Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

(Ad from February 2008 Bellsouth directory)

This section of Devine Street, between Beltline and Fort Jackson Boulevard, has always had a different feel from the rest of the street. This little strip is the one-time home of Le Petit Chateau and Martin's Coffee House. Note that Brassworks took more than one street address as the door pictured is clearly labeled as 4439 Devine Street.

The Brassworks building, with its striking second story of windowed space suspended on columns over the sidewalk and coming much closer to the street than the rest of the surrounding single story buildings has always caught my eye. I'm not entirely sure what one brings to a brass-smith, but I'm sure I don't have it, and so unfortunately never took the opportunity to stop by.

Time is running out!

...But if you order now, you can still get your calendars delivered for Christmas!

Columbia Closings Large Format 2012 Wall Calendar

Columbia Closings Regular Format 2012 Wall Calendar

Pawleys Island Large Format 2012 Wall Calendar

Pawleys Island Regular Format 2012 Wall Calendar

The Columbia Closings Store

And there's definitely still time to order my book and have it arrive in time for you to read it and re-gift it by Christmas!

This former car lot and storage building outlet is on Garners Ferry Road in Hopkins adjacent to the old Sister Rose/Wateree Arms building. I'm not sure when the car lot closed, but Best Built Barns is in the February 2010 -- February 2011 phonebook, but not the next one, so I'm saying it probably closed in 2010. Certainly it was looking a bit overgrown in mid July 2011 when I took these pictures.

I wasn't sure when I took these pix that Locals on Harden Street next to Sharky's was actually closed, but driving by this evening (15 December) confirmed that the place is dark, and that the windows are now covered over.

I am way older than the college bar demo, and really never hit them when I was in it anyway, so I never went to Locals. It does look like the rooftop area would be a nice place to hang out and people watch over Five Points..

The web site is still up, though the latest photos seem to be from September 2010.

College Bar Scene says

Deserves a bigger crowd than it gets.

which may be some indication of what happened.

(Hat tip to commenter Jordan)

UPDATE 3 March 2012 -- Now open again as Pinch. Some of the flatbread pizzas on the menu look pretty good:

Commenter Alaska Jill sends in these pictures of Gibbes, saying:

Gibbes Machinery: The sunlit pictures were taken, I believe, in 1998. I used to park at the Gibbes lot as a USC student and knew those buildings were probably not going to be around much longer. Demolition started not long after those photos were taken. One morning in early 1999, we had snow in Columbia. I was a graduate assistant at the journalism school at the time, and had brought my camera with me to get some pictures of Columbia in the snow. From the steps of the Coliseum, I caught a couple pictures of the demolition in progress. An additional picture is taken from the former Gibbes lot.

The old Gibbes space is directly across Blossom Street from the Coliseum -- I'll have to consult some old directories to get the actual address. Right now it's the location of USC's new-ish "wellness center", which frankly sounds like a boondoggle with no educational function to me, but back in the day, Gibbes was there as a representative of the old "manufacturing" look of the Vista area. I never had a clear idea of what the machinery side of the business did, but the car lot was the only Volkswagen dealer in the Columbia area.

After USC got this property, the dealership moved to Broad River Road, just west of the river and either went under or sold out to the current tenant, Wray Mazda Volkswagen.

Take a good look at the second picture above. In the background, you can see The Towers and also the mini-mall building (muraled "Gamecock Clothing") which once held Robo's video arcade, Pappy's and a number of other small, student-oriented businesses. It has since been torn down to put in the Adesso condos.

UPDATE 17 December 2011: The building I tag as the "mini-mall" was actually Addams University Bookstore a separate building in the same general area. See the comments.

(Hat tip to Alaska Jill)

Well, the relocation of this title-loan company from Arcadia Lakes Shopping Center answers the question of what will next go into the old Carolina First Bank building at Columbia Mall.

I'm not sure it's a more accessible location, but the building is certainly classier.

UPDATE 20 December 2011: Originally stated the name of the strip mall as Arcadia Lakes Plaza which was wrong. I have corrected it to Arcadia Lakes Shopping Center.

The middle route from Columbia to the Grand Strand takes you through Manning on SC-261. US-521 joins 261 there, and they run together until just east of Manning where 261 forks North to Kingstree and 521 continues on to Greeleyville.

Historically rest stops between Manning and Greeleyville have been pretty sparse, so perhaps that's why I especially noticed this rather lavish little gas plaza when it was constructed just a few years ago a little East of the 261/521 fork. That, and the fact that any sign with the word "pizza" on it tends to concentrate my attention.

While the right confluence of events hadn't ever happened, I figured it was a pretty sure thing that sooner or later I would be stopping at Tanners. Well, that was true, but not for the reasons I'd anticipated -- I noticed earlier this year that the place, which had started on such a large scale (this wasn't your typical no-name, one-guy, rural convenience store) so recently was well and truly gone.

I don't know if it turned out that US-521 wasn't as major a road as they had figured, but even with gas, pizza, bait and an attached liquor store as draws apparently the traffic wasn't there. LoopNet on the other hand, says they cleared $78,000 and 100,000 gallons monthly, so who knows?

At any rate, the road between Manning and Greeleyville is pretty empty again.

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This has already been discussed a good bit on Have Your Say, but:

Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce.. Looks like another Columbia Burger King has closed shop. This one was on Devine Street, just before it intersects in a triangle with Fort Jackson Boulevard and Cross Hill Road. It's certainly a less tony section than the bulk of Devine, and a number of businesses have come and gone in the general area over the years. It is, however, also just across from where the upscale Whole Foods will be going into the former Family Mart / Kroger, so it will be interesting to see what eventually ends up here. Or, it could just be those poor registers saying "Cannot Locate Fileserver" for years..

(Hat tip to commenter Frank)

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Plenty of calendars still available for delivery by Christmas!

Columbia Closings Large Format 2012 Wall Calendar

Columbia Closings Regular Format 2012 Wall Calendar

Pawleys Island Large Format 2012 Wall Calendar

Pawleys Island Regular Format 2012 Wall Calendar

The Columbia Closings Store

Don't need to know what day it is? Just sit by the fire and read my book!

I suspect that all three of these businesses were the same operation as the name still posted on the building Ca$h-N-Da$sh and went defunct at the same time.

Curiously, this nice old brick house is directly adjacent to another vanished quick cash operation: Title Doc at 2819 Broad River. It's interesting that both operations would see this as a good place to set up shop, and both of them be wrong (although, of course, conditions were a lot different before 2008).

UPDATE 13 March 2023 -- Well this place has been razed:

Also adding map icon and updating tags.