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Capitol Newsstand, 224 O'Neil Court Suite 21: 2000   7 comments

Posted at 2:29 am in closing

I've written before about Capitol News Stand on Main Street and Capitol News Stand on Saint Andrews Road, but this branch was on the other side of town behind the Two Notch Road K-Mart on O'Neil Court.

My memory is that the building (which now houses a fitness center) was somewhat smaller than the Main Street space. It definitely had fewer paperbacks and foreign magazines. I believe that it was the last branch that Capitol established, and I would say it started sometime in the 80s and I had the feeling that it never really established itself. The location can't have helped -- everything that goes into O'Neil Court fails, and it was somwhat lacking in a raison-d'etre. Downtown had the best selection, so if you really wanted a news-stand type thing, that's where you would look, and Waldenbooks in Columbia Mall was just a few blocks away, so if you wanted a book, that's probably where you would look first. It did have the advantage of convienience over Walden's -- you could park close by and dash in if you just wanted a newspaper where as Walden's had no outside entrance.

I forget exactly when the place closed. It certainly pre-deceased the Main Street location by a good number of years, but I think it outlasted the Hampton Street and Saint Andrews Road Locations.

7 Responses to 'Capitol Newsstand, 224 O'Neil Court Suite 21: 2000'

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  1. It was open as late as 1997.

    Tom

    28 Mar 09 at 5:59 am

  2. It was originally a nice sports bar/pool hall sort of place. Cannot remember the name.

    Dennis

    28 Mar 09 at 9:44 am

  3. I remember that the "Very's" folks ran a sports bar in the back of the plaza.

    ted

    28 Mar 09 at 1:01 pm

  4. I don't think this one lasted very long. Probably opened around 89 or 90. I think the Saint Andrews one lasted longer than this one did.

    Mr. Bill

    30 Mar 09 at 2:50 pm

  5. Capitol News moved out in 2000. There was later something there called "City Lights" for a year and a half or so. Don't know what kind of business that was, though.

    badger

    30 Mar 09 at 4:27 pm

  6. The Hutto family ran the newsstands until shortly after Merle and Bud passed away. I believe that their daughter Gwynn ran the Capital Court one for a while after her parents passed. The downtown one was sold to a former employee who ran it for several years until he closed the business.

    joec

    5 Apr 09 at 10:49 pm

  7. Judging from the archives of "The State", the O'Neil Ct. store closed in 2000, and the St. Andrews location closed in 2002. The last manager of each store at the time of its closing was likely Bill Shaffer. Bill later started the St. Andrews Newsstand next door to the previous Capitol Newsstand location. One article stated that the O'Neil Ct. store only made a profit one year out of the 15 years it was in business.

    It also appears that Gwen's sister Blair was still in charge of the company before they sold it to Mark Carman. I suspect that Bud really would have preferred to pass control of the company on to Gwen, but she chose the "Mommy Track" instead.

    Daniel Watters

    25 Feb 10 at 10:30 pm

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