Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

I'm sure you've all seen the video of this sinkhole that errupted on Trenholm Road in front of Mays Park on 14 October. If you haven't the WLTX clip is embedded above.

The State says it was the result of a 16 inch water main breach. As of Sunday 27 October, when I took these pictures, the road was still closed, though work was obviously ongoing.

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This urgent care beside Richland Mall had been up for sale a number of months, but continued to operate while that was ongoing. At this point it has either sold, or they have given up. At any rate AFC is now closed, and the building is undergoing renovations. The permits are made out in the name of a medical company, Prisma, so it is not clear to me if this is a completely new business coming in, or if AFC is part of Prisma and will be back after the upfit.

UPDATE 22 January 2020 -- Well, the construction is done (apparently), the branding is down, and the real-estate sign is out. The interior still looks like a doctor's office though:

Lexington Dry Cleaning on Two Notch near Sesqui is moving, or consolidating, to Blythewood, leaving a vacancy in Sesqui Center. I find it interesting from their heads-up sign that they do a lot of their business by delivery now. I guess in the age of Amazon Prime, Grubhub and home grocery delivery that makes sense.

(Hat tip to commenter Thomas)

UPDATE 14 December 2021: Updating tags, closing date.

King's Pizza was the follow-on operation in this spot to Charlie's Wings & Seafood. They opened sometime in the spring of 2019, and apparently closed in September. At one time, a number of other locations for King's were mooted, but they may have tried to build out too fast, and I don't believe any, with the possible exception of a co-branding with Planet Pizza came to pass.

UPDATE 4 February 2021 -- I'm not sure what is going in, but some sort of upfit is being done on the building:

UPDATE 23 August 2021 -- Now open as Starbucks:

UPDATE 13 September 2021 -- A more attractive of the new Starbucks:

As you can see in the first picture above, barely, and only if you click-through, the closing of PIggly Wiggly and the opening of Roses in that space left Edens Plaza with two discount stores literally right next to each other. In the event, it looks like Dolar General has decided the situation wasn't tenable and closed shop. Of course, this also aligns with their current strategy of moving away from strip-mall stores to stand-alone locations, so I wouldn't be surprised if that were a factor as well.

(Hat tip to commenter Andrew)

I was not familiar with this photo services business in the little strip beside Richland Mall, but apparently it closed sometime in August. There is already a new operation setting up: Bad Daddy's Burger Bar which appears to be an up-and-coming chain of, well, burger bars. They apparently have locations in Greenville and the Low Country, but this will be the first location in the Midlands. I have to say the space seems rather small for a restaurant, and there's not a lot of parking either.

(Hat tip to commenter Mr. BO)

I'm afraid I didn't get all the pictures I wanted at this year's State Fair. I usually get a bunch of neon shots at night back in the midway area, and a night video shot from the skyway. This year, it started to rain just as it was getting dark, and that put an end to the outdoor part of my visit.

I didn't notice any particular changes this year, other than that the dinosaur exhibit in the old Steel Building site was not back this year, and that the Rocket was done up in candy stripes for its 50th anniversary. This year was also the 150th anniversary of the fair as a whole, an occasion noted in the annual sand sculpture.

Anyway, it was fun, as usual, and I had my "fair food". Hopefully next year, I will get my normal assortment of pictures and video.

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Although I've never been to the area, there is still a Twin Lakes Park associated with Fort Jackson (the Google link to the left brings up some maps, this is a more official link), as well as the titular pair of lakes (though a google review notes one of them has been drained, presumably since the Great Flood of 2015). These write-ups lead me to believe that facilities like the ones on the postcard no longer exist there.

Indeed, growing up in the 1960s, I never heard anything about a Twin Lakes swimming area. Of course as a USC family, we had access to Bell Camp for lake swimming, so we never would have gone there. Still, I would have expected to hear about other people going if it were still around. One key may be the notation on the post card that the site is near Camp Jackson. As far as I can tell, Camp Jackson was renamed Fort Jackson during the build up to World War II. (This site gives 1940 as the date for the name change). That being the case, the resort could have been long closed by the 1960s.

Does anyone have any more information about this place?

Well, the story here is the same as for the the Lexington Kmart: It's a Kmart. It's closing.

Unfortunately I didn't have time to go inside, and I was shooting against the sun for the exterior shots, but it looks pretty much as you would expect.

There have been a good number of closures in this general area in the past few years. All of Ryans, Rite Aid, Taco Cid, and Toyota Center come to mind. On the other hand, there is a new plaza around the Walmart at the top of Knox Abbott, so there is some new growth.

(I continue to be confused by the boundries between West Columbia & Cayce. I would have guessed this location to be Cayce, but it seems not.)

(Hat tip to lots of folks)

UPDATE 22 April 2020 -- Commenter Mr. Bill sent in these interiors from the Kmart a while ago, and I managed to misplace them. Here they are now:

You have to wonder how bad things are when The State story on the closing of this motel doesn't even list prostitution as one of the problems:

There have been 169 calls to law enforcement about incidents at the hotel in the past 90 days, city officials said. In 97 of those calls, charges were filed for crimes that included drug trafficking (meth), strong armed robbery and attempted murder, according to the release.

On Sept. 12, Cayce officers filed a report about an alleged rape of a juvenile that occurred at the hotel.

I have actually stayed in a Knight's Inn once. It was somewhere in Florida, and in my opinion was a real dump. The table seemed to have been picked up from the side of a road somewhere and everything was sticky. However, I never felt unsafe, or worried about my car. It was just a very basic, low-end experience.

There is a hearing on 24 October to determine if the business license should be permanently revoked. Whatever happens, I see a re-flagging in the future for this location.

UPDATE 11 January 2023: The place appears to be up for sale, and the rooms are being cleared out (possibly in advance of a demolition?)

UPDATE 17 April 2023 -- As mentioned in the comments this place is coming down. The office has already been razed, and I'm sure the rest will follow. I would have liked to have gotten out and walked around, but although I didn't see any suspicious activity, it just didn't seem like a good idea, so this is what you get: