Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

The House of Blues at (The bankrupt) Barefoot Landing in Myrtle Beach seems to make a policy of booking major "legacy" acts into its rather intimate space. In the past, I've seen Boz Scaggs, Cyndi Lauper, The Beach Boys (Carl Wilson was visibly failing), and Blondie there.

The only problem I have with the place is that while they have a reserved seating area, the tickets don't seem to be available on the standard web site, and standing up for two hours gets old pretty quick for me nowdays.

Steve Miller has, of course, been around forever, but scored his greatest success in the mid 70s with the "Fly Like an Eagle" and "Book of Dreams" albums. Supposedly he has never allowed a recognizable picture of himself on an album cover, and at the peak of his fame, could ride his bike around venue parking lots without being recognized. He has never had what you could call a "great" voice -- it's a very servicable reedy tenor, and the fact that it's never been perfect means that it hasn't dropped off much either: he was in good vocal form for Saturday's show. The Steve Miller Band is now apparently a six-man outfit. Two guitars, a bass, drums, keyboards and a (very flamboyant) second vocalist.

As you'll recall, when I saw The Doobie Brothers in North Charleston, and Al Stewart in Newberry, I was surprised at how lax the venues were about cameras. In the past it almost seemed like places would break your kneecaps before letting you in with a camera, but apprently, as in school, the Battle of the Cell Phone has been lost, and other cameras reap the benefit. Since I regretted not taking the closing-cam to those shows, I checked on the HOB ticketing site, and non-removable-lens cameras are allowed, so in it came.

The curtain opening number was "Jet Airliner" (with the synth prologue [mostly missed here] playing before the curtain dropped), and Miller went on to play pretty much all of his hits and well known songs: "Jet Airliner", "Abracadabera", "Wild Mountain Honey", "Serenade To The Stars", "Swingtown", "Dance Dance Dance", "Take The Money & Run", "Jungle Love", "Space Cowboy" (dedicated to William Shatner), "Livin' In The USA", "The Stake", "The Joker" (acoustic), and "Rockin' Me". He also played a few blues numbers (it was originally "The Steve Miller Blues Band") that really let the second vocalist shine.

In short, it was an excellent show, and if you get the opportunity to catch him, do.

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This porn emporium on Broad River Road next to the old Data Resources site and across the street from Ole Town Antiques recently gave up the ghost and is already boarded up. I like the odd fact that the advertising silhouettes are about as tame as anything involving a man and a woman together can be. There are racier beer billboards. Of course maybe that did them in!

More likely are two other factors. First, they were just down the street from This is It! at 2831 Broad River Road, and that seems to be a chain of sorts. And second, I heard somewhere that Al Gore invented something that lets you see people in their birthday suits for free...

(Hat tip to a commenter I can not locate now..)

UPDATE 8 October 2011: Added "TJ's" to the post title after finding it in google. It was a strip club.

UPDATE 11 November 2011: Added "The Ballistic Center to the post title. It was a shooting range. I've got a nice ad to scan in at some point.

UPDATE 23 November 2011 -- Here's the ad I mentiond above:

The Ballistic Center first listed in the January 1984 phonebook at "1022 Columbia College Drive". I forgot to make a note of when they first listed at this address, but the last listing was in the February 1991 phonebook.

UPDATE 17 April 2019 -- Now Michael's Cafe & Bistro:

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Although there were Waldenbooks in Columbia, I believe the closest that parent company Borders Books ever got to Columbia was Augusta Georgia, where they had a store in a strip off the Bobby Jones Expressway, near the I-20 interchange.

I first encountered Borders in Kansas City Kansas, on Metcalf Avenue in Overland Park. There were actually two stores on Metcalfe, but one of them was almost adjacent to the US Sprint building where I worked a number of projects over the years. (This was also the first place where I encountered Macroni Grill, which to date is the only place I've been where the Matitre-D requested a bribe).

Since I would be staying in a hotel not too far away, I would generally repair to Borders after dinner with local and other visiting co-workers, and it was something of a wonderland for me. First of all, it was big. This was the early to mid 1990s, and there was nothing to compare with a Borders in Columbia, and even less so in Fayetteville NC where I was living at the time. There were rows on rows in the Science Fiction section, with a deep back-list, and books and authors I had only vaguely heard of, including lots of archival small-press selections from NESFA Press and other specialty publishers. The history section was awesome, including even lots of Loeb editions of classics in Latin (no, I don't read Latin [beyond 'cogito ergo sum'], but the English was on facing pages, and these were the *only* editions of a lot of these classical authors). I had been on the Internet, and doing network programming since 1985, but this was the time period when the World Wide Web was just starting to break to a mass audience, and the computer section was huge, with books on all the topics I would never see in Columbia or Fayetteville. I would always come home from Kansas with a suitcase-full of computer books, busting both my back and my budget, but I never regretted it.

