Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

Folks,

After an epic 6 hour battle with WordPress, Silverlight and PHP, I have figured out how to enable comments on pages. This means you can now add comments to Signs Your Favorite Restaurant Is About To Close, and Ted's Rules For Restaurants.

It also means that I can finally add a Have Your Say page for general site comments, closings I've missed and random chatter. You can get to the "Have Your Say" page from the link I just gave, or (more likely) from the Navigation Bar which always appears at the top of the site.

Well, I suppose it had to happen, but it is rather jarring to see The Pelican Inn up for sale. Built about 1830, this landmark inn has been part of the Pawleys Island landscape forever, and has been an inn or boarding house since the turn of the 20th century and has been the locus of several sightings of South Carolina's most famous ghost, The Gray Man. It is also possibly the last inn in South Carolina not to be air conditioned!

The web site is mostly zombie now, but an archived version explains some of the place's appeal:

Our goal has been to maintain the historical feel and share
the Inn with our friends. The Guest Rooms are comfortably furnished and have a Queen and, depending on the room, one or two Twin Beds. The Rooms are cooled by ceiling fans over the beds and breezes through large windows. Guests will also notice the absence of telephones, TVs, radios and other modern distractions.

They were in the news just this year for taking on a new chef, so this closing is rather surprising. I hope that when the place sells, the new owners will continue to run it as an inn, but I don't really expect that to happen.

UPDATE 14 Aug 2009: Well, note the rental plaque in this picture:

The property is now a Pawleys Island Realty Property

This beautiful Historic Inn is located in the heart of Pawleys..Rented as an entire house it's a 10 bedroom that accomodates 24 with 6 baths. Beautiful wooded property that has with stood the test of time. Oceanfront but not ocean view with the largest creek dock on the island for crabbing, fishing, kayaking. Large restaurant style kitchen with attached dining area, Cable TV, washer and 2 dryer, Ceiling fans, Central Heat/Air.Grill. Oceanfront Gazebo with hammock. Come create lasting memories, great for family reunions and weddings.

UPDATE 25 March 2010: Good news! Check the comments. It appears that the inn will be back in business.

UPDATE 23 April 2010: And here is the Pelican Inn's new blog.

UPDATE 21 August 2010: here is the Pelican Inn's new official web site.

This location, now a Gamecock memorabilia store, and apparently starting life as a college hang-out called The Twilight Lounge at one time housed one of the most controversial businesses in Columbia: Chippendolls, a nude dance club.

I'm not sure exactly when the place started. There is a very long and extremely dry 1995 legal opinion on Chippendolls's application for an ABC permit which suggests that the establishment became a strip club around 1988. I was living out of town for most of the period of the Chippendolls controversy, but my memory is that the club had the standard grumbles from the neighbors while it was a topless club, but was operating mostly below the radar of the city establishment as a whole.

That changed when the club decided to go from topless dancing to fully nude dancing. Apparently those few square inches of cloth made a big difference and trying to close the club became quite a local cause celebre for a while -- I believe there were a number of zoning efforts made to shut it down. Either one of them finally succeeded, or the club ran into trouble of its own making, as these places often do. For whatever reason, it has been gone for many years now. In fact, I was a bit surprised to see the 1995 date on the ABC action. If you had asked me, I would have said it hadn't lasted that long. The city continues to have a number of strip clubs, but I don't believe any dare to go bare now.

UPDATE 25 Aug 2009: Added The Twilight Lounge to the post title.

UPDATE 12 May 2010: Added the 1998 Bellsouth Yellow Pages ad for Chippendolls

UPDATE 10 June 2011: Changed the closing date in the post title to "12 September 1997" based on commenter Michelle's info. (Which made me relook at the phonebook mentioned above -- It's actually the Feb-97 through Feb-98 (ie mostly 1997) phonebook.

Back, I believe, in 1970, Sesquicentennial State Park inaugurated, with great fanfare, a concrete ampitheater. My memory says that it was inspired by The Tricentennial. At this remove, I can't recall why anyone thought this boondoggle made sense, but at the time it was a fairly big deal, and I understod everybody in the arts community to expect great things from it. (Inasmuch as a 9 year old understood what the "arts community" expected!)

