by James A. Bacon
Litchfield Beach, S.C., is blessed by natural beauty. It has long, wide beaches with sand as soft as talcum powder. It has fecund marshlands bursting with wildlife. It has thick, semi-tropical foliage: palmetto palms, crepe myrtle and southern live oak draped in Spanish moss. Too bad the humans did such a poor job with the built environment.
Litchfield suffers from the same affliction seen in virtually every other beach along the South Atlantic Coast. Growth and development took the form of disconnected lots and pods strung along U.S. Route 17. The private domains are lovely. The gated resorts, condominiums and beach-cottage clusters have meticulously maintained landscaping. Even parking areas, normally an eyesore, are shady and inviting. But the public domain is impoverished. Each development is an island unto itself. Nothing complements anything else. If you wish to patronize one of the restaurants, shops or businesses bordering the highway — and there are some great places to go — your only practical option is to hop in a car and drive there. In a word, U.S. 17 has been stroadified — converted into a stroad, a bastardized highway of street and road that does not properly fulfill the functions of either.
No one in their right mind would walk to a destination on U.S. 17. For starters, everything is too far flung to walk to. Worse, there are no sidewalks along the highway and, given the heavy highway traffic zooming by at 45 miles per hour, no one would use them if there were. The four- to five-lane highway is uncrossable to any but the most foolhardy pedestrians. There is a short bicycle path near where we stayed, but, other than a state park nearby, it doesn’t go anywhere useful.
While individual stores and restaurants are often quite attractive, the sum of the parts is less than the whole. Except for the beach itself, which is magnificent, there is hardly anywhere where one would want to spend time just hanging out.
The sole exception is a collection of restaurants along the Marsh Walk at nearby Murrell’s Inlet. The restaurants face the boardwalk, a marina and the sound, including a small island populated by goats. (We highly recommend the Dead Dog Saloon, by the way.) The boardwalk is not connected to anything else — shops, houses, condos or businesses — but it is a small patch of walkability that invites visitors to stroll around. And stroll, they do. For there is nowhere else in the area to do so.
One other location worth noting is a collection of some two dozens shops and restaurants known as the Hammock Shops Village, although it falls far short of the boardwalk as a place for people to congregate. Free-standing buildings set amidst old-growth trees are arrayed along a handful of shady and narrow lanes. The parking is handled nicely, with spaces tucked into nooks and crannies throughout the complex and on the periphery. The “village” constitutes a destination greater than a single shop or restaurant. Each shop is architecturally unique, creating a panorama of visual interest, and there are a few places to sit in the shade. It is a place where one could at least imagine walking around, eating, sitting, chatting and enjoying the surroundings.
But Murrell’s Inlet and the Hammock Shops Village are oases within a vast wilderness of highway sprawl. U.S. 17 has evolved into a “stroad” that provides neither high-speed, highway mobility between distant locations nor safe, inviting and low-speed local access. Innumerable stoplights impede the free flow of traffic, yet the high-speed highway configuration makes the road hostile to foot, bicycle and the occasional electric cart.
Once the process of stroad creation is set into motion and the landscape despoiled, I’m not sure what can be done to reclaim it. New Urbanists have created “sprawl repair manuals” but I’m not sure they would apply to resort settings where human settlement patterns are organized in a narrow band along a single highway. Local governments in coastal resort areas should give the matter serious thought. If they could devise creative fixes, they would gain a tremendous advantage in the competition for visitors.