Walk the two commercial blocks of Middle Street on any weekday evening and you'll pass a pub that's been pouring drinks since 1992, a burger joint named for a poet who lived on the island two centuries ago, and a storefront that has changed hands more times in the last decade than most of Sullivan's Island's street names have changed spelling. That last one is where the real story is right now.
The Little Market, the gourmet grab-and-go shop that has anchored 43 Broad Street in downtown Charleston, is expanding into the space at 2019 Middle Street left behind when the clothing store BeachKrew closed. Owner Laura Cottrill is recreating her downtown concept on the island: a case of wagyu beef, jumbo lump crabmeat, caviar, tuna steaks, eggs from Storey Farms, and fresh pasta from Rio Bertolini, plus home goods like linens, cutting boards, and candles. The island location adds two things the downtown shop doesn't carry: pizza and ice cream.
That sounds like a straightforward opening announcement, and if you've lived here a while, it probably triggers a specific memory. This isn't the first time someone has tried to solve Middle Street's oldest retail problem. It's the second. And the two attempts, roughly eight years apart, were built for completely different customers.
The Island's Oldest Retail Problem
Sullivan's Island is three and a half miles long and home to a little over 2,000 residents spread across roughly a thousand households, according to the town's own numbers. There is no full-service grocery store here and never has been. If you live on the island, a real grocery run means crossing the Ben Sawyer Bridge into Mount Pleasant. What Middle Street has instead is a tight cluster of restaurants, a handful of boutiques, and, periodically, someone's attempt to fill the gap between "restaurant" and "supermarket" with something smaller.
That gap is narrow and the commercial real estate to fill it is scarce, which is why every attempt at solving it has had to happen inside a building someone else already left behind.
The First Try
In May 2018, Aaron Siegel, the operating partner behind Home Team BBQ, opened Middle Street Market at 2213 Middle Street, right next door to the barbecue restaurant. He built it on the model of an old-school beach general store: made-to-order sandwiches, craft beer and wine, bulk candy by the pound, single-serve ice creams and popsicles. Siegel described it as a "happy little market" meant to serve both locals and the vacationers heading to the beach with a cooler to fill. It later added full-day coffee service and a house blend from Second State Coffee.
The market ran a little more than two years. It closed on Labor Day 2020, with the team thanking the community and redirecting regulars back to Home Team BBQ next door. No public reason was ever given beyond a short note of appreciation. What matters for the story here isn't why it closed. It's what it was built to be in the first place: a beach-day convenience stop, aimed as much at the tourist with a cooler as the resident cooking dinner.
The Second Try, With a Different Menu
The Little Market is not rebuilding that model. Compare the product lists side by side and the shift is obvious.
Middle Street Market, 2018: bulk candy, popsicles, made-to-order sandwiches, craft beer, coffee.
The Little Market, 2026: wagyu beef, jumbo lump crabmeat, caviar, tuna steaks, farm eggs, fresh pasta, home gifts, plus pizza and ice cream as the concessions to island life.
One list is built for a family walking to the beach who needs snacks and a sandwich. The other is built for someone standing in their kitchen on a Tuesday night deciding what to cook, or hosting friends and wanting something better than a cooler full of hot dogs. The Little Market's downtown Broad Street location has spent years serving that exact customer in the historic district. Bringing the same format to Sullivan's Island is a bet that the island's actual shopping gap isn't beach snacks. It's dinner.
This isn't happening in isolation. Small-format provisions markets have been opening across the Lowcountry to fill the same kind of gap in areas that don't have room, or demand, for a full grocery chain. Harvest Market opened on James Island at Camp and Dills Bluff roads with a European café model built around Harvest Catering's kitchen. In West Ashley, The Corner Store took over the former Taco Spot on Ashley River Road with a similar grab-and-go, local-vendor approach. Odd Duck Market, which first opened near Park Circle in North Charleston in 2023, expanded to downtown Summerville and has been working on a third location downtown at the old SouthState Bank building on Rutledge Avenue. Small, curated, cheese-and-charcuterie-forward markets are becoming the answer for neighborhoods too tight or too small-footprint for a standard supermarket. The Little Market's move to Sullivan's is the barrier island version of that same pattern.
The Neighbors Who Didn't Move
The reason this feels like news at all is that so little else on Middle Street changes. The Little Market's immediate neighbors on that stretch include The Co-Op, known island-wide for its frosé, and A Maker's Post, which sells artisan goods. Both have been steady fixtures while the market space cycled through occupants.
Further down the strip, Dunleavy's Pub has been pouring drinks at the corner of Station 22½ and Middle Street for 34 years. Bill and Patti Dunleavy opened it in the spring of 1992 after negotiating for just the bar and side portion of a larger restaurant space, then building a new kitchen and bathrooms to make their slice work on its own. It's still cash only. Poe's Tavern, a few doors down, takes its name and its burger menu from Edgar Allan Poe, who was stationed at Fort Moultrie in the 1820s during a stretch that shaped stories like "The Gold-Bug." The Post and Courier's rundown of the strip notes that the number of restaurants on Middle Street has roughly doubled since Dunleavy's first opened its doors.
That's the real texture of this street. The restaurants that lean on history and a fixed identity tend to stay. The retail and provisions slot, the one thing that isn't a restaurant, keeps getting reinvented because nobody has quite cracked what the island actually wants there. Beach candy and sandwiches lasted two years. Wagyu and caviar are the next guess.
What This Means If You Live Here
If you're on the island already, the practical upside is simple: there will soon be one more place to grab dinner ingredients without crossing the bridge, something Sullivan's Island has never really had. But the history of this stretch is a reminder that nothing on it is guaranteed to last. The 2019 Middle Street address held a clothing shop until recently and is now becoming a gourmet market. A few doors down at 2213 Middle Street, a former dentist's office became a beach general store that lasted a little over two years before closing for good. Enjoy the new arrival while it's here, and don't assume the shape of Middle Street ten years from now will look like it does today.
That's the thing about a two-block commercial strip on a barrier island with no room to expand. Every new tenant is a hypothesis about what year-round islanders and summer visitors actually need, tested in real time, with the same tight footprint as the only constant.
If you're the kind of person who notices when a storefront changes hands and wants to know the story behind it, that's exactly the kind of local detail I track for clients moving to or already living in Sullivan's Island and the surrounding islands. Jennifer Crider has spent years watching this stretch of Middle Street evolve, and I'm always glad to talk through what's changing on the island over coffee, no transaction required. Let's connect.