The first production I saw there was The Liberty Tree. I believe this was part of the Tricentennial celebration, and was a play set in Revolutionary Times, full of patriotic themes. I remember it had a very catchy theme song where the refrain was "Dee dah dah -- dah dah, The Liberty Tree, The Liberty Tree, something something..", but I don't think the play itself was a musical. At any rate, it was great fun for us kids, and one of the few live plays we saw growing up (the others [aside from below] were The Roar of Greasepaint, The Smell of the Crowd, and an imfamous USC production of Huckleberry Finn which my mother ended up paying my sister to leave). It was fun to drive out to Sesqui, which we never had done at night, and to run around the asiles.

The next production we saw there was a production of Gypsy: A Musical Fable with local radio personality Gene McKay cast as the act's manager (Herbie?). In retrospect, I'm a bit surprised that our parents took us to a show (partly) about strippers, but of course there was no actual stripping involved, and they probably figured that most of that would go over our heads, as indeed it did, and besides, I had figured out how to make a flashlight by taping two D batteries to a 12-inch ruler, wrapping a wire around a flashlight bulb and then touching the wire to one end of the batteries and the bulb to the other. Naturally I insisted on bringing this to the show and spent most of my time fooling with it (I hope my parents made me go back into the building portion of the amphitheater!).

After that the ampitheater fell into disuse. I can speculate as to why, and I would advance several guesses. First and foremost would be the fact that it is located in South Carolina. I don't mean anything cultural by that, rather that the climate is not really ideal. In the summer, the days are blazing hot, and nobody wants to sit in a concrete oven. The nights are better, but the location in a wooded state park guarantees plenty of bugs. Spring and Fall are better, of course, but you still face the prospect of rain-outs and daytime shows are still uncomfortable. Second, Columbia was (and still is though to a lesser extent) a medium sized city which already had two permanent drama companies (Town Theater & Workshop Theater) as well as various productions by USC. It's not clear to me that there was ever a drama community to support productions out in the boonies (as Sesqui certainly was at the time). Also, I expect that the location of the ampitheater inside a State Park probably would raise problems regarding anything of an avant-garde nature, or involving the sales of alcohol.

The final production I saw there was probably around 1976 or 1977 by which time, the ampitheater was definitely out of regular service. I don't recall the name of the show, but it was a British farce of some sort, put on by a travelling British troupe and essentially our whole high school was bussed over to Sesqui to see it. I think they got the by now defunct venue for free or a nominal fee since it was "educational". (If you make students go, then it's "Educational" by definition, right?) The only details of the show that I can recall, were that you had to listen very hard to hear the speakers, and to interpret their accents, and that a lot of the action seemed to revolve around making "bubble & squeak", apparently some sort of English "delicacy". This would have been in the spring, around May, and in the early afternoon. The place was blazingly hot. I had recently read a book on science projects which included a chapter on building a solar oven, and I remember thinking that the wall of white concrete seats surrounding the stage floor (where we were all clustered) looked a lot like the tinfoil "solar wings" which reflected and focused the sun onto the oven in the book. It certainly felt like that anyway!

Sesqui is not one of my regular hangouts, but I've been there dozens of times since the 1970s, and idly wondered whatever happened to the amphitheater. On my most recent visit there, I decided to look for it. I remembered that it was off to the left as you drove in from Two Notch, but not how far down it was. In the event, I got all the way to the lake parking lot without finding it, and it didn't seem to appear on any of the park signage. I drove back out towards Two Notch and saw a disused dirt road to the right, parked and hiked in a bit before deciding that there was no way the access could have deteriorated that badly since the 70s and it was too far off the road anyway, so I drove back down to the lake one more time.