Even beyond the books, the magazine section was huge, and had obscure SF magazines that had either never heard or or assumed long defunct, and titles from every dimly-lit corner of popular culture, including film & animation, music and all sorts of unclassifiable little niches. There was also a coffee-shop in the store, which was an innovation I had not seen elsewhere. At the time, I could drink lattes until store closing at 11pm and still be up for work in the morning, and with a table of books and magazines, I often did. (Unfortunately, I can't do that anymore..). Obviously, I wasn't there on a consistent enough basis to see much of the programmed activities apart from the merchandise, but I did get to see a presentation by George R. R. Martin (who I had long known about, but who was just starting to become famous at the time), and speak briefly with him.

In time, the assignments in Kansas got less frequent, but projects in DC got more so, and Borders was there too. In contrast to Kansas, I usually would not have a car in DC, but after work, I would often take the Metro to the Pentagon City stop, have supper at Chevy's Mexican and then spend the rest of the evening until 11pm across the hall at Borders. Once more, I often came home from DC with loads of computer books.

DC was where I first started to get the idea that all was not right in the Borders world. The store, which had always been open until 11pm, started closing at 10pm on week-nights, making it difficult for me to both have supper and visit. It also seemed to me that the quality of the computer section was declining a little bit.

Of course, there were other factors at play as well. At around the same time, Amazon really began to break big, and suddenly, I could have any book I knew about delivered directly to me in just a few days. All at once, I didn't have to visit a big city to get a big-city selection of books.

Borders dealt with the Internet *poorly*. They made their worst decision ever while I was living in Aiken and working in Augusta. At that time, when the local Borders opened, it didn't seem that special. Columbia had Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million by then, and Borders while still my preferred store, was no longer on a different quantum level from everything else I had access to. At the time, all brick-and-mortar stores were trying to figure out how to use the Internet, and Borders' idea (after initially trying an ill-thought-out web site of their own) was to get Amazon.Com to handle their online business. I remember being flabbergasted when I read this bit of news. The proper analogy is hard to come up with, but it's something like Target telling K-Mart: Sure we'll help you out. We'll put a little door on the side of our store over here with your logo on it, and if someone comes into our store by that door, we'll put your name on the register receipt, but our sales staff and stockers will take care of everything.

Needless to say, everybody coming to the Borders online store, and using the Amazon interface, search system, credit card support etc became acclimated to the Amazon environment and just started using the regular Amazon store..

To add to having a stupid Internet strategy, Borders was unable to come up with an e-reader strategy. Amazon, of course, has the Kindle, while B&N (and B-A-M) have the Nook. Borders had.. nothing. I believe that in the end they did latch onto a second-tier (but OK) e-reader, but by then it was way too late. To make matters worse, a large non-book portion of their stores had been devoted to CD's and DVDs, and the complete collapse of the CD market left them with way too much floor-space for the money the stores were bringing in.

It was clear for several years that the chain was on a downward spiral, and that even if they got access to new financing, they had no viable plan to actually use the money to make the stores profitable again. Last year, I believe, they stopped paying their book suppliers. They could sort of do that, as they were still an important market, and the vendors knew that if they pressed the issue too hard and pushed the chain over the brink, their distribution would be drastically cut. In the end though, there was no alternative. Following some last-minute drama about an offer that didn't quite come through, Borders went Chapter 11 on 16 February 2011, with the last gasp in July 2011. They had already been closing stores left and right, but now started closing them all, and plan to have them all shut by the end of this month (September 2011). The web site is still up as of this writing, and claims this is the final week with savings of up to 90% on whatever is left.

The two stores pictured are both in Florida. The first is on Tampa's Dale Mabry Highway, and is a nice location with picturesque moss draped oaks. The second is in Gainesville, just off of I-75 (and not too far from UF), in a larger strip. I'm not sure when these stores closed, but suspect it had already been several months by August. You can see that the second is taking refuge in that cure-all for closed big-box retailers: The Halloween Store.

In the meantime, the fate book retailing is still very much undecided. Both Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million have reduced their hours in Columbia, and I'm not sure that in the end anyone with a physical store can compete with Amazon.

