Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

Actually, this might not be Land of Oz as I can't remember if that was at both Bush River & Decker Malls, or only at Bush River with this being another operation. Whatever the name, it was definitely the Decker Mall video arcade though.

In its current incarnation, it has had somewhat "regular" doors retrofitted into the distinctive flat-arch entranceway, but originally, I believe they just drew a sliding mesh curtain at nights.

The layout I most remember had Don Bluth's pioneering "Dragon's Lair" console dead center in the entranceway facing the hall. This game was a combination of traditional hand-drawn "cel" animation served up from a laser-disc (not a DVD!) and choose-your-adventure gameplay with the transition between the scenes being guided by the game-play lever. For instance, if a dragon was about to fry your knight, and you raised your shield, the disc would transition to a "flame bounces off shield" scene, if you didn't raise it, it would transition to an "the ashes of your character blow away scene" (those are just examples, I don't recall the actual specifics). Actually like many "pioneering" technologies, it wasn't that good because they were pushing the video scene changing tech further than it was really ready to go, and the transitions were really clunky.

If you turned left at "Dragon's Lair", there was a "Bezerk" somewhere in the left side of the store. This was the pushy game that would in "attract mode" declare "COIN DETECTED IN POCKET" from time to time. You had to either shoot the robots or run them into the electric walls. I liked it, but wasn't that good.

Somewhere against the back wall, I think was "Battlezone" a vector-graphics based POV tank game. You had two levers, one for each tank tread, and you could spin in place by running one tread fowards and the other tread backwards. I usually ended up fooling around with navigating the tank and getting shot.

I don't recall any more of the layout, but they definitely also had "Asteroids", "Space Invaders","Tempest", "Defender" (which I could not play at all -- too many things to keep track of), "Milipede", and "Missle Command". I suppose they must have had "Pac Man/Ms Pac Man", but I don't really recall it. I'm prettty sure they did not have some of my other favorites, "Star Castle", "Galaxian", "Phoenix", "Gorf", and "Joust", or my all-time favorite, "Galaga". Of course, it could just be that when I was in college, I went to Robos instead of here and thus missed the gradual turnover.

I'm not really sure when they closed. The mall underwent a long gradual decline that accelerated into death-spiral when Kroger and Target pulled out, but I think they were gone before that, probably late 80s I'm guessing.

UPDATE 18 June 2012: The last city directory listing Land of Oz is 1986, so I have updated the closing time in the post title from "1980s" to "1986".

UPDATE 13 June 2009: The above picture is apparently the wrong spot for the adult book store, with the right spot being the corner lot (one to the left). I'll leave the first picture since people have commented on it (and its former incarnations), and add the correct one below.

I've tried a couple of times to get a decent picture of this place, but it seems that every time I go by, it's the afternoon, and the sun is against me. Anyway, this little building is on Percival Road between Decker Boulevard and Dupont Drive and has been a number of things over the years. Currently it is an El Cheapo gas station / convienience store. You can also tell from the painted-over letters on the gas island canopy that it was fairly recently a Texaco. What I recall from the 1970s and 80s is that it was an adult book store for a good many years, and the reason I recall this is one very indignant lady during the Great Ice Storm of 1979.

That storm was the biggest local event of 1979. We certainly had snow from time to time growing up, but had never seen anything like the cover of ice that descended on Columbia that day. As I recall, I went outside afterwards, and saw a bucket in our back yard. I pried it out of the ice to find that it left a neat hole with clear turf underneath, surrounded by a two-inch coat of ice. Needless to say, trees and branches were down all over the city. Our house was without power for two weeks. Nowdays, I suppose they would declare a Federal Disaster Area for anything like that, but in those days, we just coped. We had a fireplace and candles, and when things got too bad, could take a hot shower at a relative's house. We also had a transistor radio, and I remember listening to WIS's extensive coverage of the situation. The lady in question phoned in to the call-in show and expressed great ire at the fact that this adult book store had its power back, and she did not have hers. The host tried to explain that the line crews were working through the area in triage mode, and usually tried to fix the lines that would bring the most houses back at once before moving on to breaks that would bring fewer houses online. She wasn't having any of it though, and I think the host finally had to "thank" her for her opinion and hang up. Perhaps she was onto something though -- we haven't had a storm like that since the adult bookstore closed!

UPDATE 13 June 2009 See in post above about new "correct" picture. Also added the street address, 1001, to the post title.

You don't tug on Superman's cape, you don't spit into the wind, you don't pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger, and you don't open a restaurant at 2630 Decker Boulevard.

