Personal Injury Attorneyin Spartanburg, SC.

Spartanburg, S.C. The BMW Charity Pro-Am presented by TD SYNNEX tournament officials are pleased to announce that American musician and singer-songwriter, Phillip Phillips, will headline this year's downtown Spartanburg Concert. Presented by The Johnson Group, the concert will take place on Thursday, June 6th, at Morgan Square with free admission to the public. The evening's festivities will kick off at 5:00 pm, culminating in Phillip Phillips' performance later in the evening.

"We are excited to have Phillip Phillips headlining this year's Spartanburg Concert," said Bob Stegner, President of South Carolina Charities, Inc., the non-profit foundation of the BMW Charity Pro-Am presented by TD SYNNEX. "This concert is not only a highlight of the tournament week but also a fantastic way to give back to the Spartanburg community. We are grateful to The Johnson Group and the City of Spartanburg for their continued partnership and contribution to making this event possible."

Phillip Phillips, the American Idol winner known for his soulful music and engaging performances, will provide an evening of musical excellence for concertgoers in Spartanburg. Renowned for his chart-topping hits like "Home," "Gone, Gone, Gone," and "Raging Fire," Phillips has toured with artists such as John Mayer and Gavin DeGraw, as well as performed alongside Bruce Springsteen.

Geordy Johnson, CEO of The Johnson Group, also expressed enthusiasm about the partnership, stating, "We are thrilled to partner with the BMW Charity Pro-Am and sponsor the Phillip Phillips concert. This event is a wonderful opportunity to amplify downtown Spartanburg and bring the community together in a fun and meaningful way while supporting South Carolina Charities.”

This year marks the 3rd year of the downtown Spartanburg concert series, following successful performances in previous years by Diamond Rio and Marshall Tucker Band. Opening acts for the Phillip Phillips concert will include Spartanburg’s own Back 9 Band, James Radford Band, and Gritty Flyright. iHeartMedia Greenville will be the official radio partner for this event; make sure to tune in to 102.5 The Lake for the chance to win VIP tickets to the tournament and the Thursday night concert. For those seeking a VIP experience, tickets which include food, beverage and access to Delaney’s Irish Pub during the concert, can be purchased through the tournament's website, complementing the free concert for all attendees.

Additionally, the BMW Charity Pro-Am is offering a "Stay and Play" package to help keep the party going. This package includes two Clubhouse credentials to the tournament, two VIP Tickets to the concert, and a one-night stay at the AC Hotel Spartanburg for Thursday night, enhancing your experience with a touch of luxury and hospitality.

The BMW Charity Pro-Am is scheduled to take place at Thornblade Club and The Carolina Country Club from June 6th to June 9th. After attending the tournament at the Carolina Country Club on Thursday, plan to continue the fun at the special concert event that evening. For additional details regarding the tournament, sponsorship opportunities, exclusive events, and supported charitable causes, please visit www.bmwcharitygolf.com.

ABOUT THE BMW CHARITY PRO-AM PRESENTED BY TD SYNNEX

South Carolina Charities, Inc. (SCCI), the non-profit foundation of the BMW Charity Pro-Am presented by TD SYNNEX, was created in order to showcase the beauty of Upstate South Carolina and hospitality of its citizens to the world; to create an event that brings the upstate a fun and entertaining week centered around professional athletes and world-renowned celebrities; and raise money and awareness for South Carolina charities. Since 2001, the tournament has distributed more than $15 million to numerous Upstate SC non-profit organizations, part of the PGA TOUR’s $3 billion plus raised for charity.

ABOUT THE JOHNSON GROUP

The Johnson Group, headquartered in Spartanburg, South Carolina, is a family of diverse companies fueled by an entrepreneurial spirit, united in shared values and committed to the success of its team members, partners and communities. From commercial real estate to hospitality to auto finance, The Johnson Group’s foundation for business is the same: Building enduring relationships of trust and accountability with partners, and relentlessly pursuing profitable results. For more information, visit www.TheJohnsonGroup.com.

