Garden City Pier Offers Diverse Environment
By Lenore McKenzie-Morris
Far from the shadowy towers of Ocean Boulevard, the Garden City Beach Pier is a mecca for visiting families and locals who crave fun and entertainment.
Atlantic Avenue and South Waccamaw Drive are a frenzy of fun in an otherwise quiet beach community on the south end of the Grand Strand. The brave strap themselves into the Screaming Swing at the Slick Track Family Amusement Park, the hungry order a hot dog from Sam's Corner and the kids trade dollar bills for tokens at the amusement park.
On the oceanfront, Painter's Ice Cream serves up cold, creamy flavors next to the Garden City Pier. It's the heart of the Garden City experience.
Dennis Price and Endora Nix were perched on a bench along the pier's southern railing, enjoying the view on a recent Saturday.
"I come here all the time," said Nix, a resident of Surfside Beach. "My kids come and play at the arcade."
It was early evening and the pier was full of fishing men, women and kids. A man with a prosthetic leg walked along the pier with his wife, another man in a wheelchair rolled along with his family. This is ocean access at its most basic, accessible and entertaining.
Fourteen-year-old Conner Brock flipped the lid on a bait bucket to retrieve a small mullet for his fishing rod. The lid of the adjacent cooler jumped a bit as the freshly caught flounders inside bucked against it.
Brock, along with his father and family friend, Chris Webb, were fishing for flounder. The trio spends a lot of time on the pier, with Webb holding the group's record for spending 72 hours straight on the pier when the whiting and sea trout were easy to catch.
Webb would have fished through the evening performance of the band on the end of pier.
"It makes it kind of hard to fish," he said. "You can't cast out really and the fish don't like the noise."
Still Webb, who owns a boat, spends most of his fishing hours on the Garden City Pier because he has a season pass.
Folks like Webb can be seen throughout the evening as the crowd gathers to hear the live music on the end of the pier, exchanging comments with those who step out from the bar area to peer over the railing at the occasional shark below.
Matt Cribb, leader of the Southern Drawl band, likes to play at the pier because it's always a good crowd. A Conway native, Cribb and his band play country rock throughout Georgia and the Carolinas. But he'll always welcome performing at the pier for the locals and tourists who come in family groups with toddlers and grandparents to dance in the open air bar.
"I love the pier," he said. "It's got a great crowd, very easy to work with. Everybody comes to have a good time, there are no bad spirits here."
Mac Forbes, one of the bartenders at the end of the pier bar, says she loves the job.
During the day, Forbes is a billing and insurance supervisor for a Surfside Beach medical office. For the past 10 years, Forbes has worked through the summer season at night on the pier serving the over-21 crowd beer, wine and spirits from the full bar.
"I just love being outside," she said. "We just have a really good time out here with the entertainment."
The bar at the end of the pier is one of two. There's another at the beginning of the pier. There's karaoke at this bar in the afternoon with live music in the evening. The pier at the beginning of the bar is smaller and more intimate. It's a bit more sheltered than the other bar and closer to the pier's arcade and café. On that day the bar was occupied by a man with laptop who was enjoying the view and creating a spreadsheet for his business.
At night, the experience at Garden City Beach changes dramatically. Fireworks on the beach are the norm here, with visitors spending hundreds of dollars on their colorful shows. It's possible to sit on the pier and watch fireworks throughout the evening while having a beer and listening to live music.
There's so much going on here that the pier is a diverse environment. You'll find grandparents dancing with small children to the live music at the end of the pier, couples walking hand in hand and teenagers cruising the pier in small groups. And all the while, the fishing continues.
For more information, visit pieratgardencity.com.
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