Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

I'm curious.

Is anyone aware of a working payphone in the Columbia area?

I noticed this vacant ATM setup at Columbiana Station when I went over to take pictures of B Mac's Buffet.

I had no memory of what it was, or when it ceased, but Google StreetView suggests it was a South Carolina Federal Credit Union location, and that it vanished sometime between September 2011 & August 2015.

The street address is not particularly accurate, it belongs to Dick's which the stand is more or less in front of.

I don't know much about Clean Juice. Judging from the Google reviews, it seems like they did smoothies & avocado toast, but I see the one on Forest Drive also has sandwiches and acai bowls. They were located just a few doors down from Wayback Burgers.

The closing note is a bit confusing, opening with We have sold!, but apparently that does not mean they have sold the operation as an ongoing concern.

(Hat tip to commenter JamesR)

I don't have much to say about this closing, just that the onwership of this Blaze was the same as the one at Sandhill, and it closed on the same date with the same note.

The Corner Blend at the corner of Main & Blossom Streets has been a number of things since the building went up. Most recently, I believe, it was Yoghut, and my understanding at the time was that The Corner Blend is essentially a reflagging of that operation to signal a new focus on Boba and Acai bowls.

The Post & Courier reports that the space has been taken by the owners of the Rosewood Market who want to make it a mini-outpost of that brand. It sounds as though there is still a good bit of work to do, but the projected timeframe is "this fall".

(Hat tip to commenter Cats)

This has already been discussed extensively in Have Your Say but B Mac's Buffet which opened on 8 August 2025, in the old Copper River Grill location, unexpectedly closed on 26 August, 18 days later.

Here is a State story on the news that the place would be moving in. In retrospect, there are a number of red flags on display.

The State covers the actual opening here here.

You can read about the closing at WLTX.

(Hat tip to a number of commenters, but I believe commenter Tom made the first definitive 'This place is closed' mention.)

Here's another place I never ate -- I wasn't really aware of it, and anyway would worry about parking. I don't have an exact date for the closing, but the follow-on, Surfin' Sumo, "Hawaiian fusion flavors with a Japanese twist", opened on 28 August 2025, so presumably at least a couple of weeks before that, to allow for the changeover.

I don't see any stories about Sandwich Depot (the Google reviews are middling), but here are stories about the new operation from City government, the Post & Courier & The State.

(Hat tip to commenter Justin)

Sometimes it seems as though restaurants go through phases, and for a while the "build-your-own-pizza" phase was hot. I never went to Blaze, but I have been to Mod, and I understand that it's a similar experience: You go through a line like you are building a buritto except it's a pizza, and after you have all your toppings they quick-fire it and there you go.

It's a concept that has been going through some tough times as Mod went through bankruptcy recently and closed locations, 1000 Degress never got here, and now all the Midlands Blaze locations have shut down.

Blaze is not the first restaurant to close in this storefront, back in 2013, it was Al Amir with the place sitting vacant, I believe, until Blaze moved in in 2016.

Here is the story in The State & The Free Times.

(Hat tip to commenter Tom)

The first image above made me think of Villa Villekulla over the weekend, as I took it on 4 September 2021 during my Labor Day weekend visit, so I figured it was time to do a closing.

The original Villa Villekulla of course was the ramshackle, but magical, house that Pippi Longstocking lived in alone (but with good friends close by) while her father was off plying the seas in the children's books from the early 20th century. And in fact, Fernandina already had a Villa Villekulla connection as one of the Pippi movies was filmed there with a particular house in Old Town (at 212 Estrada Street to be exact), doing duties as the setting during filming.

My memory is that the toy store opened sometime after that, when the connection was still in people's minds, but after the movie itself was largely forgotten (it was not a big hit). The location on 2nd Street, next to the Hampton Inn is an interesting one in that there are two suites in the building not exactly separated. You enter through the street level entrance, and the toy store area is off to your left, though you are basically in it already, but there is a staircase to the right, without a separate door or any barrier, which leads up to the top floor suite which is a totally separate business. When the toy store opened, the top floor was a pretty decent Italian restaurant, and later it became an art gallery. It was a bit of an odd setup.

Anyway, the toy store was somewhat eclectic, with lots of stock that I never saw elsewhere, and generally on my fall or winter visits, I would pick up a number of Christmas presents for my nieces. I remember a number of different type of slime or putty, markers for coloring on windows, throwing balls that would bounce on waves, old-time "car bingo" cards, sidewalk paints & quirky Asian toys. I also picked up a model hot-air balloon as in their logo that spins in the wind.

On my trip last December however, I noticed things had changed. The store had been rearranged leaving much more free-space, possibly to draw attention away from the fact that there was considerably less stock. I still picked up several things, but I took it as a bad sign, something confirmed when I went back in July to find the storfront empty, and papered over with notices of a new enterprise moving in.

I'm not sure exactly what happened, but at one point I found a story about how the store was adding an event space (I can't find it again now). In December, the upstairs art gallery was gone, and my surmise is that Villa Villekulla, possibly already stressed, took the space over to bring in more money, over-extended themselves and had to give it up. That's speculation, all I can say for sure is that their Facebook indicated that they had been trying to sell the store, ended up being unable to do so, and had to vacate on 30 April 2025.

Here is a bit more shared on a neighboring store's Facebook.

It's a shame, it was a nice little place for many years.

This place is now called Veneziano's. Looking at the Google reviews, it's hard to say exactly when this happened, but apparently the ownership changed about a year ago, and the name probably changed around October of 2024. I had eaten several times at Papa Gio's, and it was not my favorite place. I found that consistently the garlic knots had very little or no garlic on them, and since they did not have 10 inch pizza, I would order a calzone, which would generally have cold ricotta in the filling.

I decided to try Veneziano's, and found the interior much the same with the exception of some tables being removed in the area directly behind the hostess stand. Service was good and friendly, but I still found that the garlic knots had no garlic, and the calzone was filled with chilled ricotta...