Myrtle Beach Audio Tour: From Rails to Waves—Boardwalk Legends Unveiled

On your left, the Myrtle Beach Boardwalk looks like a long wooden-plank promenade with railings, a broad gently curving path, and the oceanfront piers marking its reach north and south.

For a place so tied to vacation mythology, Myrtle Beach spent a surprisingly long time without much of a boardwalk at all. A beach town without a proper boardwalk is a little like a diner without coffee... technically possible, but nobody trusts it. The first version here linked the Sea Side Inn, Myrtle Beach’s first hotel, to the early pavilions. By the nineteen thirties, the city had a wooden boardwalk. In nineteen forty, leaders upgraded it with concrete, then World War Two stalled plans to extend it. Hurricane Hazel finished the argument in nineteen fifty-four and destroyed most of it, leaving only a concrete stretch between Ninth Avenue North and Eleventh Avenue North.

The modern boardwalk grew out of a very specific local ache. When the Pavilion closed in two thousand and six after fifty-eight years, downtown merchants wanted something that could pull people back. David Sebok, who led the downtown redevelopment corporation, put it plainly: most tourists expected a boardwalk, and Myrtle Beach really did not have one to speak of.

So the city argued... and argued properly. Early estimates floated around ten million dollars, then climbed to twelve million. Some leaders wanted nearby businesses to pay more through a special tax district, since they would benefit most. Others said the whole city should chip in. Small business owners worried about the bill. Some residents worried about crime and vagrancy. Meanwhile, designers sketched a traditional wood-plank walkway, a meandering concrete promenade, benches, planters, beach crosswalks, and public parks.

Groundbreaking finally came in September of two thousand and nine, even while the city and Burroughs and Chapin were still sorting out who would pay for the section crossing the old Pavilion site. In the end, the timing helped. The economic slowdown cut construction costs hard, and the full project came in at nearly six point four million dollars, financed with bonds backed by a tourism sales tax rather than higher local property taxes.

What you see here opened in May of two thousand and ten, stretching one point two miles from Pier Fourteen down to Second Avenue Pier. Builders used seven hundred seventy thousand board-feet of lumber - that is a builder’s way of measuring wood by volume - plus five hundred fifty-five thousand screws and three hundred thousand nails. The city added six hundred palmetto trees and fifty thousand beach grass seedlings, because even a promenade needs decent manners.

If you glance at the shoreline photo in the app, you can see the bigger idea: this was never just a walkway, but a stitched edge between downtown and the beach. The northern section began as an eight-foot-wide raised wooden deck. The middle section leaned into restaurants, bars, and gift shops. The southern stretch became more of a meandering oceanfront park with benches and landscaping.

Then came the payoff. National Geographic ranked it the number three boardwalk in the United States. Travel and Leisure ranked it number two. More than nine hundred survey responses gave it four and a half out of five. Even many business owners who opposed it ended up calling to say, yes, fine, it worked. Nearby development followed, including the SkyWheel you can spot in the app image, rising beside the promenade like downtown’s oversized exclamation point.

This boardwalk turned a missing piece of Myrtle Beach into one of its defining lines. When you’re ready, keep following it and head on toward the next stop.

Look for the tall, stepped concrete-and-glass building with its narrow glass tower and big nautical Gay Dolphin sign built into the facade.

This place has the cheerful nerve to call itself the nation’s largest gift shop, and honestly... it makes a decent case. By twenty eleven, the Gay Dolphin covered about twenty-six thousand square feet and carried roughly seventy thousand items. Owner Justin “Buz” Plyler said it held more merchandise than Sears Roebuck in its heyday, and more than a Walmart Superstore. That is either retail poetry or a mild cry for help.

Justin Whitaker Plyler and Eloise Plyler opened the original shop here in nineteen forty-six, right beside the old Kiddieland amusement park. Justin wanted a whimsical nautical name, so Gay Dolphin it became. Then Hurricane Hazel hit in nineteen fifty-four and destroyed the first store. The Plylers rebuilt on the same site, starting near the beach and expanding upward and outward over the years. If you glance at the exterior photo in your app, you can see that layered, almost puzzle-like profile more clearly than you can from the sidewalk.

One reason the place feels like a maze is wonderfully practical: the store has four stories but ten levels because Justin Plyler could not afford to remove the hill between the street and the beach. So instead of flattening the land, he let the building work around it. A budget problem turned into a business model.

Inside, the Gay Dolphin grew into about fifty themed sections, called coves. One is an Elvis Cove, complete with a life-size Elvis Presley for photos. Another specialty corner, Trader Bill’s Shark’s Tooth Cove, rents space inside the building. Tom Pierce, who had fifty-six years of experience in that trade by twenty twenty-five, can even turn your own shark teeth into jewelry. The inventory has always leaned delightfully broad: seashells, Myrtle Beach T-shirts, brushes for bald men, noisy seat cushions, even at one point a life-size cigar store Indian and a fountain with three dolphins for seven thousand dollars.

