Is The Sky Bar for Sale? The Main Street Rooftop North Myrtle Beach Spot For Summer Controversy

Posted Tuesday, October 20, 2026 7:49 am

David Hucks (via MyrtleBeachSC)

Oct 20, 2026 · @https://x.com/myrtlebeachnews

NORTH MYRTLE BEACH — Few businesses on Main Street have generated as many council speeches, court filings and police reports as the rooftop nightclub at 214 Main Street. Now the question circulating among Ocean Drive locals is a simple one: Is Sky Bar for sale — and if so, what would a new owner be walking into?

The short answer is that the property has been publicly marketed before. The longer answer runs through a five-year fight between the bar’s owner and the city over music, profanity and the First Amendment, a federal appeals court loss for North Myrtle Beach, and a 2026 summer season that put the venue back in police reports. Taken together, that history says as much about Main Street’s future as any listing price.

What we know about the listing

In November 2024, commercial real estate agent Bradley Lloyd told The Sun News that the Main Street building housing Sky Bar and the SOHO Main restaurant was on the market, along with a parking lot on nearby Hillside Drive. The same report said a second Main Street property — home to Daisy Dukes Saloon, Nathan’s Famous and Pirates Cove Rooftop Bar — was listed at about $4 million, and the paper put the combined Main Street offerings at more than $12 million [The Sun News, 2024].

Both parcels are held by limited liability companies — STEF Properties Main ST and STEF Properties NMB LLC — with Sky Bar owner Michael Moshoures listed as registered agent for each, and Horry County land records show the Sky Bar site was purchased in 2016.

What happened next is less clear. Sky Bar did not close; it reopened for the 2025 season in early March and added a Soho restaurant on its first floor [The Sun News, 2025]. As of this writing, no public report or record reviewed for this story shows that a sale has closed. Until the broker or county land records say otherwise, the “for sale” status should be treated as unconfirmed — and we’ll update this story when that changes.

That uncertainty is exactly why the property’s history matters. To understand what’s being sold, you have to go back to 2021.

How a rooftop became a council agenda item

Sky Bar sits across from Ducks and next door to Fat Harold’s Beach Club — the heart of the shag and beach-music district [My Horry News, 2021]. Its open-air design is part of the draw. According to some residents, it’s also the problem.

At a July 2021 council meeting, resident Ray Collins told members that the bar’s profanity-heavy rap music carried well beyond Main Street because the rooftop has no walls, and said people near McLean Park, several blocks away, could hear it [My Horry News, 2021]. Council had already met behind closed doors on the issue, and City Attorney Chris Noury said an ordinance was likely on the way. Council members acknowledged the bind they were in: they wanted to act, but free-speech protections made any fix complicated [My Horry News, 2021].

Public records later showed complaints arriving by email from both visitors and residents, some quoting the lyrics they objected to, and that council understood the constitutional limits before it voted [My Horry News, 2021].

On Oct. 4, 2021, council approved an amendment setting special volume caps for music with “obscene, profane or vulgar” lyrics — 30 decibels during the day and 50 at night, levels the ACLU of South Carolina compared to a whisper and a quiet air conditioner [ACLU of South Carolina, 2022]. Within days, the ACLU’s legal director warned city leaders in writing that the rule conflicted with federal law and urged them to drop it [The Sun News, 2022].

The city kept it on the books. That decision set the stage for a three-year legal fight.

The courtroom years

On July 5, 2022, Moshoures — represented by the ACLU — sued the city, Mayor Marilyn Hatley and public safety chief Tommy Dennis in federal court [WMBF News, 2022]. The complaint said officers had entered the club several times, stopped the DJ and turned on the lights, costing the bar customers and revenue, and that at least one DJ had cut back his shifts because clean versions of songs were hard to find [WMBF News, 2022; Georgetown Free Speech Project, 2022]. The bar described its format as rap, hip-hop and Top 40 — music its customers showed up expecting to hear [My Horry News, 2022].

