Main Street in Fort Mill will close this weekend, and the next four. Here’s why.
Fort Mill residents and guests are still invited to Main Street this weekend, they just won’t be able to drive through it.
The town plans Weekends on Main events for five straight weekends. Each will close off the top half of Main Street to auto traffic. Main Street restaurants will be able to use the extra space for outdoor dining.
The S.C. Department of Transportation allowed for the temporary closures. They’ll begin Friday and run through Aug. 29, weekends only. They’ll close Main from its Tom Hall Street to its Confederate Street intersections.
“The plan would be to shut down Main Street at around 3 p.m. on a Friday afternoon, and then we would need to leave it closed down until Sunday evening,” said town manager Davy Broom. “Sometime between 8 and 10 p.m.”
Detours will include White and Academy streets at the bottom or Main, and Tom Hall to Clebourne Street at the top.
“It would still leave a driveable passage,” Broom said.
Restaurants will be able to set up outside dining, including alcohol sales, directly in front of their establishments. Acoustic but not amplified music will be allowed. The decision came after numerous conversations between the town and restaurants there.
Broom said the events aim to assist restaurants and businesses that struggled with revenue loss during the COVID-19 pandemic. It also allows for more space to bring in diners who may still be hesitant to eat indoors. Closing Main Street traffic for special events, Broom said, can do both.
“The town wanted to find a way to provide a safer passage for patrons on our Main Street corridor,” he said.
No outside businesses will be allowed to come in for the events. Mayor Guynn Savage said restaurants and businesses on Main did their part for the town in creating a vibrant downtown before the pandemic, and have done as much as they could during it.
“They’ll never recoup what they lost over the period of the pandemic, but it is something that we as the town can do to support them,” Savage said. “And make available to them additional time and space to have customers that perhaps they haven’t seen in quite some time.”
Downtown Fort Mill has grown its list of restaurants in recent years. It now includes The Improper Pig, Amor Artis Brewing, Hobos, Local Dish, Towne Tavern and more in the area that will be closed to traffic. There’s also Emmet’s Social Table at the bottom of Main and other restaurants nearby that won’t be closed.
