Who Crapped in the Sand Box? 

In the first four and a half hours of its grand opening, on March 17, more than 35,000 people came to Coastal Grand Myrtle Beach Mall. Among them were South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford and other state officials, including officers of the Burroughs & Chapin Co., the mall's developer.

Even before its conception, the mall was controversial. In the early 1990s, B&C bulldozers moved in and discreetly went about ditching and draining the vast tract of Horry County land near the Intracoastal Waterway. By 1998, when B&C announced plans for its mega-mall, the land was sufficiently drained. Only an acre of wetland remained and B&C was allowed to destroy that through a mitigation agreement with state environmental authorities.

B&C next called for the creation of a vast "business park," one of South Carolina's many economic incentive schemes to reward companies for doing business in the state. Under the terms of B&C's business park plan, the company would be allowed to raid the Horry County School District for the money to build infrastructure for its new mall and other projects. The audacious plan divided the county, filled the pages of the local newspaper with vitriolic letters to the editor, and reduced county council meetings to rounds of spiteful shouting and name-calling.

Even in the last stages of construction the mall sparked new controversy. Coastal Grand Mall promised to draw thousands of additional cars each day to what was already one of the most congested intersections in the state. When the state Department of Transportation announced plans to install a traffic light at the mall entrance on the bypass, it sparked a grassroots uprising among residents who traveled the bypass on their daily commutes. Letters poured in to the newspaper and a website (www.stopthelight.com) was created to channel the public fury. Citizens complained all the way to the Governor's Office. But the light went up, traffic congealed around the mall on grand opening day and, after years of screaming and thrashing, the whole project was brought off with the grim inevitability of a constrictor swallowing a rat.

It was yet another notch in the belt of Burroughs & Chapin CEO Doug Wendel. In 11 stormy years at the helm of B&C, this was his greatest triumph. At his side, Gov. Sanford intoned, "This is the essence of a great physical monument to the importance of tourism to the entire state."

Station Wagon Memories
Before there were malls and bypasses and traffic jams that stretched for miles in the simmering summer heat, there was the beach -- a magnificent 90-mile arc of sand stretching from Winyah Bay in South Carolina to the Cape Fear River in North Carolina. In the 1950s, this was the place where I discovered the vast, gray Atlantic Ocean, standing on a sweep of sand almost as empty as a desert.

Each summer my family loaded up the Ford station wagon and headed from our drab Piedmont mill town to an exotic place where the music played all night, where people talked a little louder and couples clung a little closer and a seven-year-old could stand on the beach at midday and almost see the far side of the world. I remember walking with my family down that beach to a tidal creek, where we spent the day crabbing with chicken necks on strings and dip nets in hand. At the end of the day, we walked back to the rented house and boiled our catch on the kitchen stove, broke open our feast over newspapers and considered ourselves the luckiest people in South Carolina.

We spent our nights listening to the surf from open windows and screened porches, for those were the only air conditioning. I had spent my young life living and sleeping to the monotonous drone of a cotton mill across the street. From our beachfront house I could hear something eternal and transcendent in the breaking of waves along the shore -- something I've never forgotten.

The most magic evening of each vacation was the night my father loaded us into the station wagon and we headed off to the Pavilion. That's the Pavilion Amusement Park, to be formal, but for millions it's simply The Pavilion. There I tasted cotton candy for the first time. I wandered through the Fun House, and my younger brother and I rode the famous Pavilion carousel.

But the most daring enterprise was the Ferris wheel. With my father between us, my brother and I would enter the tiny swinging carriage and gasp as the bar was closed and locked in front of us. We slowly moved backward and upward, as one carriage after another took on its passengers. Then the lever was thrown and we were cast into the night, 40 feet above the ground -- though it seemed like 100 -- 40 feet above the lights and the noise and the heads of the multitude below, 40 feet above the world, the highest I had ever been off the ground, 40 feet to scream and squeal and pray as our carriage plunged down through the summer night and began the arc back up to the heights.

In the Beginning...
Like most visitors, my family had never heard of Myrtle Beach Farms Co., the corporate entity which owned the Pavilion Amusement Park. Nor would we have known that Myrtle Beach Farms was owned by two of the most powerful clans in the area, the Burroughs and the Chapin families.

Patriarch Franklin G. Burroughs returned to Horry County after the Civil War to establish himself in the timber and naval stores industry. His crews felled ancient cypress and pine trees in the interior and floated them down the Waccamaw River to Georgetown. His stills boiled down pine resin to make turpentine and pitch. His riverboats and commissary stores served the little lumber camps that sprang up in the vast forest.