One of the great Gay Dolphin traditions is the wall of name tags. Co-owner Michelle Plyler said it carried about three thousand names, updated every year using the Social Security Administration list of popular names. If your name was missing, the building once offered a strange little consolation prize: you could climb the circular steel stairs in the tower for free, while everyone else paid one dollar. For years, people went up for the rooftop view from what was once the tallest building in Myrtle Beach. The tower also held the Wonder Falls, a set of oil-rain displays - moving liquid sculptures that created the illusion of waterfalls and fed a wishing well below. When the pump broke in the early two thousands and no one could replace the parts, that odd marvel vanished. Insurance concerns finally ended tower climbs in two thousand six.

Buz Plyler started working here at age eight, doing the jobs his father disliked, and later bought merchandise himself, sometimes from bankrupt suppliers at a discount. That scrappy instinct helped make the Gay Dolphin the first tourist shop here to stay open year-round. The Plylers even lived in an apartment at the top of the building for forty-five years, which is commitment with excellent stock access. If you check the sign photo on your screen, you’ll catch that playful seaside spirit Justin wanted from the beginning.

If you feel tempted to go inside, it generally opens every day from nine thirty in the morning until eleven at night. The Gay Dolphin turned souvenir shopping into local folklore. When you’re ready, continue on toward the Goddess of the Sea.

On your left, look for a bronze sculpture with a tall mermaid figure, two arcing dolphins, and wave-like water forms at the base.

This is Goddess of the Sea, a work by artist Kristen Visbal, installed here in Plyler Park in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, on the eighteenth of April, twenty eighteen. Visbal gave the city a mermaid and two dolphins rising from the water, which is a pretty efficient way to say, yes, this town takes its relationship with the ocean seriously. Bronze helps sell the idea. It gives the figures weight and permanence, as if this sea goddess has been claiming the spot for ages instead of arriving in the twenty-first century. There is a little theatrical flair in the pose, but that suits Myrtle Beach just fine. This is public art doing its job without getting fussy: part myth, part landmark, part love letter to the shore in the United States.

It turns beach-town identity into something you can stand beside and size up.

When you're ready, head on toward the next stop.

In the historic photo on your screen, the Chesterfield stands out as a three-story brick-faced rectangle with a front gable roof and that unmistakable green-and-white Chesterfield sign. You’re standing at the former site of one of Myrtle Beach’s more unusual old hotels... unusual because it dressed like a Colonial Revival inn, not a carefree beach motel. That style borrowed the manners of older American houses, with brick, symmetry, and proper gables... a little formal for the Grand Strand, which is probably why people remembered it.

The story started in nineteen thirty-six, when Steven Chapman, from Chesterfield, South Carolina, put up a modest five-room house here. It burned, and in nineteen forty-six his replacement rose with a brick veneer over a wood frame, a raised basement, and a roof that ran from the end wall to the front gable. Later, in nineteen sixty-five, a second three-story rectangular building joined it.

If you glance at the app, you can see the inn before the wrecking crews arrived. Clay Brittain, whose uncle built the brick building, worked here as a teenager, then became an owner in nineteen sixty-five and ran the place until nineteen ninety-one. The Chesterfield earned a spot on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen ninety-six, which sounds reassuring... until development enters the chat. After foreclosures, resales, and one economic slowdown, demolition finally came on the twenty-second of August, two thousand twelve. Some bricks, the sign, even parts of the basement lived on in the miniature golf course that replaced it.

So this stop is a reminder that landmarks can disappear and still leave traces behind.

When you’re ready, keep going toward Rainbow Court for the next chapter.

On your right, look for a low stucco and wood motel complex arranged around an open court, with straight exterior walkways and a swimming pool as its signature marker.

Rainbow Court told the story of Myrtle Beach before towers muscled in. Between nineteen thirty-five and nineteen fifty-nine, builders added two motel style buildings, five beach cottages or boarding houses, and a small house around this shared court. It was not grand... which, honestly, was the point. Check the app image for the full layout: low rise, practical, and built for people who wanted the ocean, not a chandelier. The National Register of Historic Places, the federal list of recognized historic places, added Rainbow Court in nineteen ninety-six and counted six buildings as historically important. It mattered because it was one of the few surviving small motels from before Hurricane Hazel in nineteen fifty-four. By June twenty sixteen, redevelopment plans aimed to replace this site with a parking garage and police station, backed by ten million dollars, and by twenty twenty it had lost its register status - another sign of how quickly this shoreline keeps rewriting its own memory.