In December, a 100-year-old live oak took a 700-foot ride across a lot in Midtown Mount Pleasant. It moved on inflatable airbags, root ball and all, at a walking pace, after fourteen months of root pruning and daily irrigation to get it ready for the trip.
Nobody made them do that. Cutting it down would have been faster and a great deal cheaper. They moved it instead, and then built the whole place around where it landed.
A rendering of Gather MTP, the 5.5-acre mixed-use development going up on Midtown Avenue
What's coming
Gather MTP sits at 1601 Midtown Avenue, off Hungry Neck Boulevard. I got co-developer Mack Cross of Four Oaks Property Group on the phone back in June, and the scope he laid out is bigger than most people driving past the site realize: 12 food and beverage spots, 7 retail spaces, two large lawns, and, in his words, plenty of seating.
Crooked Hammock Brewery anchors the adjacent pad. The rest is meant to be small independent operators.
The site plan Cross walked me through in June
They already know the format works
Gather MTP is modeled on Gather GVL, the food hall Cross's group runs in downtown Greenville. That one landed fifth on USA Today's Readers' Choice list of the best food halls in America in 2024, which is a good enough result to want to run the play again.
Gather GVL in downtown Greenville, the model for the Mount Pleasant project
Their own website is not subtle about the vibe they're chasing. Eat hot food, drink cold beer, listen to cool music, "let the kids be kids and the adults be kids," support local, try new things, and "hang out without hang ups." The atmosphere is meant to be "lively, active and inspiring," with everyone "from young professionals to kids and their grandparents" feeling welcome.
Or the line that actually sums it up: Gather MTP is meant to show off Mount Pleasant as "a place with its arms wide open and its table set for all."
Where it actually stands
Later than the original plan, and worth being straight about. Cross told Live 5 News in October 2024 that the project would cost $14 million and be finished by the middle of 2026, on a 12-to-15-month build. The groundbreaking did not happen until December 3, 2025, the same afternoon they moved the tree. His most recent public target is early 2027.
The scope moved too. "We reduced the scale of the project," Cross said at the time. "Originally we had a hotel component, but we have since gotten rid of that. The economy changed through the process."
That is not a red flag so much as the ordinary weather of building anything right now.
Gather MTP under construction in Midtown Mount Pleasant
Phase two is a sport you probably haven't played
When we talked in June, Cross said they were headed back to the Town of Mount Pleasant for approval on a second phase: five padel courts.
If you haven't run into padel yet, you will. It's a doubles racquet game played on an enclosed court about a third the size of a tennis court, with glass walls that stay in play the way they do in squash. Solid stringless paddles, underhand serve, and a far shorter learning curve than tennis. It is enormous in Spain and Argentina and has been among the fastest-growing sports in Europe for years.
Five courts next to a brewery lawn is the kind of thing that turns a food hall into a place people go twice a week instead of twice a year.
Eight names are already signed
This is the part almost nobody has noticed. Cross has been announcing tenants on Gather's Instagram all year, one at a time, with no press release and not much fanfare, and the list is now eight deep.
On the food side: Cachita's Kitchen, the Mexican spot Jose Cruz and Erik Hernandez grew from a 2020 food truck into a room on North Market, was the first name out, back on March 14. Rocket Burger, Ben Berryhill's smash-burger truck that lived in Red Drum's parking lot on Coleman since 2021, drew the loudest reaction of any announcement so far. Banh Sai brings Asian fusion under eighties neon, and it is worth knowing this one is not a Charleston business: chef Austin Belt cooked here before he built it in Wilmington. Petal & Pour is coastal sodas, lemonades and grab-and-go bouquets, and Gather is its debut.
On the retail side: Dear Georgie, the Charleston children's label carried in sixty-plus stores nationally, is moving over from Chuck Dawley. Pip & Brine is a second brand from The Southern Welcome over at Seaside Farms. Disco Dragon Books landed on August 22, billed as "the most fun & fanciful bookstore in town." And Suite Life Salons is taking a mezzanine nobody has been talking about: twelve suites, each over 200 square feet with its own exterior entrance, in spring 2027.
That last one is the tell. Twelve salon suites is not a food hall amenity. It is a second floor of leasable space, and it means stylists and their clients on the property every weekday, not just a dinner crowd on Friday.
What is still open: Crooked Hammock's own site now says 2027, and the office building remains a build-to-suit that JLL says will not start construction until a tenant is identified.
Why it's worth wanting
Because what Mount Pleasant is short on is not restaurants. It is somewhere to stand around outside with people you did not plan to see. A privately owned park with a stage on it, a project built for walking instead of parking, and a live oak in the middle that somebody spent real money and fourteen months keeping alive.
"We chose not to look at it as an inconvenience, but really find the opportunity with that tree," Cross said the day it was moved. "It's an investment in the tree, and in something that has been here long before us and will be here probably long after us."
The tree is already home. The rest is coming.
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