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I believe this restaurant, on Decker Boulevard in the plaza with Rite Aid and Food Lion, was originally a Burger King. As I mentioned in discussing the vanished USC Burger King, once upon a time, all Columbia area Burger Kings were closed in a franchisee/corporate dispute. I believe that this one closed then and never re-opened.

After Burger King imploded, a Zesto's set up shop. Zesto is a local, greek-influenced fast-food outfit that has a number of locations in town. I believe chicken is their big selling point, but for me it will always be the chocolate dipped soft-serve cones. During the ongoing general flight from the Decker Corridor, this Zesto joined many other Decker restaurants and moved out on Two Notch road. Evidently they did not move far enough out, and with their new fortunes tied to a dying strip-mall, they did not last too long (that building is now a matress store).

Anyway, a couple of years after Zesto left, the current occupant, a Vietnamese "Pho" restaurant set up shop in the building. I've eaten there once, and found the Pho very tasty (admittedly I have no standard of comparison there) though they do limit you to one refill on the ice tea. I could be wrong, but I believe this place may be the only solely Vietnamese restaurant in town.

UPDATE 1 June 2019: Add tags, map icon.

UPDATE 4 June 2024: Update tags.

This building, not technically a Columbia Mall outparcel since it is not reachable from the mall perimeter road, has had several tenants. Right now it is a Verizion store, but at some point in the 1990s, it was Coconuts Music.

Coconuts was a fairly generic CD store, and really the only reason to have gone at all was the location, which was fairly close to my parents' house (I was living out of Columbia by then). On the other hand, Sounds Familar on Parklane was not that much farther, and when I was in town, I was just as likely to end up on the Manifest side of town anyway. So, what i'm leading up to saying is that my own personal boycott of Coconuts did not cause me any great hassle or inconvenience.

The way it happened, as I recall now, is that I had heard some great song on the radio by a band I had never heard of. When I got to Coconuts, I found that this band had in fact been around for a while and had five or six albums out. No problem, I thought, I'll just read the track lists and I remember enough of the lyrics to figure it out. So I pulled out one CD and flipped it over. Huh. There was one of those metal spiral anti-theft, ring-the-buzzer, stickers on back. A big one. Right on the track listings. Well, OK, there's three of this CD, try another. Same thing. Try one of the other albums. Same thing. Every darn CD I looked at had a huge sticker all over the track listings.

I brought this to the attention of the manager, and the response was basically That's the way we do things here.

I decided that wasn't the way places I shopped did things, started a boycott, and a few years later they were gone.

Nowdays, of course, I can just google as much of the lyric as I can rember, find the track and artist and have it from Amazon Prime in two days without leaving my house. (Yes, I could just order the MP3 from Amazon and have it immediately, but I still like having the CDs for backup purposes).

Taco Cid is a local (a fact I didn't know until just now) Mexican fast-food chain. Well, I say chain but from their web site, they are down to one location, on the Charleston Highway, at present.

When I first became aware of them, they had at least three locations. The one on Charleston Highway, one on Broad River Road near Intersection Center, and this one, on Decker Boulevard just up from Decker Mall. At that time, I was just starting to sample Mexican food, and I was never a steady customer, but I had this odd custom that whenever I was going to drive to Charlotte (usually for the Heroes Convention, but sometimes for other reasons), I would hit the Decker Taco Cid for lunch first (I will rarely start any voluntary trip before noon!). I'm not sure exactly why this was. The food was better than Taco Bell, but not spectacular, and before the Completion of I-77 to Percival, Taco Cid really wasn't on the way to Charlotte in any meaningful fashion. Even now that connection is tenuous since you can only get on I-77 going the wrong way if you use Decker, but I would drive down Decker to Parklane to 277 and tell myself that made sense.

The Decker location was the first to close though it predated the total collapse that happened to Decker later. The Broad river location lasted years longer. I don't know exactly when it went under, but I don't think it has been more than 5 years ago.

The vet's office moved in a few years after Taco Cid vacated the building, and has been a steady presence there ever since as Kroger, Target, The Olive Garden, Red Lobster, and most recently Zorba's have crashed and burned around them.

UPDATE 15 Aug 2009: Added scans of Taco Cid matchbook provided by commenter Melanie.

UPDATE 18 April 2013: The building is to be Atlantic Seafood.

UPDATE 30 August 2022: Updating tags, adding map icon.

Well, it's not like I didn't see it coming.

The first establishment I can remember in this building on Decker was The Captain's Kitchen, a seafood operation. I can't tell you a lot about it because I have never liked seafood, and don't have any specific memories of going there. I think I did go there several times -- I seem to recall my parents speaking of it with approval -- but if I did, I would have gotten a burger or sandwich off the kids' menu.

