Downtown Conway Has Finally Stitched Its Summer Sundays Together

For years, a Conway Sunday afternoon meant driving somewhere else. The Riverwalk was pretty but ended awkwardly. Town Green hosted the occasional concert. Main Street rolled up its awnings by mid-afternoon, and if you wanted a walkable stretch of food, music, and shade, the honest answer was to point the car toward the beach or Market Common and give up the twenty minutes.

That answer has quietly stopped being true. Between a Riverwalk extension that finished in 2025, a five-Sunday event series that Conway City Council greenlit on June 1, and a couple of new operators filling the weeknight gap around 3rd Avenue, downtown Conway now runs on a cadence a resident can actually plan around. This post is a map of that cadence, aimed at people who already live here and are tired of scrolling generic "things to do" lists that stop at Rivertown Bistro and the Horry County Museum.

The thesis, in one line: Conway's downtown is no longer a collection of good individual stops. It is a single connected afternoon, and the connective tissue was laid in the last eighteen months.

The 2025 change that made everything else possible

Most of the newer programming makes sense only if you understand what happened to the Riverwalk. The city's most popular pathway now runs from Kingston Lake and the Waccamaw River north to 4th Avenue following the latest expansion completed earlier in 2025. That is not a small extension. It closes the loop between the historic river frontage and the northern edge of the walkable downtown grid, which means Main Street shops, the Town Green, and the water are now one continuous walking route rather than three separate destinations that required a car in between.

The linkage between the Riverwalk and Main Street has been drawing more foot traffic into the downtown corridor, and the businesses that noticed first are the ones now programming around it.

Sunday afternoon has a shape now

The clearest example is Gathering on the Green: Sunday Fundays. The series sets up at the Town Green, 200 Laurel Street, on five Sunday afternoons between June and August. Each event runs from 3 to 8 p.m., giving families a wide afternoon window before the Sunday evening winds down. The series received approval from Conway City Council on Monday, June 1, and the first event was scheduled within two weeks of that approval.

Here is what that actually looks like on the ground, if you have not walked over yet:

• Where to park: the Riverwalk lots on the south end let you approach Town Green on foot, which is the point of the whole exercise
• What to expect at the Green: food trucks lining the square, music drifting through the old oaks, and balloon animals for the kids
• The vendor mix: savory, sweet, specialty beverages, and comfort-forward street food, curated to cover a range rather than cluster around a single style
• Why it feels less generic than a food truck rally elsewhere: the Town Green already carries the memory of Coastal Carolina Tealgates, the Groovin' on the Green concert series, and native plant sales organized by the Grand Strand chapter of the South Carolina Native Plant Society

The practical read is that a Conway Sunday now has a default. If you have out-of-town relatives visiting or you just want to hand the afternoon a structure, the answer is Town Green from three to eight, and the walk over from the Riverwalk is part of the experience.

The weeknight anchor near 3rd Avenue

Sundays were the missing piece, but weeknights were quietly getting solved a few blocks over. A Coffee Movement, owned and operated by Abel Wilson and his wife, Michelle, debuted at 1120 3rd Ave. in downtown Conway, making the jump from a mobile van that had been serving specialty drinks across the Grand Strand into its first permanent storefront. The shop makes all drinks in small batches on site, with classic coffee and espresso options such as filter coffee, Americanos, lattes and cappuccinos, along with matcha, hot chocolate, and signatures like the "Everything Latte" made with three house-made syrups.

A coffee shop is not, on its own, a headline. What matters is where it sits. 1120 3rd Ave. anchors a stretch that includes established restaurants a resident already knows, and adding a small-batch café with evening hours turns a two-stop errand into a walkable evening. Pair it with a plate at Crooked Oak Tavern, Rivertown Bistro, or Bonfire a few doors away, and the block finally reads like a district instead of a set of disconnected pins on a map.

River City Cafe's arrival at the Black Water Market fills the other gap. The restaurant moved into the Black Water Market at 328 Laurel St., taking the building just to the right of the Market's Laurel Street entrance, which was once occupied by the Crooked Oak. That is a burger-forward operator on a corner most residents already pass on their way to and from the Riverwalk, and it means an early dinner after a Riverwalk lap no longer requires a reservation or a wait.

What to circle on the fall calendar

Summer is the visible half of the shift, but the fall calendar is where the cadence pays off for residents who prefer cooler weather. Conway Downtown Alive has three anchor windows worth putting in a calendar now.

For a sense of scale on Riverfest specifically, the celebration draws tens of thousands to the heart of the city and in 2026 was headlined by Slaughter and Vixen with local opener Badlander. That is a lot of visitors for a downtown that used to feel quiet on a weekend, and the extended Riverwalk is what makes the crowd manageable rather than gridlocked.

Why this matters if you already live here

The temptation with a post like this is to make it a list of things to try. The more useful frame is that Conway's downtown is finally operating on a schedule you can memorize, which is a different quality of place than a downtown with the same number of good businesses but no shared rhythm. Sunday afternoons default to Town Green. Weeknights default to a Riverwalk lap plus a plate somewhere on 3rd Avenue or Laurel Street. A morning coffee is now walkable from either end. September and October each have a downtown-wide reason to be out.

The people who benefit most from that are the residents who used to reserve their downtown time for out-of-town guests. It is worth spending a Sunday testing the new cadence for yourself. The Riverwalk extension makes the walk short. The Town Green programming gives the afternoon a spine. And the operators who bet on the block, from A Coffee Movement to River City Cafe, are counting on the same thing you are: that Conway finally reads as a place you drive into on purpose, not one you drive through on the way somewhere else.

If your relationship to your Conway home is starting to shift because of how the downtown is changing, or if you are thinking about what a move within Conway or the broader Waccamaw Neck might look like, William "Bill" Moody is happy to talk through the neighborhood at whatever pace suits you. Let's Connect.