How many times have you driven past the clock tower at Moultrie Plaza without actually looking at it? It has marked the corner of Coleman Boulevard and Simmons Street since around 1997, the kind of landmark that stops registering once you have passed it a thousand times on the way to Sullivan's Island or the Ravenel Bridge. That is about to change. The tower is coming down, and the story behind why explains more about what has opened and closed on this stretch of Coleman Boulevard this year than any single restaurant announcement does on its own.
Nantucket's Meat & Fish Market held its grand opening on July 17, 2026. NEAT Bourbon Bar moved into the old Topsail space earlier this year. Taken one at a time, both read like ordinary good news for a commercial strip that is holding onto its tenants. Look at where each of them landed, though, and a pattern shows up that a roundup of new openings would miss: almost everything new on this corridor moved into a space someone else had to leave first.
A Sixty-Year-Old Shopping Center Changes Hands
Moultrie Plaza opened in August 1963, built on a former pecan orchard for roughly $600,000, with a W.T. Grant department store as its anchor tenant. George Brewer and a group of partners bought the property in the mid-1980s, added about 40,000 square feet of retail space in the mid-1990s, and built the clock tower around 1997. For close to forty years, one ownership group ran the corner and decided who filled it.
That ended in June 2023, when Columbia-based investment firm EDENS paid $28.5 million for the 104,000-square-foot center. EDENS is not a landlord still learning the neighborhood. The firm already owns Freshfields Village on Kiawah Island, bought in 2022 for $125 million, and is the lead developer on a 35-acre project near Sam Rittenberg Boulevard and Old Towne Road. A quick timeline of who has controlled this corner:
- 1963: Moultrie Plaza opens as a suburban shopping center anchored by W.T. Grant
- Mid-1980s: George Brewer and partners buy the property
- Mid-1990s: Brewer's group expands the center; the clock tower goes up around 1997
- June 2023: EDENS buys Moultrie Plaza for $28.5 million
- October 2025: The town's Commercial Design Review Board grants preliminary approval to remove the clock tower
Kacky Teston, a marketing specialist with Bridge Commercial, told CoStar at the time of the sale that a new owner would make a real impact on the shopping center and help keep its longtime tenants around. What has followed in the years since suggests she was right about the impact, though not necessarily about the tenants.
The Businesses That Had to Leave First
The clock tower's removal is not a cosmetic update. Mount Pleasant's Commercial Design Review Board gave preliminary approval on October 29 to a plan for two new two-story buildings totaling 6,500 square feet, sharing a covered breezeway designed for outdoor dining, with an option to add a third floor. The renderings lean coastal: light blue and cream tones, a metal roof, fresh landscaping along the boulevard. Building any of it means the tower comes down first.
Two tenant moves already show what that kind of repositioning looks like once it starts. In July 2025, the manager of Senor Tequila Grill confirmed the restaurant's lease at Moultrie Plaza was not renewed, and the space went dark. Then in February 2026, Village Emporium, the antique and consignment shop that has anchored a corner of the plaza since 2021, packed up its booths and relocated to a different unit within the same center. It did not close. It moved because its old spot was needed for a buildout.
That buildout became Nantucket's Meat & Fish Market.
What Actually Moved In
Nantucket's Meat & Fish Market is a family-owned company headquartered on Nantucket, with existing locations on Martha's Vineyard and in Hilton Head. Its Mount Pleasant store at 616 Coleman Boulevard, open daily from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m., carries the kind of inventory a specialty butcher and fish counter stocks: dry-aged strips, wild Alaskan salmon, house-made sausage, and a case of chef-prepared meals for anyone who wants dinner handled without touching a stove. It is the company's second South Carolina location and its first in the Charleston market.
A few blocks west, NEAT Bourbon Bar took over the former Topsail space at 440 W. Coleman Boulevard. The concept runs on whiskey flights and bourbon-forward cocktails, paired with bar food built to match: mac and cheese finished with bacon and bourbon, bacon popcorn with sea salt and cracked pepper, a rotating charcuterie board. Opening timelines for NEAT shifted depending on which source you checked earlier in the year, but the bar is open now and already hosting private events, the kind of detail that only shows up once a business has been running long enough to build a calendar.
Two New Buildings, Still Unbuilt
The two standalone buildings approved in October have not broken ground as of this writing. No construction start date has been announced, and the clock tower is still standing at the corner of Coleman and Simmons. When work does begin, the design already approved calls for restaurant-ready space with a shared outdoor dining breezeway, a tenant mix that commands different rents than a 1990s strip center was ever built to support.
Reading the Redevelopment
Put these pieces next to each other and a different story appears than the one in any single opening announcement. This is not a strip simply refilling empty storefronts as demand returns. It is a sixty-year-old shopping center under new, well-capitalized ownership that is actively deciding who gets to stay and who does not. A locally owned Mexican restaurant lost its lease. A locally owned antique shop had to relocate within its own building to make room for a specialty grocer from out of state. A national investment firm is now cleared to remove a landmark tower and replace it with buildings designed around restaurant tenants and outdoor seating.
None of this makes Coleman Boulevard worse. Nantucket's and NEAT are genuinely good additions to the corridor, and Village Emporium is still open, just a few doors from where it used to sit. The point is that the next chapter of this particular block is being written by a landlord with a $348 million project elsewhere in the Charleston market and a clear sense of what a retail center should look like once it has the capital to rebuild it.
What to Watch This Fall
Keep an eye on which other leases turn over before the new buildings are finished. Senor Tequila's departure suggests EDENS is comfortable letting a space sit empty rather than renew a tenant that does not fit where the property is headed. If that pattern holds, the next closure on this stretch may say as much about the plaza's direction as the next opening does. And when construction equipment finally shows up at the corner of Coleman and Simmons, know that it was not a surprise. The plan was approved back in October, and the clock tower you have been driving past for years was always the first thing that had to go.
Coleman Boulevard has long been Mount Pleasant's main street, the route locals use to get from the bridge to the beach without ever touching the highway bypass. It is changing hands and changing shape at the same time, one storefront at a time. Whether that shift ends up serving the neighborhood well is still an open question. What is not in question is that it is already underway, and it started with a tower nobody had really looked at in years.
If you are watching Mount Pleasant change and wondering what any of it means for your own plans nearby, whether that is a move within the neighborhood or a first look at what the market looks like today, Rose Gold Properties can walk you through it. Request Your Home Estimate and let's talk about what a corridor like Coleman Boulevard means for the properties around it.