Unlike most of his competitors, who bought timber rights to a tract, cleared it and moved on, Burroughs took the long view. In post-Civil War Horry County, land was dirt-cheap -- as little as a dollar an acre. Burroughs bought up huge tracts of swamp and lowlands and sand dunes. By the 1890s, he had assembled an empire of more than 100,000 Horry County acres, including miles of empty, windswept beach.

The story is apocryphal and sounds like corporate moonshine, but the Burroughs family swears it's true: in the last years of the 19th century, their patriarch stood on that beach and told one of his daughters, "I may not live to see it and you may not, but some day this whole strand will be a resort."

Who knows? Maybe he did say it. Burroughs was a shrewd businessman, and he had surely heard of such northern beach resorts as Coney Island and Atlantic City.

To move his timber to mills and markets, Burroughs began construction of a railroad across the Horry swamps and backwaters, from the county seat of Conway, to the beach 14 miles away. He died in 1897, not living to see the task complete. Sons Frank and Donald took over the company and oversaw completion of the railroad, in 1900, and the laying out of streets around the terminus. The little lumber camp was called New Town to distinguish it from the old town of Conway.

Dreaming of the possibilities, the Burroughs family put passenger cars on their train and built the Seaside Inn, a rambling three-story gabled hotel, where the Pavilion Log Flume now runs. The Seaside Inn lacked indoor plumbing or electricity, but there were other amenities, including a boardwalk down to the beach and a pavilion where musicians played on summer nights and couples danced in the evening breeze. In the town's first marketing ploy, the family changed the name of their fief from New Town to Myrtle Beach, recognizing the local wax myrtle shrub.

In 1912, the Burroughs brothers took on a partner, Simeon Brooks Chapin, a Chicago financier who had already made several fortunes and was looking for new worlds to conquer. Together they formed Myrtle Beach Farms Co. to develop their new beach resort. They sold oceanfront lots for $25; to lure quality development, they threw in an extra lot free to anyone agreeing to build a house worth $500 or more. It was the first "Buy-One-Get-One-Free" deal in a town that would become famous for them.

Myrtle Beach grew in size and reputation as a resort, gaining the amenities and services of modern life: electricity, water and sewer, telephone service, a newspaper, a high school, the first golf course. Hurricane Hazel nearly swept the whole venture away in 1954, yet, when the debris of that disastrous night was cleared away, a new generation of investors arrived to build bigger and finer hotels. Then, in 1968, low-cost flood insurance became available through the National Flood Insurance Act. With private investment insured by the federal government, out-of-state money poured into Myrtle Beach, sparking the condo boom of the 1970s. National chains bought up old hotels, demolished them, and built oceanfront high-rises.

The next two decades saw the arrival of country music theaters, miniature golf, water parks, strip clubs, shopping malls and outlet centers. By 1999, Myrtle Beach boasted 100 golf courses, 2,000 restaurants and more than 13 million visitors a year, who rang the cash register to the tune of $5 billion.

Doug Wendel Takes Command
Throughout this period, the Burroughs family maintained a benign and paternalistic attitude toward their creation. To direct the moral development of their town, they donated land for the city jail and a number of churches. Simeon Chapin created a foundation that built the municipal library and aided numerous churches and charitable causes.

Myrtle Beach Farms sold land for development, but was largely a spectator to the growth that transformed Myrtle Beach after World War II. But things were about to change at the stodgy old company. In 1990, the Burroughs and Chapin families reorganized their company and other holdings, creating the Burroughs & Chapin Co. Three years later, board chairman Egerton Burroughs went outside the family for the first time to tap Douglas P. Wendel to head the company. Burroughs & Chapin and Myrtle Beach would never be the same.

Fifty years old, Doug Wendel was an unsentimental over-achiever, with a closet full of dark, pinstripe suits, a quiet, conservative lifestyle, a Masters degree in public administration, and more than 20 years in the field. Most of his career had been spent in Horry County, where he knew the culture, knew the players and knew how to work a barbecue or a boardroom.

One of Wendel's first acts as CEO was to announce the creation of Broadway at the Beach, a $250 million shopping, entertainment and restaurant complex on US 17 Bypass. By the end of the decade, Broadway at the Beach was drawing 10 million visitors a year.

Broadway at the Beach was a bottom-line success for B&C, but it was also part of Wendel's bold plan to engineer Myrtle Beach away from its Southern, working class roots, into something Walt Disney might have designed.

Like any resort, Myrtle Beach is for people who seek a respite from reality. For most, that's a vacation from the office or factory. For others, it's a chance to do something they could never do back home -- screw the secretary, go hopping from strip club to strip club, spend days in drunken delirium, or have part of one's anatomy pierced and affixed with a stainless steel ring.