These Covid tracking pages are no longer being updated. Get the latest information from the Centers for Disease Control, or find archived data from The Times’s three year reporting effort here.

An updated vaccine is recommended for adults and most children. Statewide, 7% of vaccinations did not specify a home county.

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Notes: The hospitals map shows the average I.C.U. occupancy at nearby hospitals in the most recent week with data reported. The data is self-reported to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services by individual hospitals. It excludes counts from hospitals operated by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the Indian Health Service. Numbers for hospitalized patients are based on inpatient beds and include I.C.U. beds. Hospitalized Covid-19 patients include both confirmed and suspected Covid-19 patients. The C.D.C. stopped reporting data on cases in May 2023.

How trends have changed in Spartanburg County

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Notes: Weekly county death data prior to Jan. 2021 was not reported by the C.D.C. and is sourced from reporting by The New York Times. Hospitalization data is a weekly average of Covid-19 patients in hospital service areas that intersect with Spartanburg County. Hospitalization numbers early in the pandemic are undercounts due to incomplete reporting by hospitals to the federal government.

Historical trends in Spartanburg County

The data in these charts has been archived and they are no longer being updated.

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The data in these charts has been archived and they are no longer being updated. Weekly county case data prior to Jan. 2021 was not reported by the C.D.C. and is sourced from reporting by The New York Times. The C.D.C. stopped reporting data on cases in May 2023. Test positivity data is based only on test results reported to the federal government and is a seven-day average.

Ready to get outside and play? These playgrounds in Spartanburg, SC are perfect for playtime! You’ve read about the wonderful playgrounds that Spartanburg and the surrounding area have, but after a long winter of planning indoor activities, here is a reminder of some of the best playgrounds in Spartanburg you can revisit, or check out for the first time.

Looking for more great parks in Spartanburg? Don’t miss our Upstate, SC Park Guide.

Spartanburg Parks your kids will love

Holy playground, Batman! Being one of the largest parks and playgrounds in Spartanburg, SC, Cleveland Park, is one you won’t want to miss. Located at 141 N. Cleveland Park Drive in Spartanburg, this park holds a massive playground that the grown-ups might even want to check out. Due to its large size, Cleveland Park is perfect for an impromptu game of hide in seek with young kids or tag with your older ones.

An inviting entrance leads you into the playground area. Cleveland Park’s playground isn’t your typical metal pipe, monkey bar, and slide type playground, though. Endless ramps wind through, bringing you to what seems like various levels of this castle-like structure. A soft ground takes the place of mulch under your feet, however, it can get pretty hot-to-the-touch when the sun is shining. A smaller-sized rock wall will challenge your climbers, and several swings are provided to help create a breeze on your face to cool down.

Park shelters are available to rent, which makes this a great spot to throw a birthday party. (Take a look at the rental information.) You can also check out their website for park hours, which is suggested because once the gate closes, it might be tough to get your car out.

Find out why we LOVE Cleveland Park in Spartanburg, SC

Nestled smack in the middle of the beautiful, historic Converse Heights neighborhood, Happy Hollow Park can simply be described as cute and quaint. Located in a sectioned-off fork of Glendalyn Ave, this park provides a fenced-in grassy area, complete with winding sidewalks, water fountains, and benches for you to relax while your little ones run around.

As you walk toward the playground, covered picnic tables provide an area for snack time or for your family to enjoy the lunch you packed as a picnic. Beyond the picnic shelter and through a gate, you’ll find two playgrounds that are surrounded by mature trees. The natural shade will help keep you cool once the days get warm. Several benches surround a cemented area, which is a perfect spot for hopscotch, so don’t forget the sidewalk chalk. The baby and big-kid swings are separated from each other, but there aren’t many available, so make sure your child hops on when they see the opportunity.

There currently are no bathrooms available at this park, so using the potty before heading over is a must! There is no designated parking lot, but on-street parking is available on both sides of Glendalyn Ave, which is only a small price to pay for spending some time at this scenic park.