UPDATE 1 December 2012: The Tampa borders above is to become a medical clinic as the pictures below that I took in August 2012 show, and as the linked article provided by commenter Andrew tells:

Well, I'm pretty sure that this follow-up operation to Zorba's and The Captain's Kitchen is gone. Or at least I've driven by it several times on weekend evenings now with no signs of activity despite someone having left the roadside OPEN sign turned on.

I never quite knew what to make of the place. It was obviously a nightclub with a latin audience, but it seemed to be open erratically, and for some reason despite it having been a fully kitchened restaurant in all its previous incarnations, Patrons set up a cooking operation on the deck. I don't speak Spanish, but "Show De Bikini" seems clear enough, and the rest of the sign would seem to indicate that the place made it to its one year anniversary at least.

A realty "for-sale" sign remains on the property, and has been there a good long time. I don't know if the owners finally decided to get serious about selling and kicked out the tennants or if Patrons just went under financially.

UPDATE 9 February 2012 -- Well, it appears that the next operation to give this building a go will be Continental:

UPDATE 7 August 2019: Adding tags and map icon.

My memory is that in the original layout of Dutch Square, there were two stores in the actual mall building which had no access to the mall interior: Jackson Camera and Baskin-Robbins.

Why this was, I don't know. A camera store, even a smaller one (but more than a film drop-off) could easily draw foot traffic inside the mall as well as any number of other specialized stores that had inside access, and there were other fast-food operations inside, such as Orange Julias, Chick-Fil-A and lunch counters at Edkerd's and Woolworth's.

At any rate, Baskin-Robbins soldiered on with its odd location for a good number of years until around 1996. I noticed some activity in the store recently (first picture), and it turns out that it is to be reopened (or perhaps already is) as a barber shop.

UPDATE 9 September 2011: Commenter Weston points out I was wrong about the 96-ish closing date, I've changed it to something less specific (Late 90s/Early 2000s) for now.

UPDATE 18 January 2023: Update tags, add map icon.

Cabo Fresh Taco, on Sumter Street near the hospital and in between Quiznos Sub and The Palmetto Sandwich Shop is gone. I never was really aware that it was there, or I might have stopped by though I very rarely eat downtown.

The replacement operation is already in place, Anthony's Past Time Cafe which I presume is connected with Anthony's Dairy Bar on Two Notch.

(Hat tip to commenter Payne)

UPDATE 2 June 2020: Anthony's closed and rebranded as Massey's some time ago, then Massey's also closed. Rather than put the Anthony's closing on the Massey's closing page, or making a separate page, I will put it here because the pictures here already show it. So I am adding Anthony's to the post title.

The first two pictures above come from a post noting changes in the surrounding plaza that I made last November.

At the time the whole plaza was for sale apparently as a bank forclosure. Since then, the place has been bought by East Point Academy charter school: "The first South Carolina Chinese Immersion Elementary School". (I'm not sure how that kid on their home page really feels about that Panda -- I'm reminded of a South Park episode..). Anyway, as a result, Sandy's and whoever else was still in the plaza had to get out.

Sandy's Facebook page calls this location Cherry Park, which I had never heard before, and notes that "we will open a new location soon", which I take to mean in the same general area.

(Hat tip to commenter tonkatoy)

UPDATE 5 April 2012 -- The Chinese immersion charter school which took over the whole plaza is now up and running:

UPDATE 22 January 2020: Update tags, add map icon.

I don't really know anything about Cayce School. I'm guessing that given the name, it was the school in Cayce at one time. The (Guignard?) brick architecture could easily go back to the 1940s I suppose. The pictures don't really make it clear, but as this aerial view from google maps shows, the school is really just one building with several different wings:

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Of course it's a building that takes up a block of its own, being bounded by 3rd Avenue, Lexington Avenue (on which it fronts), Poplar Street and 8th Street.

At some point it appears that it stopped being a "school" as such and was taken over by Lexington District Two as a "Learning Center". (I have to say that the picture with the sign indicating such would make a good funny email to forward around Mississippi education circles..).

The building has obviously been out of use for a good while, and I think only the fact that it is in the middle of a residential area has kept it from being vandalized and tagged to a fare-thee-well. Certainly it is decrepit, which can be seen in the google view (which can be zoomed) as well as my pictures. Signs around the school indicate that the lot is to become luxury townhomes in a gated community, so I suppose the building will be demolished at some point, though with the current real-estate market, I doubt the developers will be in a big hurry.

(Hat tip to commenter tonkatoy)

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