As with life itself, the meaning of the vacation lies in knowing that it is brief and it must end. Yet, Myrtle Beach attracts many people who don't grasp this simple axiom. With little reason to go home, they linger through the season and through the year. Some become involved in the very businesses that attracted them in the first place -- drugs and booze, sex and "body adornment." Many of them are young -- refugees from America's failed families, failed schools, failed churches and social service agencies. They come to Myrtle Beach with their histories of abuse and neglect, with fear in their eyes and demons on their shoulders. They come because they have a memory of a special day -- or maybe it's just a rumor of a day -- when the sun was shining and the breeze was blowing up from the surf and the band organ played from the Pavilion and there was the smell of hotdogs and cotton candy on the air and everyone was happy and they were sure this magic Myrtle Beach day would never end.

But it did end and they lost their way home. Now they roam Ocean Boulevard in their drab, baggy garb, their tattoos flashing defiantly; their pierced lips, ears, noses and eyebrows a statement that few around them can comprehend.

That was the Ocean Boulevard Doug Wendel inherited with the helm of the Burroughs & Chapin Co. It was the center of the family vacation resort his company had established a century before, and now it was overrun with beachwear and T-shirt shops, body piercing pagodas, cheap bars, flop houses and video arcades. This wasn't the Myrtle Beach his company wanted the world to see. And Wendel held the trump card.

In 1996, he announced that he intended to close the historic Pavilion Amusement Park and move it to a site near Broadway at the Beach if the city didn't join his program of social engineering. To appease the CEO, the city agreed to a five-year plan to redevelop downtown; that included cleaning up Ocean Boulevard. City Council went to work to limit cruising on the Boulevard, to ban body piercing, the sale of drug paraphernalia, the display or sale of "indecent" material to minors.

The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal dispatched scribes to report on Myrtle Beach's kulturkampf. "If we were not the magnanimous, loving, caring company we are, we would abandon [the Pavilion]," Wendel told the Times.

People got to feel the chief's love even more warmly in 1998, when the South Carolina Gay & Lesbian Pride Festival came to Myrtle Beach to stage its annual event. The rally was welcomed by most of the community. Broadway at the Beach club owners and merchants ponied up a $50,000 deposit to bring the 1970s group, the Village People, longtime favorite in the gay community, for an outdoor concert.

The alarm sounded at B&C headquarters. The company's Broadway at the Beach complex was a temple to family values. Under B&C's rosy rubric, even the Victoria's Secret lingerie shop and the Smith & Wesson gun store seemed as wholesome as apple pie. B&C asked their tenants to drop their association with the Gay & Lesbian Pride Festival and cancel the concert.

In a paid advertisement in The Sun News, the county's daily newspaper, B&C stated its case: "Our company abides by the laws governing fair and equal treatment of all individuals. However, as a private company, we have not, nor do we intend to be forced or intimidated into supporting organized activities that we believe endanger the historic values of our nation and the cornerstone truths on which they are based."

B&C's tenants didn't give a damn about the landlord's "historic values" or "cornerstone truths." When they refused to cancel the Village People concert, B&C got tough. In another newspaper notice, the company stated tersely, "We have decided that it is not in the interest of Broadway at the Beach to have any special events during April 30-May 3, 1998, which can be misunderstood as an endorsement of the Gay and Lesbian Pride March to be held during the same period."

There was almost universal shock at the company's high-handed action, but it only proved once again that being Burroughs & Chapin means never having to say you are sorry.

A Perfect Storm of Corruption
Until modern transportation spanned the swamps and rivers of the region, Horry County was geographically isolated, in a state that was culturally isolated from the rest of the world. Reflecting those times, Horry County still calls itself "The Independent Republic." The county was inbred and distrustful of new people and new ideas. The Ku Klux Klan marched through the streets, burned and lynched with impunity. Politically, Horry was regarded as one of the most corrupt provinces west of Calcutta.

One newspaperman who started his career in Myrtle Beach in 1973 told me he was in a watering hole on US 17, when a law enforcement officer came in -- in uniform -- ordered a beer, and received a payoff from behind the bar. That's just the way things are done in Horry County, where crime and corruption are a way of life. According to FBI statistics released last fall, Myrtle Beach has the highest crime rate in the nation. In the last two decades, scores of Horry County cops, judges, magistrates, mayors, city council members and state legislators have faced criminal charges. Most notorious was Congressman John Jenrette, the North Myrtle Beach Democrat, who was caught in a 1980 FBI sting, accepting a $100,000 bribe from a fake Arab sheik. Jenrette was infamously recorded saying, "I got larceny in my blood."

