Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

Here's another closed Food Lion to go with the ones on Two Notch Road, Taylor Street and Airport Boulevard. This Loopnet picture shows the store in happier times.

The story on the WLTX site, calls the store underperforming and gives 19 Feb as an upper bound on the closing date.

I had never been in this Food Lion, but I suspect it was an older store, which would have been up against a newer Bi Lo in the same general area. The newer Food Lion stores are actually quite nice -- I stopped at the one off the Ballentine I-26 exit the other day when I was looking for The Whale's Tail and it was very upscale.

Even after the Seven Oaks Shopping Center closing, there is still a Food Lion on Saint Andrews Road. It's on past the former Clusters of Whitehall towards I-26, in front of the discount cinema.

(Hat tip to commenter Jamie)

UPDATE 12 September 2011 -- Now open as a Big Lots!:

Here's another vacancy at The Shoppes of O'Neil Court. According to Loopnet there are currently six open spots there. This one has been vacant going on half a year now, and the Pro Golf of Columbia slot has been vacant at least a year and a half..

According to the Roundabouts web site, they were established in 2003 as Capital City Consignments and this site was their second storefront, the original one being another slot in the same plaza. This January they moved into the old Stein Mart location at 70 Polo Road. To me it seems like sort of a wash from a visibility point of view. O'Neil Court is off the beaten path, but while the Polo / Two Notch location gets a lot more drive-bys, it's up on a hill that makes it invisible from the road, and there's really nothing else in that plaza to pull traffic in...

UPDATE 7 September 2012 -- There is now (and has been for a while) another consignment store Divine Consign in the old Roundabouts location:

We never ate at The Whale's Tail growing up. I wasn't a big seafood fan (which is to say I refused to eat the stuff), and my parents didn't push the issue too often (in fact we used to go to Oliver's Lodge before 5pm because I could get spaghetti before 5 but not after. (Which really sounds odd to me at this remove, but I'm pretty sure thats right..).

Anyway, while I never went there, I used to see the billboards from time to time, and I decided to go looking for it today. The old phonebooks (the above ad is from the 1977 one) never give a real street address for it (it was pretty far out in the boonies back in the day) but I took exit 97 both ways and didn't see anything that looked probable. There's certainly a lot of new construction in the area, and I suspect the building must have been torn down long ago. Can anyone confirm or refute that? The only possible place I saw was Little Pigs barbecue which looked to be the right vintage, but I always imagined The Whale's Tail as a bigger building.

UPDATE 27 May 2010: Added shots of Little Pigs which turns out to be the old Whale's Tail building.

UPDATE 15 February 2012: The Italian restaurant was Rubino's Italian Restaurant and I have added it to the post title along with the full Broad River Road street address.

I continue to have a bit of a fascination with Intersection Center. The whole property has been up for sale several years now, but (rather unsurprisingly) it has yet to sell. Fairly recently, the owner (I assume) went as far as to blank out the "Intersection Center" sign on the Broad River Road entrance to the complex, though it is still up on the Dutch Square side.

Despite the rapidly increasing decrepitude of all the buildings in the area, a few stores (or storefronts anyway, I think one may be some sort of church) do hold on. All Breed Dog Grooming Shop is not one of those. I do know it was open as recently as 1998, so I've simply listed the closing date as 2000s.

We used to get our dogs sheared evey summer, but we never had one groomed. It sounds like kind of a poodle thing to me (not that there's anything wrong with that..)

UPDATE 22 January 2020: Add map icon, update tags.

I just thought this one was a little odd. The ad is from the 1985 Bellsouth phonebook. Sometime between then and now, the name of this backgate restaurant at Fort Jackson Boulevard & I-77 was changed from Saki to Saky. If you look at the photo, you can see how the 'I' was replaced by a 'Y' in the mural (which is very similar, though not identical to the Yellow Pages art).

The only reason for something like this that I can think of is that the ownership changed at some point, and the new owner didn't have permission to keep using the same name, but was able to keep something very similar..

