How Myrtle Beach was built and evolved over time

Myrtle Beach is built to one logic: as close to the sand as regulation allows.

The wall of towers

The oceanfront is lined with condominium and hotel towers, mostly built from the 1980s onward, standing directly behind the dune line on a narrow strip between the beach and the coastal highway. Building height and setback are governed by state coastal legislation introduced after the 1989 hurricane, which drew a baseline behind which new construction must sit and restricted seawalls, on the principle that hard defences accelerate beach loss.

The strip

Behind the towers, a commercial corridor of motels, restaurants, outlet malls and attractions strung along Kings Highway and the bypass — the classic American resort form, built for arrival by car.

Renourishment

The beach itself is engineered. Sand is dredged from offshore and pumped ashore periodically to rebuild the profile, a federal programme without which the beach in front of the towers would not persist.

Rice landscape

South of here the flat fields, embankments and trunk gates of the eighteenth-century rice plantations survive in the marsh — an enormous earthwork built by enslaved people and now readable only from the air or a boat.

Atalaya

Archer Huntington built a winter home opposite Brookgreen in the 1930s in the form of a Moorish courtyard fortress, with a square plan, a covered walkway around an open court and a water tower disguised as a minaret. It was built by local labour during the Depression, deliberately, and stands empty and open to visitors in the state park.

Brookgreen

A 1930s garden laid out in the shape of a butterfly on old plantation ground.