The longstanding goal to create a true downtown area for the city of Mauldin now looks closer than ever to becoming a reality.
City officials and the developers behind the project have revealed plans for Mauldin City Center, a 6.5-acre adaptive reuse project that will feature a food hall, residential townhomes and a 25,000-square-foot indoor and outdoor entertainment complex.
The food hall and entertainment complex are projected to open late spring to early summer of 2022. The overall project is set to take roughly 24 months once construction begins, a date for which has yet to be locked down.
The site of the project, located on city-owned property along the train tracks on Murray Drive between Jenkins Street and East Butler Road, has been a well-worn topic of discussion among local stakeholders. Plans to put the property to use have been underway in some form or another since the city voted to begin working to create a formal downtown area in 2009.
But after more than a decade of starts and stops on the project, city officials had expressed an understandable hesitance in recent months to make any bold proclamations about whether or not the project was finally going to happen.
Now, they’re expressing an unprecedented certainty.
“I’m as optimistic as I’ve ever been that this is going to finally happen,” said Mauldin Mayor Terry Merritt. “You know, the country-boy side of me is always cautious about things. I’m one of those guys who only gets excited about a project when I actually see the shovels turning over the dirt. But I’m very excited right now. This is really, really real.”
The project, which is spearheaded by Greenville-based real estate and development consulting firm The Parker Group, is being developed with a holistic approach in mind, according to the firm’s founder and broker-in-charge, Drew Parker.
The food hall will serve as home to several restaurant concepts as well as a beer garden, an outdoor stage, covered outdoor seating, a 5,000-square-foot patio, fire pits and a large swath of green space.
Patrons will have access to a 100-space parking lot directly adjacent to the food hall.
The attached entertainment complex will feature yard games, indoor pickle ball, bocce ball and “plenty of other fun activities,” according to Parker.
“We like to embrace a challenge,” he said. “And the truth is, finding projects that can help build a community are a challenge. If it was easy, anybody would do it. So we like to get fully integrated and make a bold statement, in a good way, that brings everybody together and makes it a place people can be proud of for decades to come.”
