If you want to see gentrification in action, take a cruise up Meeting Street. There new apartment buildings tower eye-level with the overpass as the race to claim every square inch of undeveloped peninsula continues.
Enter: Thunderguards Motorcycle Club. Or, I should say, Exit: Thunderguards Motorcycle Club. The black biker club hosted members at 525 Meeting St. for 41 years until the space sold this summer for $450,000 to SP Real Estate LLC.
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“The city built all around us. There was no place to park,” says Starchild, Thunderguards’ business manager regarding the closure. The Thunderguards have since moved to 3575 Dorchester Road in North Charleston and in its original location The Montford Group, the same developers who just purchased Bluerose Cafe, are planning to open a globally-inspired tapas lounge called Villa 525.
“It will be very different than anything anybody has seen in Charleston,” says Jessica Reid, Montford’s Founder and COO. The group aims to open Villa 525 sometime this fall.
As for the legacy of the Thunderguards, Starchild says that as far as he knows its shuttering marked the closure of the last all black club on the peninsula.
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