I'm not entirely sure when The Captain's Kitchen closed, but I suspect it was in the late 60s or early 70s. At any rate, after that, a Zorba's opened in the building. It's hard to explain today how limited cuisine choices were in a medium-sized Southern city in those days. Pizza was considered an exotic food, Mexican restaurants were unknown, Chinese places were rare, and I suspect still tended towards "chop suey" and Greek food was completely unknown outside of Greek families. Today, everyone loves "Greek Salad", back then we didn't even know what it was and Feta cheese was very suspect (it wasn't even yellow!). Which is to say we didn't eat at Zorba's much, and when we did, I got a cheeseburger.

My memory is hazy on the details here, but at some point in, I believe, the 80s, the manager of Zorba's on Decker bought out the Zorba's people and rechristened the restaurant as Sparta. The only real difference was new signage, new menus and opening the restaurant on Sundays. Greek food was a bit less exotic by that point, and we ate there more frequently, and I started to discover the joys of feta in spanikopita and Greek Salads.

I don't know what happened next, but suddenly, Sparta was gone, and the place was Zorba's again (and closed on Sundays again). At this point, I had moved out of town, but had become quite fond of the food, and would often eat Saturday lunch there when I was back in Columbia. Things seemed to move along basically unchanged into the 90s and early 2000s.

At some point in that timeframe, Zorba's became the default place for my father, sister & I to have Saturday lunch (I was generally in town on Saturdays). My father had not been wild about Greek food at first, but gradually came to really like the place, and the staff was always very solicitious of him, especially as it became harder for him to get around.

About this time, the "flight from Decker" started as the Decker Corridor went into decline. Again, I got bits and pieces of this in conversation and may have parts wrong, but I also think that the owner had some health issues and needed to cut back his responsibilities some. He ended up selling the restaurant to an Asian couple and staying on as manager. To combat the decrease in business, he & they decided to refurbish the deck area and try to make Zorba's an afternoon cocktail destination. Unfortunately, it didn't work, and business continued to decline.

By 2003, I was back in Columbia, and eating lunch at Zorba's three times a week (Monday, Wednesday & Friday). I liked to come in about 3pm, have the "stuffed shells" or "cheese manicoti" special, and drink tea and read a book for the rest of my lunch hour after finishing eating. The waitresses knew me, and always kept my glass well filled.

After that, the The Signs Your Favorite Restaurant Is About to Close set in.

First was "sign #1: the hours change". Suddenly Zorba's was no longer open for dinner, just from 11:00am to 3:00pm for lunch. Not only was this a bad sign, but it meant that to eat there, I had to go at 2:00pm, earlier than I generally like to eat lunch (yes, I'm a night owl), so I started going on Monday's only.

Then there was "sign #3: the staffing level drops". Where there had been several waitresses before, now there was only one, and she was new.

After that, there was "sign #5: staff cleaning the restrooms rather than a sanitation service" and "sign #6: the menu changes" -- the formerly full menu + specials was reduced to a skimpy lunch menu + specials.

Finally, when I went in on Monday 26 May 2008, we had "sign #2: they are out of something mundane". In this case, it was lettuce, so instead of the greek salad with the manicotti, I had to choose rice or potatoes instead.

I'm putting 2 June 2008 in the title for this post, but I can't actually say that's the first day they weren't open as I was on vacation the week after 26 May. It's a deduction based on them not getting full deliveries for the week of 26 May and being definitely closed when I went by on 9 June. Combined with that, a new month with all its bills is a logical time to close up shop and the telephone is already disconnected. Actually it's a bit interesting. If it weren't for the phone being disconnected, I wouldn't be absolutely sure. There is no signage at all indicating that they are closed. Usually there is a "Thanks to all our wonderful customers for a great XX years" taped to the door, but not here.

Inside, you can still see the Cheese Manicotti special on the white-board. Oh well -- Thanks guys! I enjoyed it!

UPDATE 2 April 2009: Added Captain's Kitchen Yellow Pages ad from 1970

UPDATE 9 April 2009:

Well, for a while the sign said that an Italian restaurant was coming (Giovanni's, I think), but that never happened, and now it appears the place will be a Mexican restaurant for Mexicans (at least that is my interpretation since the sign says "Patrones Restaurante Mexicano Y Barra" rather than "Patrones Mexican Restaurant & Bar".

I don't know what's up with the For Sale sign, unless the area between the old Redwing and the restaurant is a seperate parcel.