Read our full review of the cute and quaint Happy Hollow Park near Converse Heights in Spartanburg, SC

Located at 195 Dillard Rd in Duncan, Tyger River Park is another large park in terms of space. Once you drive into the park area, be sure to follow the signs to guide you to where you want to go, because this park doesn’t have just your typical rectangular parking lot. Thirteen baseball/softball feels fill up a large portion of this park, as well as an 18-hole disc golf course.

Right behind the clubhouse are two exciting playgrounds, one for the big-kids and one for the little kids. The big-kid playground is filled with plenty of slides and different ways to climb up onto the playground, which makes for a great obstacle course. There is also a ramp to make getting up to the slides a little easier. As you head on over to the little-kid playground, you’ll pass a rope climbing structure that looks a little intimidating, but can be loads of fun! The little-kid playground includes swings, including swings for the younger children, a sandbox, and a play structure with several low bridges for running around.

There is also a splash-pad, which puts it high on the list of best playgrounds in Spartanburg, SC. Be sure to bring along a swimsuit, because your children are bound to want to run through the water on hot days (and there are bathrooms to change into dry clothes before loading everyone back in the car before you head home).

Learn more about Tyger River Park and the many updates it received in our Kidding Around review!

When you think of Boiling Springs, Va-Du-Mar McMillan Park might be one of the first things that come to mind. It’s updates make it one of the best playgrounds in Spartanburg, SC! Located at 591 McMillin Boulevard, this is a park you can easily spend half of the day at without getting bored. Bring along a picnic lunch, your discs for disc golf, a soccer ball, and your walking shoes.

This park has shaded picnic areas and clean bathrooms so you can stick around for a while longer and let the kids burn off some energy. Walking trails, with doggy bags receptacles- because pets are allowed in certain areas of the park- wrap around this beautiful park so you can tire yourself out too (as if the kids don’t do that for you already)!

Two playgrounds are in a fenced area, keeping your babies safe from the parking area, and with plenty of swings, it’s not likely your child will have to wait their turn for one. These playgrounds don’t fall short on slides, bridges, or climbing structures, so there are plenty of fun ways to enjoy it. A stand-up see-saw adds a different type of fun that you won’t see at most playgrounds.

Va-Du-Mar McMillian Park has updates you’ll want to check out! Learn more in our Kidding Around review.

Find 2 more parks in Boiling Springs on this list of 3 Great Parks in Boiling Springs.

Located at 119 S. Spencer Street in Duncan, this park is situated right outside of another fun spot in the upstate- Shipwreck Cove. Stoneledge Park is even pretty to look at as you make your approach, as it has the appearance of being fenced in by trees/bushes.

A big- and little-kid playground will give your child an age-appropriate play structure to have some fun. While these playgrounds may not provide anything out of the ordinary to climb and play on, they present a fun appearance with dimension added to the sides of the crawl through tunnels, and the tunnels on the big-kid playground even have a slight incline to make things more interesting.

A scenic walking trail paves its way through this park, so don’t forget to bring the stroller along if you feel like getting in some of your daily steps. Conveniently, restrooms are available, so potty breaks won’t be an issue when you decide to hang out here. This is a great park to check out if you are trying to plan a busy “make-my-kids-so-tired-they-nap-on-their-own” type of day, because you can start your morning off here, then head over to the waterpark to cool off and add more fun to the day!

So as the warmer weather approaches, remind yourself that you don’t have to venture far from the upstate to enjoy a day outdoors with your children. With these playgrounds offering such a different atmosphere, each one will create a brand-new adventure.

Find out why Stoneledge Parks is one of our top 5 parks in Spartanburg!

What’s your favorite park in our area?

Molly Talbot-Metz wanted so badly for it to work – a name grocery store bringing name brands to a blighted end of town, where supermarket options nearly all of this century have been either generic products or nothing.

Ruth Littlejohn wanted it just as badly.

James Talley misses the place already.

Ken Kolb is not surprised it didn’t work.

When Piggly Wiggly opened its Spartanburg location in August of 2022, there was ample reason to be hopeful. The City of Spartanburg and the Mary Black Foundation (MBF) had joined to put $900,000 into the supermarket. The neighbors had been clamoring for a place to shop where a Save A Lot store had once stood in South Church Plaza – itself a respite from the three-to-five-mile trips to the nearest Ingles, Food Lion, or Walmart stores that are variably serviced by city bus routes.