With its large population of transients, speculators and retirees, Myrtle Beach is a perfect storm of corporate greed, public apathy and governmental corruption. The region's long tradition of laissez-faire, good ole boy capitalism is now driven by outside money and suffused with a get-rich-quick madness.

Not surprisingly, the Republican Party has risen to dominate the county in the last 20 years. Sun News columnist Bob Bestler jokes that he is one of the seven Democrats in Horry County. In 1996, county GOP chairman Blaine Liljenquist explained how local politics work in Myrtle Beach when he announced creation of the Business Round Table. Businessmen would pay $1,200 for the privilege of meeting monthly with the county's top Republican officials over heavy hors d'oeuvres and an open bar to discuss their problems and concerns. The money would go to the county Republican Party to finance future campaigns.

"The business owners who join would certainly have better access to the politicians," Liljenquist said matter-of-factly. "They can sit down and talk to them on a one-to-one basis."

Six months later, Chairman Liljenquist gave a practical demonstration of just how influence works in Horry County. As a condominium developer, he was ordered by the fire marshal to install sprinklers in some of his condos, but Liljenquist ignored the order for two years. Three of Liljenquist's GOP friends on county council moved quietly behind the scenes to retroactively amend the building code, exempting Liljenquist from installing sprinklers. One council member even nominated Liljenquist to chair the building inspection board of adjustments and appeals, a position that would have allowed Liljenquist to exempt himself. The scheme unraveled when the Sun News brought it to light.

Politicians, environmental regulators and enforcers are easily compromised by corporate wealth and power. That's why environmental destruction often goes hand-in-hand with political corruption. Nowhere is this more obvious than in Horry County, a fragile coastal zone where earth meets water, where salt marshes and freshwater lowlands provide habitat for thousands of species, from shrimp to black bears. The irony is that proximity to water attracts development, yet it is that very water which limits development. To get around this cruel fact, developers have created a number of ploys over the years, many of which are now illegal. For instance, much of North Myrtle Beach was built on land that was bulkheaded and backfilled, destroying hundreds of acres of salt marsh. Another tactic is to ditch and drain wetlands, as Burroughs & Chapin has done to huge tracts around Myrtle Beach.

In a state that has been singled out by the Sierra Club as among the worst in the nation for encouraging urban sprawl -- 48th in protecting open space and 45th in transportation planning -- Horry County has been singled out as the worst in South Carolina by the state chapter of Sierra Club.

The memory that millions of visitors take home from Myrtle Beach -- more indelible than Calabash seafood buffets, miniature golf adventures, the beach and the sun itself -- is traffic.

Myrtle Beach was built for cars; people were secondary. Fourteen million visitors come to town each year -- 94 percent in their personal vehicles. Their cars, 4x4 pickups, SUVs, Hummers and Winnebagos are largely confined to US 17, a narrow strip along the coast that supports Myrtle Beach's historic development.

In the 1970s, US 17 Bypass opened, two miles behind the town, with promise that it would solve Myrtle Beach's traffic problems for all time. Today, it's the fastest developing stretch of highway in South Carolina, the home of Broadway at the Beach and Coastal Grand Myrtle Beach Mall, to say nothing of countless strip malls, office parks and residential developments.

To cut the Gordian knot of traffic and development, business leaders launched a bold plan in the 1990s to lay $1.5 billion worth of asphalt through the swamps and forests of Horry County. Veterans Highway opened two years ago, offering an alternative to US 501 to the beach. The Carolina Bays Parkway is still under construction, a freeway running from one end of the county to the other, with the promise that it will be the solution to traffic problems for years to come. Yet, developers and property owners are already lobbying for access ramps from local roads to the new super highway, which could turn the freeway into a parking lot during the busiest times of the day (think I-485 in Charlotte between I-77 and Rea Road at rush hour).

Meanwhile, in its first week of operation, Coastal Grand Myrtle Beach Mall presented a challenge: four wrecks and 90 tickets issued on approaches to the shopping mecca. Still, the mall received 378,000 vehicles in its first month of operation.

Construction has begun on Buckhead Brewery and Sticky Fingers, the first two restaurants in the mall's restaurant district, on the 170-acre site across the Intracoastal Waterway from Myrtle Beach International Airport. Burroughs & Chapin Co. seems comfortable with two unclaimed anchor sites for future tenants and 20 "outparcels" for smaller retailers and restaurants. After all, this is the largest mall in South Carolina, located in the third largest tourist destination in America. What could go wrong?

"Their biggest challenge is keeping their inventory levels up," a mall spokeswoman said of the tenants.

Looks like a good season for Myrtle Beach. A good season, indeed.

Former CL news writer Will Moredock is the author of Banana Republic: A Year in the Heart of Myrtle Beach.