I have to say I don't like the lettering here at all:

UPDATE 14 June 2009: Added the 1977 Southern Bell Yellow Pages ad above

UPDATE 8 June 2012 -- The new operation in this building, Continintal Bar & Grill (a very un-Mexican sounding name to me, though perhaps not to a Mexican) seems to be open. Except that I have yet to ever see a single car there.

UPDATE 27 September 2014 -- Well, as reported, the place has been razed:

This Winn-Dixie was located in a hard-luck strip mall on the "troubled" Decker Boulevard corridor. Prior to the store's locating there, the physical plant of the building it went into had really been in bad shape since the long-ago departure of its predecessor (whose name I can't recall right now). Winn-Dixie put a lot of work into the building, and it looked like the mall would come to life again as it attracted a few new businesses, including Columbia stalwart, The Book Exchange.

What my family found really notable about the store's opening was the blast of publicity they paid for: They mailed everyone in the area a custom produced 10 minute VHS casette to promote the store and all its features. That must have cost them a pretty penny (now I suppose they would just mail a postcard with their web-site address, though I suppose since that would be less notable, people would be less likely to actually follow it up..).

Out of curiosity, my sister & I watched the tape which had been sent to my father. I know the impression I got from the tape was that the store was very upscale with an extensive deli department. I was surprised when I actually dropped by the store to find that it was very average. There was absolutely nothing wrong with it, and I wouldn't hesitate to stop if I were in the area and remembered I needed something, but it was definitely less upscale than other non-FoodLion stores in the general area (Publix for instance).

Still, I think it did well enough, and was a solid tenant for the struggling plaza. Unfortunately, the whole Winn-Dixie chain got in big trouble in 2004 and completely exited North & Suth Carolina, leading to the store's closure, and the plaza started going downhill again. The Book Exchange in fact moved back to almost the same spot on Two Notch that it had moved from to begin with. Lately things have stablized a bit with the Comedy House moving (after a hiatus) from its Saint Andrews Road location into half of the Winn-Dixie, and a bingo operation subsuming the other half as well as the Book Exchange spot and several other spots
on the other side. At this point only the huge sign behind the old store remains to say that Winn-Dixie was once there. (Though that itself is a bit unusual: Chains that are still operating usually take care to remove their branding from failed locations).

UPDATE 11 March 2011: Updated closing date to 24 August 2005 based on here.

UPDATE 28 August 2018 -- There is now a plasma center in the left part of the old store that was Bingo. (The Comedy House is still in the main portion):

I said in another post that Asian Buffet is the last stage a restaurant building goes through.

I didn't mean that in any disparaging sense -- I have a lot of admiration for the folks who, often as a family effort, can take a marginal location and make a go of it. Unfortunately, as we have seen before, it doesn't always work.

In this case, the building was the former Red Lobster location next to the former Olive Garden on Decker Blvd. The Red Lobster closed in the general flight from Decker towards Sandhills which also took the neighboring Olive Garden. I'm not sure why Jumbo Buffett failed in this case. It could be that the established buffet on Two Notch by Lowes was too nearby, perhaps the Red Lobster building was just too large for an operation with less traffic to pay the utilities or perhaps people never got past the "jumbo shrimp" jokes. Whatever the reason, I recall this operation as rather short lived, no more than a year or so.

UPDATE 19 Feb 2010: Added full street address to post title.

UPDATE 26 August 2024: Add Red Lobster to the post title, edit tags, add map icon.

Yep, it's another Decker posting!

The Olive Garden can't get no respect, and I'm not entirely sure why. Yes, compared to your favorite little hole-in-the-wall that you discovered in Little Italy, it's not that great. Compared to the chains? I'm not sure exactly where it rates with Macaroni Grill (MG's bread is definitely better), and it's definitely not as good as Carabbas. BUT: it's not bad. Certainly not as bad as all the insults comics have thrown its way for years. I'd go so far as to say that the "Soup, salad & breadstick" lunch is very nice, and the Capelini Pomodoro is quite good.

This location is another place where my father, sister and I used to eat Sunday lunch from time to time. I can understand why the chain would want to put a new location out on Two Notch near Sandhills -- there's a lot of growth there, and a lot of people to feed. What I don't understand is why opening that new store required closing this one. It seemed to do a good business, and the people in the Forest Acres area haven't gone anywhere. We still eat! In fact, I would probably eat lunch there at least once a week whereas the new location is just too far to go for lunch hour.

UPDATE 19 Feb 2010: Added full street address to post title.

UPDATE 15 Feb 2011: Updated closing date in post title to April 2005 based on commenter Andrew's research.