By Kathleen Dayton
Staff Writer

The shops are shuttered, the parking lot is cracked, the outparcels are empty and a mound of trash grows suspiciously behind what was once the Charleston area’s finest shopping venue.

The former Pinehaven Shopping Center in North Charleston, more recently known as Shipwatch Square, is a retail center only a developer could love.

Monarch Development LLC is just such a developer. The company bought the 18-acre site for $4.1 million in December 2004 and plans to demolish the 200,000-square-foot shopping center and replace it with a mix of condominiums and commercial space it has renamed Chelsey Point.

“We looked at it as a prime parcel of commercial real estate in that part of North Charleston,” said Jamie Price, managing partner of Monarch Development.

Nearby, the Noisette Co. plans to redevelop the former Charleston Naval Base into an urban city with loft apartments, condominiums, shops, offices and restaurants. The revitalization project was part of the reason Monarch set its sights on Pinehaven, Price said.

“We’ve heard a lot from Noisette about what’s happening,” he said. “You haven’t really seen it yet, but it’s starting to take shape. We’re going to really upgrade and do the proper things that will make this a great area. I just think North Charleston is going to be dynamite.”

Price and his partners, John Paulson and former Charleston restaurateur Jiri Jilich, plan to invest $40 million in the project, which will include 280 one- and two-bedroom condos selling for less than $200,000. The group is in talks with a supermarket and pharmacy to occupy the anchor spaces, one of which is the former South Carolina National Bank site at the northeast corner of the property.

Price’s company will start seeking retailers after the anchor spaces are leased. He expects the retail part of the project to be complete in about 18 months with the condominiums ready by early 2008, he said.

“We’re making a place where people can shop and live,” Price said. “Right now, there’s no supermarket within a five-mile radius up there, which is horrible.”

Rehabilitation experience

Price has been developing property for 25 years, including rehabilitation projects in Atlanta, Philadelphia and Florida. Monarch Development was formed in 2003 and last year completed the Corinne Street Project in downtown Charleston’s Radcliffeborough neighborhood.

The 1.1-acre site in what was a deteriorating neighborhood now holds duplexes and single-family homes and has sparked more new development in the area.

Price said he can see the potential in dilapidated property.

“If you bring in nice (properties), you’ll end up with other things in that area that are very nice. It snowballs,” Price said.

On a recent weekday afternoon, the only cars in the shopping center’s parking lot were a couple of taxis seeking shade under the few remaining trees. The center is about 15% leased, and existing tenants include a bingo parlor, a coin laundry, a wig shop and an Eckerd drug store. Winn Dixie, the shopping center’s largest and oldest tenant, closed in 2005.

Remembering the good days

The site is a far cry from its glory days as the largest shopping center in the state. It drew throngs of people when it opened its doors Sept. 17, 1959, as a three-strip, open-air shopping center. It was the showpiece of a community just beginning to sprawl.

North Charleston native Betty McMillan Varner, who was crowned Miss North Charleston in 1948, remembers shopping at Pinehaven soon after it opened. She was a fan of the hot dogs sold at Edwards 5¢-10¢-$1 store. She also herded her children to the shopping center in the 1960s to catch a glimpse of Jonathan Frid, who played Barnabus Collins in the daytime television mystery series “Dark Shadows.”

“It used to be very vital there, but then it went down,” Varner said. “Everything seems to be moving up the road.”

The neglected shopping center sits at the intersection of Rivers and McMillan avenues, directly across from the Naval hospital. In its heyday, the area was the core of North Charleston, serving hundreds of military families living in World War II-era tract homes nearby.

Business began to shift northward in the 1970s with the opening of Northwoods Mall, prompting tenants such as Belk to shed their Pinehaven leases. In the mid-1980s, the shopping center’s owners remodeled and renamed the center Shipwatch Square, but increasing crime in the area and the 1995 closure of the Navy base cast a pall over the site that remains today.

An investment risk

Monarch’s purchase includes the former bank outparcel and a closed Chinese restaurant that was formerly a Howard Johnson. A movie theater that was added to the shopping center in 1968 now houses a church and was not part of the sale.

Along with condominiums and shops, Monarch plans a fresh landscape that will add green space. Prior to becoming a shopping center, the site was the home of Pinehaven Sanitarium, a hospital for tuberculosis patients set in the dense forest that gave the shopping center its name.

Patrice Duker, spokeswoman for the International Council of Shopping Centers, said rehabbing a neglected property in a rundown area is always a risk, but it has been achieved successfully around the country.

“What I think you’re seeing with this developer is he is projecting out not in the short term, but in the long term,” Duker said. “He must have done his due diligence and worked with the city and the county to see what the 10- to 20-year growth projections are. These concepts of mixed-use and new urbanism are the hottest topics right now.”

Just as it took time for the shopping center to fall into disrepair, Duker said it will take time for the area to revitalize.

“The Navy base didn’t close in one day. It took a couple of years to get everybody out and see the area go down,” she said. “The pendulum has to swing back, and it’s not going to swing back in one day.”

Chelsey Point will attract first-time homebuyers and those who can no longer afford to live on the peninsula, Price said.

“We’ll give people opportunities to have decent shopping up there,” Price said. “I think what we’re doing on that corner will bring a new start to Rivers Avenue.”

Kathleen Dayton is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail her at kdayton@charlestonbusiness.com.

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