Well, it is a bit sad to see their street sign proclaiming their first anniversary and then to have them closed 16 days later, but that's how it happens sometimes. (Though they apparently still have an operation in Florence).

I wrote about this building first in a closing for Cancun / Little Mexico, so the building has been at least three different Mexican restaurants. Loopnet says the place was built in 1980 and is a "Spanish Style" restaurant, so it probably has been Mexican restaurants since it was built. Notice also the fundamental tension in the Loopnet write-up (apparently left over from 2007 or so) between keeping something secret and posting it on the Internet..

I did not yet notice any "for sale" signs on the building last week, but I suppose it will be another Mexican restaurant someday.

(Hat tip to commenter IrmoJeff)

UPDATE 29 Sep 2010: The restaurant is being converted into a Wata Wing -- or maybe not.

Commenter Matt found this PDF of a legal action in Maryland against Wata Wing which seems to basically indicate that while there may be legit WW restaurants, the franchaising operation is pretty much a scam. The work being done on the Mi Teirra building matches the description in the PDF pretty much to a tee, right down to the work on the floors and the note on the door indicating that it was started without getting the proper permits. To me, the oddest thing in the PDF is that apparently none of the people in Maryland investing in WW franchaises ever asked to visit an operating WW, or at least that's the implication I'm getting. The Taco Bell on Knox Abbott seems to be in a similar state of Wata Wing stall-out.

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Although I've never eaten at a local Quiznos, I believe I did eat at a DC area location once, and recall it as pretty good. Of course that may be partly because one of the other guys I was eating with was a nice guy but had an interesting personality quirk such that he was never completely satisfied with anything, so at least I liked it better than he did! I find it a little bit interesting that the name they use in their signs has no apostrophe and has the singular, "Sub", not "Subs". You almost have the image that if you were the second guy to get there, the sub would be gone.

This Quiznos, the latest of a number of the chain's outlets to close around town, was at the intersection of Airport Boulevard with the Charleston Highway, across the street from Piggy Park and at the edge of Airport Square with the closed Food Lion. The building looks to have been some other type of fast food outlet before the Quiznos.

I think the door note in this case is pretty straight-forward and classy.

The main Airport Square building is like two sides of a square, with one side parallel to the Charleston Highway and the other parallel to Airport Boulevard. While I was taking these pictures, I noticed a family picking some sort of fruit from trees growing at the end of the building that comes closest to Airport Boulevard. I can't think what is in season now, and I didn't want to bother them by heading towards them and maybe make them think I was some sort of Airport Square guy coming to say "stop that" -- I'll have to go back and see what that was.

(Hat tip to commenter Tom)

UPDATE 4 Feb 2011 -- It's now open again as Best of China restaurant:

(Hat tip to commenter Andrew)

Here's an interesting little coda to Friday's posting about the Boozer Book Dispensary. That story noted The State article about both the Boozer and Two Notch stores being folded into one new location.

Well, I went by the old Tillman's Plaza location on Two Noch Sunday evening, and there's an interesting sign on the door. It seems someone connected to that branch feels that the area is still viable for a used book store, and will be re-opening the vacated Book Dispensary space with the same concept and a new name.

I wish them good luck!

UPDATE 28 June 2011 -- The follow-on operation Books Revisited has been open for a good while now:

"What Good Is Sitting Alone In Your Room?"

Actually until the last year or so, I didn't even know there was a drag cabaret in Columbia. I think I had kind of a vague idea that a nightclub was in Punch Line location, but I figured in Five Points it was probably a college hangout.

The building is PT's was in never seemed to really thrive. It's at the way outside edge of Five Points, and aside from The Punch LIne, I can't recall ever stopping there. The address for PT's is Harden Street, but the building also fronts on an odd little section of Senate Street which is totally unconnected with the rest of Senate Street. (Come to think of it, the State House also cuts off Senate Street, so it actually has three discontiguous segments.)

The Free Times says the next tenant in the PT's space will be a burgers and milkshake operation, soooo..

"Right This Way, Your Table's Waiting.."

UPDATE 25 July 2010: OK, the PT's building at 1101 Harden Street has now been demolished. See the link for details.