Hmm. That building behind the (still!) never finished colonial era house looked oddly curved -- Could it be? There were still no signs, but I parked and walked on up. There was a little building in front that could plausibly have been a box-office, and the big building was oddly curved. I walked around to both ends of the building, but there was fencing keeping me from getting behind it, or even seeing what was behind it. OK, there was a little access road to the side signed Training Cener, so I walked down that. The whole place was fenced in, and the path didn't go all the way behind it, but siddenly I could see -- the bank of concrete seats! This was the ampitheater! I took some pictures and figured that was probably that, but then decided to walk back up to the building again, and see if I could see anything through the doors.

I couldn't; the glass was too dark, but then on a whim, I turned the handle, and the door was unlocked. Now, normally when I take pictures of abandoned buildings here, I don't make any attempt to go inside. There may be alarms and it's certainly trespassing. Given the total lack of signs here, I'm pretty sure the ampitheater building is not considered an "open to the public" part of the park, but since it's a State Park, I figured I was part owner, and I went in.

As it turned out, there was nobody inside. It appears to me that the theater is now a training "retreat" for State Park employees with sleeping quarters and a nice kitchen in the old concession stand. The back door leading down into the ampitheater was locked, so I was not able to go down into the seats, but I was able to get some reasonably good pictures through the back windows. The place looks kind of sad, as you would expect after 30 or so years of disuse.

On my way out, I took some more pictures of the "box office" and wandered over to the log cabin. I have some kind of vague recollection that it was originally meant to show colonial building techniques as part of some historical village exhibit, but that never came to fruition, and the place remains unfinished despite having been there over 20 years now.

Oh well, it wasn't economical, or practical, but it was entertaining!

Let me entertain you
Let me make you smile
Let me do a few tricks
Some old and some new tricks
I'm very versatile

UPDATE 21 June 2011: Added (at top) a picture of The Liberty Tree being performed in the ampitheater from an old Chamber of Commerce promotional book.

UPDATE 13 March 2013 -- Commenter Bo sends in this photo:

along with this information about the log cabin:

Hey Ted here is a photo of the "old Log House" at Sesqui Park. Before the lapboard siding was removed. It was a rental house near the corner of Lancaster & River Drive. Now an empty lot next to Head of Style Salon. The "tenants" were customers on my paper route That building was originally "Watson's Tile and flooring. Owned by The Honorable Albert Watson US House of Representatives.

and this youtube video:

L A Weight Loss was in the Forest Park shopping center, which is on Forest Drive, next to Cardinal Newman high school. This place was on the end in between the Piggly Wiggly and CVS. I kept meaning to go back in the daytime and get some better pictures, but you know how that works sometimes.

A bit of googling establishes that the chain is franchaise based and has a line of protein bars and other foods. As with anything, I can find people on the web saying it's great and people saying it's a scam. At any rate, their weight on Forest Drive is down to 0.

UPDATE 4 March 2010: Added full street address to post title.

This lot, across from Trenholm Plaza and originally behind Bell's Drive-In and the Gulf station was once a plant nursery. I think I went there with my mother a few times, but I believe she favored another place, perhaps out on Two Notch. I can't really recall much about the place, even the name. And though it's hard to believe with all the building activity in this part of Forest Acres now, I do remember that after the Nursery closed, the lot sat vacant and overgrown (with some of the nursery infrastructure still there) for many years. Fairly recently, within the last ten years, I would say, it has become a dental plaza.

This triangular lot across from the old Kroger Sav-On was once the site of the coldest IHOP in Columbia.

There are, to my knowledge, now three IHOPs in Columbia: One on Two Notch Road in the Home Depot parking lot, one downtown on the corner of Assembly & Senate Streets and one on Saint Andrews Road near I-26. I believe the St. Andrews and Two Notch stores are affiliated while the downtown store is under seperate management. I don't know if the Divine Street store was connected with any of the others, but if it had been, I'd guess downtown because it was a similar, old-style, IHOP building, while both of the other two are more "modern" and characterless. I can't recall if it were a 24-hour store as the downtown one is though.