Thirteen months later, however, in September of 2023, the store closed down; $900,000 in impact investment loans from MBF to the city to the store gone, leaving the residents of the Southside neighborhoods wringing South Church Plaza without a supermarket again and leaving the city to pay for a vacant space.

“The agreement that the Mary Black Foundation made with the city was that part of the loan was guaranteed by the city,” said Talbot-Metz, executive director of MBF. “We will receive some of the loan funds back. Others will be a loss.”

The loss of the Piggly Wiggly, however, stings on a deeper level than money. While Talbot-Metz said she stands behind the investment – and the market research that she says pointed to an optimistic future for the store – Talley said the Piggly Wiggly closing so soon serves as a reminder that the community it was intended to serve routinely has to deal with disappointment and failure.

“It made me wonder, what are we going to do now?” Talley said. “Where do we go from here?”

At 83, Talley drives to the other supermarkets in town, but said he preferred the convenience of having a name-brand store just a few blocks from his house in the Hampton Heights neighborhood. But while he preferred the closeness – and an excuse to not have to use gas getting somewhere else – Talley said many of his neighbors turned against the store before it ever had the chance to get off the ground.

“There were some that really relied on it,” he said. “Then, for some reason, there were some that came up with a vendetta against it; they started talking about the prices and they started talking about, was this fresh enough, was that fresh enough? I guess some people expected the prices to be low because it was Piggly Wiggly.”

Talley suspects – as does City Councilwoman Ruth Littlejohn – that a kind of price nostalgia doomed the store. Remember, Spartanburg’s Piggly Wiggly operated in the same building in which Save A Lot had operated. Save A Lot is a discount store chain most famous for selling private label (i.e., generic) groceries, which tend to be less expensive than name brands.

And the last day that Save A Lot was open for business was in 2019, when an 18-ounce box of (admittedly name brand) Cheerios cost about $4. Closing in on five years and one inflation-inducing pandemic later, that 18-ounce box will cost you $7.99 at the Piggly Wiggly in Columbia (which is now one of the chain’s closest locations to Spartanburg).

Littlejohn said that shoppers expecting 2019 Save A Lot prices were not happy with 2022-23 prices at Piggly Wiggly, even though the latter’s prices were “pretty much the same” as those at Ingles, Food Lion, and Walmart.

While Littlejohn said she would have liked to see the store hang on for a little longer, that had it gutted through, it might have been able to survive, she feels that COVID was “the demon” that doomed the store before it had much of a chance to make itself part of the community.

But for Ken Kolb, chair of the sociology department at Furman University and author of the book, Retail Inequality, the death of the Spartanburg Piggly Wiggly was foreseeable and quantifiable. Kolb said that trying to solve so complex a problem as food insecurity with so singular a solution as dropping a supermarket into a food desert simply cannot work.

The quantifiable part, the math, however, breaks down to a simple equation for Kolb: 900,000 divided by 261.

The 900,000 figure is the amount of dollars pumped into the project by the city and MBF to help float the Piggly Wiggly as it got off the ground (and it takes a lot of money to get a supermarket off the ground, even a Save A Lot, which, according to its website costs between $600,000 and $2.1 million to get going). The 261 figure is the number of households in what the U.S. Census Bureau defines as “near poverty.”

“The near poor are people living at 100 to 150 percent of the poverty level,” Kolb said. “Think of a family of four making between $24,000 and $36,000 a year. They are really kind of hovering above mild catastrophe. They've got it together, but a flat tire or a kid's runny nose can cost them a job, which can create a downward spiral for them.”

And in the two Census tracts that comprise the neighborhood that the Spartanburg Piggly Wiggly was intended to serve, he said, there were 261 near-poor households that could have most benefitted from having a supermarket in close reach – hardly enough, he said, to keep a store open.

And while Kolb said he is 100 percent behind investing in supermarkets in food deserts, he would rather see a different approach – one that invests in the community and the people rather than the store itself.

