The Old Village Got Its Pool, and a Waiting List

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Mount Pleasant's Old Village is getting a private pool club this month. It took two years and a fight to get here.

Old Village Swim Club opens mid-September at 1305 Erckmann Drive, hemmed in by neighborhoods on three sides. The main building runs two stories and 4,700 square feet around a 40-by-75-foot pool, with showers and bathrooms off the deck and two apartments upstairs, a one-bedroom and a two-bedroom.

Behind it: Brian Collie, a real estate lawyer, Allen Biggers, a custom home builder, and Blair Belk and Trey Lucy, both commercial agents. All four live in Mount Pleasant. Three of them live in the Old Village.

Their pitch is a gap nobody had filled.

"Whereas if you look at newer neighborhoods, think I'On, Brickyard, Carolina Park, as part of those communities, there's almost universally a pool and a clubhouse," Collie told the Post & Courier. "A community-gathering hub for neighbors to come together and swim, and families to interact and get to know each other. We saw that in the old Mount Pleasant, Old Village area, that was missing."

The membership math

115 families had bought in as of Aug. 27. Roughly 90 percent of them live in the surrounding streets. Membership is capped on purpose.

And you do not simply sign up. There are four steps: submit an inquiry, wait for the membership committee to review it, take an in-person meeting, then request an invitation to apply. That is a lot of gates for a swimming pool, and it is the most Old Village sentence anyone has written this year.

The fight

The Design and Review Board approved the club in 2024. Twenty members of the public spoke at the October 30 meeting that year. Nine backed it, six of them saying it would make the neighborhood better.

"Enhance the neighborhood" is how Kirby Teller, a neighbor at the time, put it in the minutes.

The rest were worried about one thing, and it was not swimming. Erckmann Drive is narrow, it meets King Street at a tight intersection, and neighbors a street over turned up at a December 2024 transportation committee meeting to say so.

Collie and Lucy said they would work with SCDOT on traffic calming. What actually happened is that the Town of Mount Pleasant, not SCDOT, put a radar speed sign on Erckmann in January. Collie says he would back a four-way stop at Erckmann and King, but that call belongs to the state.

Parking was the other flashpoint. The club provides 42 interior spaces, exactly what the town's zoning requires for the square footage. Several people at the DRB meeting said that would not be close to enough.

Collie's answer, weeks from opening, is that most members will not drive at all.

"For anyone who lives in the old Mount Pleasant, Old Village area, if you're to just ride around on a Saturday, in the summer, you're going to see kids on bikes, families on sidewalks, walking, jogging," he said. "It's a very active neighborhood. I don't think that this is going to create a transportation behavior that doesn't already exist throughout the entire neighborhood."

Golf carts, in other words. We will find out in about a week.

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