Walk down Poe Avenue past the Fish Fry Shack and you'll pass a low, unassuming building that most people on the island have driven by hundreds of times without ever going inside. It's the Island Club, and on October 17 it's going to be packed with almost every restaurant Sullivan's Island has.
That single afternoon is worth paying attention to, not just because of the food, but because of what it reveals about how this island actually decides what gets fixed and what gets left alone.
The Roster Doesn't Change Much
The Island Club's Taste of Sullivan's Island fundraiser returns this fall after selling out in 2025, and the vendor list reads like a full roll call of the island's dining scene:
- Home Team BBQ
- Sullivan's Fish Camp
- Poe's Tavern
- The Longboard
- High Thyme
- Mex 1 Coastal Cantina
- Dunleavy's Pub
- Island Coastal Lager
- Republic Ice Cream
- The Wine Shop
- Rebel Rabbit High Seltzer
That's not a curated sample. On an island this size, it's close to the whole list. There isn't a second tier of restaurants waiting to be discovered, because there isn't room on Sullivan's Island for one. The names that show up at Taste of Sullivan's Island are, with very few exceptions, the same names that have been feeding this island for years.
Even the turnover tells that story. When Sullivan's Fish Camp opened in the old Sullivan's Seafood Restaurant space on Middle Street, it wasn't a new concept displacing an old one so much as a continuation. The space had served fish and cold drinks to islanders for over three decades before the Towills took it over, and the new ownership leaned into that history rather than erasing it. Home Team BBQ has a similar story: it moved into the building that once housed Bert's Pharmacy and Bert's Bar, and it kept the original bar that Bert Wurthmann built when he converted half his pharmacy into a neighborhood watering hole. Islanders who eat there today are drinking at a bar with more institutional memory than most of the buildings around it.
Taste of Sullivan's Island Saturday, October 17 · 12 to 3 p.m. Tickets: $100, children under 3 free sullivansislandclub.org
The Clubhouse That Got Saved
The building hosting all of this has its own history worth knowing. The Island Club at 1452 Poe Avenue has been running events since 1946, and for a long stretch it looked more or less like a building that had earned the right to be tired. Over the past couple of years, that changed. Club leadership pushed through a renovation with partial support from the Town and the rest funded by members and residents who wanted the building to keep functioning as a gathering place rather than fade into disrepair.
What makes the Island Club's revival notable isn't just the paint and the plumbing. It's the fact that a private membership organization, not a government budget line, is what got the work done. Club President Trey Sedalik has described the programming that came out of that renovation as a wide mix of recreational opportunities open to islanders of every age, whether they've lived there for decades or just moved in. The fundraiser on October 17 exists specifically to keep that momentum going, with proceeds directed toward continued renovations to a building that's now marking eighty years of hosting the island's version of a living room.
The Town Hall That Didn't
Now walk to the other end of Middle Street, to 1610 Middle Street, and you'll find a very different outcome for a building with just as much history.
This one dates to around 1915 and originally served as Fort Moultrie's Ordnance Office before it became Sullivan's Island's Town Hall. The town used it as its administrative home for decades until 2011, when it moved operations into trailers and eventually a new building. The old Town Hall has sat there ever since, mostly unused. In 2024, the town awarded a contract to gut the building's interior, which is a necessary step before any future use, but it's also the kind of step that can precede either a fast renovation or a long pause.
So far it's been the pause. As of this September, the building's most active use is as a classroom exercise. Professor Christina Butler's Historic Preservation course at the American College of the Building Arts recently arranged to use 1610 Middle Street for a documentation project, producing condition assessments and research findings as coursework rather than as the first phase of an actual restoration. An ad hoc committee under the Town's Public Facilities Committee, led by Planning and Zoning Director Charles Drayton and Building Official Max Wurthman, has been exploring what the building could eventually become. That work has been going on for what the town's own newsletter describes as quite some time, without landing yet on a plan.
What Fifteen Years in Court Says About Ten Years of Vacancy
Sullivan's Island is not a place that lacks institutional patience. Consider the maritime forest, the stretch of accreted land on the island's southern tip that has been the subject of litigation since 2010. The fight centered on a small group of oceanfront homeowners who wanted the town to clear more vegetation for water views, against a town position that the forest functions as a storm buffer for everyone behind it. In February 2026, the South Carolina Court of Appeals sided with the town, upholding an earlier ruling that had invalidated a settlement allowing significant cutting. Fifteen years is a long time to keep pursuing a legal position, but the town did it, because there was sustained pressure, real stakes, and a constituency that showed up to council meetings year after year to keep it moving.
The old Town Hall hasn't had that kind of pressure. Nobody's property value depends on what happens inside 1610 Middle Street. No storm season makes the decision more urgent. Without an outside force compelling a timeline, a publicly owned building with genuine historic value can sit as a documentation exercise for preservation students instead of becoming what it could be.
That's the real difference between the two buildings a few blocks apart on Middle Street and Poe Avenue. One had a membership organization with its own money, its own volunteers, and its own reason to move fast. The other has a government process without a clear owner of the timeline, and government processes without urgency tend to stretch. It's not a story about neglect. It's a story about incentives, and about what actually gets a building on Sullivan's Island from vacant to open.
When you buy a ticket to Taste of Sullivan's Island this October, you're doing more than sampling eleven restaurants worth of the island's food scene in one afternoon. You're funding one half of that equation directly, the half that has consistently worked. The other half is still waiting on its own version of a fifteen-year court fight, or a committee that finally lands on an answer.
If you're already living on Sullivan's Island, both buildings are worth knowing the history of next time you drive past them. And if you're the kind of person who finds this stuff genuinely interesting, from how an island this small keeps its restaurant scene intact to how its public buildings get decided on, that's exactly the kind of local detail I like talking through with people who are thinking about property here, whether they already own on the island or are just starting to look.
Let's Connect if you want to talk about what's happening on Sullivan's Island beyond the open house signs.