Anyway, pancakes are comfort food, and every now and then I get in the mood for them as do and did the rest of my family, especially my father. I believe it was he who proposed a trip to IHOP one weekend for lunch, and we ended up at the Divine Street location. Now, when I say this place was cold inside, I'm not talking a little chilly. After a few minutes we had to fetch sweaters in from the car (it was not a cold day), and even that did not help. We asked to be moved to another table, not under a vent, and that didn't help either. My sister and I were uncomfortable, but my father who had always been cold natured and more so as he got on in years could barely handle his utensils. We made it through lunch somehow, and put the restaurant on the "boycott" list. I believe my sister later told me that she had been back with friends and it was just as cold then too. It was just very odd, and I can't believe we were the only diners who decided not to go back. You expect a place serving comfort food to be, well, cozy.

Sometime after that, Walgreens brought the property, tore down the IHOP building and put up a 24 Hour drugstore -- I've been several times, and it's quite comfortable!

Lorick Road is off of Folk Road, which is off of Wilson Boulevard, which is what North Main Street becomes as it nears I-20. As I was riding out that way early last month with my sister & niece on our way to a "Country Farm Adventure", I noticed Ray Lever's Bar-B-Q (or possibly just Lever's BBQ, depending on if you believe the roof or the front door placard) sitting abandoned off of the road.

It struck me as a very "barbecue" location -- off in the middle of nowhere (sorry Blythewood!), and at that first drive-by, I wasn't even completely sure it was closed. Barbecue places tend to have odd open days and to be as a rule, rather delapidated. (There's a place in the DC area whose slogan is "The Best Barbecue You'll Ever Eat In A Building That Hasn't Already Been Condemned"). When I drove back out there and got out though, it was apparent that the place was genuinely defunct. The name was vaguely familiar, so I did a bit of googling and found that the place is very fondly remembered by a good number of people though the owner got himself in some serious legal trouble before the final closure of the place. Lever's son reports that the family recipies have been passed on to Southern Pig BBQ also in the Blythewood area.

UPDATE 15 May 2017 -- As mentioned in the comments, this place has now been razed:

(Pictures 30 September 2008 & 1 November 2008)

The Happy Bookseller opened in another world than ours, a world called 1974. In some ways, it was a world very like our own, but in other ways it was very different. You might, were you to find your deLorean transported there, be able to find your way around town with very little trouble -- Although buildings have come and gone since then, the major thoroughfares and landmarks of today's Columbia largely existed. What you would have trouble navigating would be the media landscape. Columbia had three commercial television stations: WIS (channel 10) for NBC, WOLO (channel 25) for ABC and WLTX (channel 19) for CBS. Of the three, only WIS occupied a coveted spot in the VHF range and only WIS had good reception throughout the Columbia metro area. The other two UHF stations (and the fledgling ETV network station WRLK on channel 35) worked best if you put tinfoil on the rabbit ears and stood in just the right spot in the room. Few people had cable, and those who did only got a few extra "trash" stations like WTBS out of Atlanta -- there were no CNN, BRAVO or MTV. Nobody had a computer at home. The ARPANET barely existed and few dreamed it would become The Internet, or what that might mean.

Printed media was a different world as well. Dutch Square had been open a few years, and there was a Waldenbooks there which focused on paperbacks and bestsellers. Capitol Newsstand on Main Street was mainly magazines with a modest number of new paperbacks; there was a small specialty bookstore in Trenholm Plaza and the various locations of The Richland County Public Library and that was about it for Columbia and books.

Richland Mall at the time was still an open-air promenade anchored by J. B. White, Woolworth's, The Redwood Cafeteria and grocery stores. The Happy Bookseller started in Richland Mall on the far side of the promenade (the side away from Beltline Boulevard), and if I recall correctly, just a bit Whites-ward of Woolworths; that is you would come out of Woolworths, cross to the other side and head just a bit towards Whites to get to The Happy Bookseller. Along the way, you would pass some of the concrete animals which gave the mall a homey touch -- I remember a grinning turtle in particular.

When the ill-conceived "upgrade" to Richland Mall started (the process that has left us with the largely empty "Midtown at Forest Acres" [though I refuse to call it that]), The Happy Bookseller found itself priced out of a home and made the move down Forest Drive, towards Trenholm Plaza, to the spot it occupied until yesterday. The new location was quite a bit larger than the original store, and the staff took advantage of it by increasing their stocking depth. I recall that when I was in grad school, I even found a copy of Doug Comer's XINU book on operating system construction -- a pretty obscure computer science topic for a general interest store.