“Had we poured that $900,000 into roughly 261 households making between $25,000 and $40,000 a year, we could have effectively given each one of those households a $150 coupon for food once a month for three years,” Kolb said. “How could that have changed lives? What would that have done for their disposable income in being able to support other businesses that could have kept other shops in business? I don't know, but that's the experiment that I'm ready for, because we're about 15 years into bribing grocery stores to move into under-resourced areas, and while I'm all for it, because I think that's a good, healthy, wholesome form of retail to invest in, it's still been a business-first, supply side-first solution. I think it's time to maybe chart a new path.”

As cities and counties across South Carolina grapple with growth, Spartanburg County is experimenting with a new type of zoning that promises greater adaptability and predictability in guiding that growth.

The method is called performance zoning and is designed to be more adaptive than traditional Euclidean zoning, which derives its name from a 1926 court case won by the town of Euclid, Ohio, that established local governments’ constitutional authority to enact zoning.

Spartanburg County adopted its performance zoning ordinance in 2019 and applied it in 2020 to the southwestern corner of the county encompassing the area surrounding Duncan, Lyman, Reidville and the portions of Greer within the county – among the fastest-growing areas in the Upstate.

Roads to growth

Euclidean zoning relies on placing every parcel of property in a specific zoning category that dictates what types of uses are allowed – residential, commercial or industrial, to name three examples.

But in the process of gathering public input on land-use regulations over the past 20 years, the county’s rural residents have made their opposition to zoning restrictions abundantly clear, according to David Britt, a member of Spartanburg County Council for more than 30 years.

Instead of imposing zoning where it was not wanted, Britt said the county has used buffers and setbacks to preserve property owners’ options in what they can do with their land while trying to minimize impacts to surrounding properties.

Britt has also spent years spearheading the council’s economic development efforts and said the county’s targeted approach to concentrating industrial projects along arterial roads, such as state highways 290 and 101 in the southwestern corner of the county, has paid handsome dividends.

The influx of companies has brought in more than $8 billion in the last few years and created more than 8,000 jobs, improving the lives of county residents, he said.

“Those companies that either expanded or came here were companies that we wanted … (and helped) our residents make an impact in their families’ lives,” he said.

Targeting the “golden box” of the Highway 290/ 101 corridor with performance zoning that encourages industrial growth along road arteries and residential growth along the interconnected local roads was a way of meeting the needs of both sectors, Britt said.

Striking a balance

The region’s unprecedented growth in recent years has begun to shift attitudes towards land-use regulations, Britt said.

He added that communities experiencing rapid growth like Boiling Springs northwest of Spartanburg are beginning to clamor for some means of controlling that growth.

Britt said county leaders are trying to strike a balance between preserving private-property rights and the need to impose some order on where development happens.

Opposition to traditional zoning remains strong, but the county’s use of performance zoning has worked reasonably well, Britt said.

“Performance zoning is intended to be adaptive and accommodating to development while offering balanced protections for property owners,” Assistant County Administrator Kevin Stiens said. “This approach is focused on the impacts or effects of land uses on the surrounding properties.”

As explained in a county-prepared video outlining performance zoning, designating a property’s zoning category essentially involves guesswork. Changing that category once established is an involved process that invariably involves contending interests.

Instead, the county’s performance zoning approach starts with a road-classification system as a more reliable indicator of where growth is likely to happen and what types of development that growth is likely to produce.

Roads are classified as arterial, collector or local. In essence, arterial roads are main thoroughfares where traffic volume and non-residential development are most likely. Collector roads connect arterial and local roads and are likely to attract a range of residential and non-residential uses, while local roads typically connect residential areas to the wider community.

Britt said the county is continuously evaluating its land-use policies and whether zoning is appropriate, and more importantly, supported by residents.

“When people want it, we’ll respond,” he said. “We aim to do what our constituents want.”

This story was filed as part of an editorial partnership between South Carolina Public Radio and the Greenville Journal, who is responsible for its content. You can learn more about the Greenville Journal here.