Walk down the 100 block of South Dargan Street on the last Friday of the month between April and September, and you'll see lawn chairs staked out along the curb hours before anyone plays a note. Regulars know to get there early. Locals call it the lawn chair phenomenon, a term Downtown Development Corp program manager Hannah Davis coined to describe the ritual of claiming a patch of sidewalk before the band even sets up at 6 p.m. That crowd, sometimes topping 1,000 people, has been showing up on a dirt lot's worth of faith since 2009. The buildings around them took a lot longer to catch up.
That gap is the real story of downtown Florence right now. Not that it's having a moment, every downtown claims that, but that the sequence ran backward from how these things usually go. The audience proved itself first. The storefronts, and now a century-old theater, are still closing the distance.
Sixteen Seasons On A Dirt Lot's Promise
Florence After 5 started small, a handful of hundreds of people gathered in what was, at the time, an actual dirt lot, an experiment meant to pull foot traffic back into a downtown that didn't have much reason to draw a crowd. Sixteen years later, the festival returned for its 2026 season on April 24 and now regularly pulls more than 1,000 attendees to the same stretch of Dargan between Evans and Cheves streets. This year the Downtown Development Corp is giving away two custom lawn chairs stamped "Our favorite Florence is after 5" at each show, a small nod to the fact that people were bringing their own long before anyone thought to brand the habit.
The next date on the 2026 calendar is Friday, August 28, with the season closing out on September 25. Both run the usual window, 5:30 to 8:30 p.m., with the band taking the stage at 6. Food and drink tickets are a dollar each, cash or card, sold near the Florence County Museum. Parking is free in the city garage nearby. None of that has changed in years, because it didn't need to. The format was never the problem downtown Florence was solving.
Who Actually Showed Up To Meet Them
What was missing, for a long time, was somewhere to go before or after the music stopped. That changed more in 2025 than in the several years before it. According to Davis, downtown added five new businesses last year and lost only one, the smallest number of closures in five years. Vacancy downtown now sits at just 4 percent.
A short list of what actually opened:
- Bojangles, on South Irby Street, which Davis called a "first of its kind concept" for downtown, tucked between the taco bar King Jefe and S/W Printing
- Florence Nutrition, at 292 W. Evans St., serving tea bombs, juices, acai bowls and smoothies
- Lucky Dog Re-Tail Thrift, a volunteer-run secondhand shop at 236 W. Evans St. that opened in May
- Funky Flow Fitness and Jiu Jitsu, at 167 N. Dargan St., opened by Amber and Lakyn Bendle in early February
None of these are the kind of anchor tenant that gets a press conference. That's the point. They're the small, ordinary infrastructure that a monthly crowd of a thousand people needs and, until recently, largely didn't have within walking distance of the stage.
"Florence in general is a place that people want to be and it's a growing community," Davis said. "There's still a lot of opportunity here."
Florence Chamber of Commerce President Mike Miller put it more plainly: downtown is becoming, in his words, "kind of the place to be." Market studies Davis has reviewed point to more room specifically in retail, restaurants and sporting goods, which suggests the current run of openings is a start rather than a finish.
The One Marquee Still Dark
The biggest piece of downtown infrastructure built for exactly this kind of crowd has been sitting empty the longest. The Carolina Theatre opened in 1919 as O'Dowd's Theatre, was renamed the Carolina in the 1930s, survived a 1939 fire that forced a rebuild, and reopened in 1940. It closed as a movie house in 1984, spent time afterward as a church, then sat abandoned for decades on Dargan Street, a few blocks from where Florence After 5 now draws a crowd larger than the theater itself once could have seated.
The city's restoration effort has moved in fits and starts. An initial $2 million investment in 2018 wasn't enough to finish the job. The city matched that amount again in its 2024 budget. On May 11, 2026, City Council approved a first reading to add another $2 million from the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, and Finance Director Glenn Bodenheimer confirmed construction was already underway at the time. Assistant city manager Clint Moore, who's managed the project, has said the theater will reopen not as a movie house but as a multipurpose venue for concerts, weddings, conferences and film, meant to complement the Performing Arts Center and the Florence Center rather than compete with them.
Moore's read on why it matters has stuck with people who've followed the project: there are still plenty of Florentines in their fifties and sixties who remember going to the Carolina Theatre. The building predates almost everything else on this list, the block party, the thrift store, the Bojangles, and it's the one piece still waiting for its turn.
What This Sequence Actually Tells You
Most downtowns try to build the audience by building the buildings first, hoping the crowd follows the investment. Florence did it the other way. The crowd proved itself over sixteen years of dirt-lot Fridays before the storefronts had much reason to bet on it. Now that the storefronts are catching up, four net openings and a vacancy rate that would make plenty of larger downtowns jealous, the last major piece still under construction is the one building old enough to remember when this street didn't need convincing.
If you're already bringing a lawn chair to Dargan Street on the last Friday of the month, you don't need a real estate agent to tell you something's shifting downtown. You've been watching it happen in real time, one new storefront and one funding vote at a time.
Kirk Stalvey grew up in Conway and has spent his career working the Grand Strand and Pee Dee, which means he pays attention to towns like Florence even when nobody's asking him to sell a house there. If you ever do want to talk about what a changing downtown means for property nearby, or you're just curious what else is in the pipeline, Kirk Stalvey is easy to reach and happy to talk shop. Book an appointment whenever the timing's right for you.