I don't know where the name of the store came from for sure -- I've always assumed it was playing off the bestselling (and notorious) 1971 book called The Happy Hooker, drawing an amusing contrast between two very different paths to happiness, but I could be completely wrong about that. At that time, it was certainly a name that caught your attention, though that was hardly the only thing the store had going for it. In particular, despite it's initially rather cramped quarters, Rhett Jackson decided to make The Happy Bookseller a real general interest bookstore in a way the others in town largely weren't. You could certainly get paperbacks and bestsellers at The Happy Bookseller, but they tried to have a bit more depth than that. I know that I really had only a limited appreciation of that in the beginning, given that I was 13, but over the years I would notice that the store always had a slightly different mix in science-fiction and humor, the two sections I perused most, and later that they were quicker than the chains to pick up on the fact that (some) graphic novels weren't just well-bound comic books and when I became interested in history, I found much more depth there than anywhere but the main library.

Jackson and the store were interested in bringing literature to Columbia and in promoting Columbia literature as well. An author I know had a number of signings for her books there though she has never been approached by one of the big-box stores like Barnes & Noble, even though she is with a well-regarded national publisher, has been well reviewed and sells a respectable number of books. They simply don't devote resources to local authors unless a directive comes down from corporate.

So, after lasting 34 years and being widely beloved, why did The Happy Bookseller close. Well, look in the mirror -- I know I have. Apart from retirements, tragedies, and the like, stores generally close when they aren't making money, and they don't make money when people don't shop there. I was amused when I was working in Augusta and Macy's pulled out of Augusta Mall. When the plan was announced, some of the locals started a petition saying how much they loved Macy's and how it should stay. My thought was that while someone in Macy's mailroom might appreciate their petition, what would keep the store in town was enough people buying stuff there that they made money. And it's the same, I'm afraid, for The Happy Bookseller.

Remember that different world of 1974? Well, we're not living there anymore, for better and for worse. Just on the local retail level, Columbia has four big-box bookstores that have more floorspace than The Happy Bookseller could ever dream of. They can get volume deals from publishers that a local store can't, and even when they are indifferently run (and not all of them are) they can stock in depth in a way a small store simply can't due to the laws of physics and the inability of more than one object to occupy the same space at the same time. And that's just local retail. I haven't even mentioned The Internet yet.

I recall that once, after my father stopped driving, he was looking for a particular book and wanted me to take him to The Happy Bookseller. I don't recall what it was, probably something about opera or English literature, but as it happened, they did not have a copy. That's understandable, I think it was fairly obscure. Anyway, we were in the stacks looking where it would be, and I suggested we drive over to Books-a-Million and see if they had it. He said he would rather have The Happy Bookseller order it. I argued that might take a while, and it's possible we could find it that same day. He looked at me, and said with one of his old fashioned turns of phrase Yes, but I would rather give this store my trade.

In the end, that's what not enough of us did -- give this store our trade. I include myself. I enjoyed browsing the store, and if I saw something I liked, I would buy it. But.. If I discovered I needed a technical book, or found an interesting sounding book mentioned in an online forum I was much more likely to point my browser at Amazon.com than drive to The Happy Bookseller even though it was only a few miles away. That's disintermediation, and it's been even worse for music stores. Given my general night-owl nature, I was also much more likely to find myself in a big-box store at 10pm wandering around drinking coffee and buying books I saw there rather than remembering what they were and getting them at The Happy Bookseller. So, as we shopped online, or shopped elsewhere The Happy Bookseller did what it could. They tried a coffee bar, which didn't last too long, and then a lunch counter which did a bit better, but at the end of the day, the numbers just weren't there to continue and so at the end of the day, they couldn't.

So, thanks folks, for helping us out of that 1974 media wasteland. I know that in the end the future didn't turn out as any of us expected, but it was a great ride!

UPDATE 9 October 2020: Adding full street address to the post title. Updating tags and adding map icon.