The city countered that its rule was a measured response to a genuine conflict between the bar’s business and neighbors who didn’t want to hear the lyrics [Georgetown Free Speech Project, 2022].

In March 2024, U.S. District Judge Joseph Dawson III split the difference, striking down the “profane” provision while siding with the city on “obscene” and “vulgar” [WMBF News, 2026a; The Post and Courier, 2025]. Moshoures appealed the vulgarity piece.

In March 2025, a unanimous panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals threw out the vulgar-language provision, describing it as a textbook case of content discrimination [The Post and Courier, 2025]. The judges said the city could regulate noise, but only in a way that treats all speech evenly, regardless of whether some residents find it offensive [WBTW, 2025]. City officials responded that the obscenity restriction, which the lower court upheld, remains in force [WMBF News, 2025].

Here’s the part residents shouldn’t miss: the court never said North Myrtle Beach had to tolerate loud music. It said the city had to stop deciding which lyrics were too loud. That distinction shaped everything that came next.

Volume, not vocabulary: the 2026 crackdown

This past May, the city leaned on the part of the ordinance nobody had successfully challenged — the plain decibel limit, which caps noise at 60 decibels from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. and 80 decibels the rest of the day [WMBF News, 2026a].

Over three nights, according to a police report, officers cited a Sky Bar DJ after an 82-decibel reading, warned the bar’s manager after a 97, and then arrested manager Alexander Paragas, 28, early on a Thursday after readings of 95 that rose to 102 [WMBF News, 2026a]. The report said the manager told officers the music couldn’t go any lower. He bonded out of J. Reuben Long Detention Center within an hour; a violation carries up to a $500 fine, 30 days in jail, or both [WMBF News, 2026a].

The bar pushed back publicly, posting its own decibel readings that it said were lower than the police figures. A longtime Sky Bar DJ argued that normal Main Street noise on a busy weekend night tops 60 decibels by itself, and some people questioned whether crowds and traffic skewed the measurements [WMBF News, 2026b].

Days later, police arrested more than a dozen people after a string of fights and disturbances on Main Street near Sky Bar and Ducks; reports described a security guard being assaulted while removing people from the club and several officers being hurt [WPDE, 2026].

Analysis: The city’s 2026 approach is essentially what the 4th Circuit told it to do — enforce by the meter, not the playlist. That puts North Myrtle Beach on firmer legal footing than it was in 2021. But it exposes a practical question the courts never had to answer: whether a 60-decibel nighttime cap is realistic on a street built around nightlife, where crowd noise alone may sit near that line before any bar turns on a speaker. If the limit is effectively impossible to meet, enforcement becomes discretionary — and discretionary enforcement aimed at one disfavored venue is precisely what the ACLU warned about in 2022.

What a sale would — and wouldn’t — change

If the property does change hands, a new owner gets a prime Main Street location and a rooftop with real drawing power. They also inherit the same ordinance, the same neighbors, the same weekend crowds and a police department that has shown it will meter and arrest.

A sale could reset the relationship. A buyer with a different format — or one willing to enclose the rooftop — could defuse a fight that has consumed closed-door council sessions, ACLU letters and federal judges for half a decade. But the underlying tension isn’t really about one owner. Main Street is trying to be both a shag-and-beach-music heritage district and a late-night party strip, and the noise ordinance is where those two identities collide.

There’s also a taxpayer question no one has answered publicly: how much North Myrtle Beach spent defending a provision it was warned about before it ever took effect. The city’s stated policy was not to comment on pending litigation [WMBF News, 2022]. The case is now over, and those legal bills are public records.

Conclusion

Whether the “for sale” sign is current or a leftover from 2024, the Sky Bar story is bigger than one building. It’s a case study in what happens when a city tries to regulate taste instead of volume, loses in court, and then returns to the tool it had all along.

For locals, the takeaways are practical. The vulgarity rule is gone; the decibel limits are not. Whoever owns 214 Main Street next will operate under the same meter. And the cost of the city’s legal detour — in dollars and in time — remains a fair question to raise at the next council meeting.

Know something about the property’s current status? Contact our newsroom.