Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

A casualty of the digital revolution, I guess. I would notice Champagne Color from time to time over the years, and would always imagine it as the sort of place where instead of just running your film through the machine and printing whatever came out, they would check each print and dodge and burn-in each exposure as necessary, and if that wasn't true, it should have been.

I myself held on to 35mm for most of my pictures for years after it became clear that digital was not only winning, but had already won. When I started this site, I knew I had to go digital at least in part because I would be at Ritz or the drug-store every day -- it would just take too long, and cost too much.

Closing-Cam 1.0 didn't displace my old Fujica because the resolution was still too low, but Closing-Cam 2.0 (a Panasonic Lumix DMC LX3) pretty much has. My guess would be that this happened to Champagne's customers over the course of several years, and that without the resources of a national chain, they couldn't make the transition to full digital.

At any rate, whether that's a good guess or not, the building has been empty for a long time now. The location is not very easy to get into or good for parking (especially if you are coming from the Dutch Square direction) and I think you would need a "destination" store there to make it viable.