.
Those designs never came to pass, although it’s unclear why. A Burroughs & Chapin spokesperson’s quote from the article proved prophetic about the mall’s future or lack thereof.
“It will sit there for a while,” the spokesman said.
The statement holds for another notable downtown property that Burroughs & Chapin let sit for a long time near the oceanfront.
The Pavilion went from a place to a memory soon after the leveling of the Myrtle Square Mall. The Sun News reported in October 2007 that re-development on the land wouldn’t start until at least 2009, and as of 2025, it still hasn’t begun. Carolina Country Music Fest uses the land annually for concerts, and a zipline business once operated there before closing.
While it could be part of the City of Myrtle Beach’s proposed downtown mixed-use development project, The Pavilion site remains empty.
Olivieri said she doesn’t know what should replace the Myrtle Square Mall, joking that it should be rebuilt as it was. The structure itself wasn’t magical, but it helped create the memories she and others remember daily.
“Anything historical in this city, when they tear it down, (locals) mourn it,” she said. “They mourn it.”
Editor’s Note: Gerry Olivieri’s name was misspelled in an earlier version of this story. (Updated: 5:46 p.m. 04/14/2025)
This story was originally published April 14, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
