Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

Well, talking about The Record Bar brings another record store to mind, one I haven't thought about in years.

In the early 1980s, there was a record store just across from The Horseshoe, on Sumter Street. It was on the ground floor of the building next to the restaurant that was McDonalds, then Lizards Thicket and is now, I think, Tios. This particular building also had a Sandy's Hotdogs and a video arcade.

I liked to stop into the place from time to time since it was almost on campus, and was a shorter walk than going down to Five Points, and despite its small size, it had an interesting selection of music. I remember in particular, that they had an import copy of The Beach Boys "Stack O' Tracks" album, one of the oddest releases ever put out by a major rock group, and long out of print in the US at the time, and a Stan Kenton album I wanted. Despite the fact that I bought both, neither could have been hot sellers on a college campus in 1980..

I'm guessing that the owner must have been pretty plugged into the local music scene, because of one incident I remember in particular. I was browsing in the back of the store, and a guy walked in with a bunch of 45s. The owner put one on the turntable, and the store was filled with this incredible stripped down bass-heavy New Wave groove under a piercing vocal:

A-Bomb woke me up -- only thing alarming was the noise!

At the end, the guy who had brought the 45s in said he was still a little unhappy with the mix, but that they were going to go with it. I didn't know it at the time, but the guy with the 45s almost had to have been Jeff Calder and the song was "The A-Bomb Woke Me Up" off of the Swimming Pool Qs first album The Deep End. It was a little slice of history, and a band that should have been huge.

I'm pretty sure the store was gone by the mid 80s, and I can't even recall the name now. It was not New Clear Days. NCD was in the same building, but upstairs where this store was downstairs, and came in much later. Anyone remember what this place was called?

UPDATE 17 Sep 08: Originally this post was just titled "Record Store", but the consensus seems to be that it was "Budget Tapes & Records", and I have changed the post title accordingly. Thanks folks!

I'm not a big customer of Jewelry stores. I have a watch battery that needs to be replaced about once a year, and that's pretty much it. The last time it needed changing, I used the jewelers outside the 2nd floor entrance of Macy's, and the time before that, the one that's a short walk down Two Notch from Very's restaurant. So, although I've been somewhat aware of the name, I've never been in Friedman's.

As it turns out, that was probably a good move on my part. The store seems to have been hit with a triple whammy lately. Apparently, from what I've been able to google, the chain went into bankruptcy once, came out in 2005, then went under again in 2008, and closed "all" of its stores by June 2008. If that weren't bad enough the following from Wikipedia seems to apply to the Columbia Mall store:

Any stores currently operating under the Freidman's or Crescent nameplates are currently owned by Whitehall Jewelers Inc, who had purchased these locations for about fourteen million dollars from bankrupt Friedman's. Whitehall went bankrupt and began liquidating all of its stores in August 2008.

I suppose you have to admire the optimism that makes the purchase of bankrupt stores seem like a good idea, but I sure wouldn't bet on that idea!

Another casualty of the Trenholm Plaza renovations. (Have you noticed all the new palm trees going in?)

I've always been an Electrolux guy myself, except that I figured out a few years ago that I just don't have the cleaning gene at all, got maid-service and never looked back..

UPDATE 30 Jan 2009: This is their new location a few blocks down Forest Drive in the Forest Park plaza with the Piggly Wiggly.

UPDATE 14 May 2012 -- The store has now changed its name to All Vacuums:

I went down to the sacred store
Where I’d heard the music years before,
But the man there said the music wouldn’t play.

I was just at Columbia Mall, a place I go very seldom nowadays. I couldn't help but be struck by how few of the original stores are still there. There's Sears, Waldenbooks, Radio Shack, and that's about it. (I suppose you could count Macy's since there was continuity with their purchase of Rich's..).

Anyway, The Record Bar was on the top level, right next to J.C. Penny's and above Radio Shack. It was not a large operation and wasn't "indie" the way Sounds Familiar and especially Manifest can be, but it performed its function of providing the current hit LPs & 45s with a comendable depth of back catalog for a chain store with limited space. They also had a constantly changing selection of "cut-outs" from which I bagged many a gem, especially considering my extremely limited finances in those days before I had a job.

They also were generally careful to pull out the "Hot 100" pages from the current week's Billboard magazine, and tack them up over the 45 bin. This was nice because in those pre-internet days, you might never know your favorite group had a new song out if it was still down around #60 and never showed up on the radio.

I don't know their hiring practices -- their staff was definitely not as tatooed and pierced as is the norm at Manifest, but someone there seemed to know a bit about music. I pretty much discovered rock music in 1976 as a result of being introduced to "Endless Summer" by The Beach Boys, and I would always check the Beach Boys section in the LPs. Of course by that time, Brian Wilson was still not living on Earth most days, and the Beach Boys glory days were long gone, so there were years between album releases, and even the back catalog was in sad disarray. I found though, that whenever some interesting Beach Boys artifact was released abroad, it would usually show up at the Record Bar. I remember I had to borrow a dollar from my sister to get a "Brian Wilson Rarities" record with stuff that didn't show up in the states for years.

I'm not sure exactly what happened to The Record Bar. They had two locations in Columbia, I always presumed they were a larger chain, but perhaps I was wrong. At any rate, both the Woodhill Mall and the Columbia Mall locations closed in, I believe, the 1980s. It may have been that they were unprepared for CDs to catch on as quickly as they did. It may have been that that made a good bit on 45 singles and those disappeared. It may have been competition from larger non-mall stores like Peaches, Sounds Familiar and Manifest. It could even have been in-mall competition -- I know that at one time there was a larger CD store on the bottom level near Sears (though my impression is that that came after The Record Bar was already gone). Whatever the reason, they packed up, and their stained glass window and wooden door are now long gone. Currently there's not even a storefront in the spot where they were.

The levee is dry..

Jackson Camera. At their height, they had stores all over Columbia. I can recall locations at Richland Mall (on the backside of the open-air corridor), Main Street, Five Points and Dutch Square.

The location I always visited was at Richland Mall. As a kid, I had gotten into developing and printing pictures. I can't remember exactly how, but I had already started fooling around with it when I "inherited" a bunch of (mostly hand-made) equipment from someone moving out of town to a smaller place. Originally I had no enlarger so I favored bigger-frame negatives like (the even-then archaic) 616 and slightly smaller 620 and 127 film sizes which made accptable contact prints. I'm afraid I pretty much ruined the finish on the kitchen counters with sloshing developer, stop-bath and "hypo" all over them -- the stains are there to this day. And really, there was no way to make the kitchen dark enough to be a "real" darkroom during the day (not surprisingly, my mother needed it to cook at night..), so my prints and negatives were always fuzzy, but I never hesitated to try again, and to ask for more advice down at Jackson Camera.

I'm sure the guy who was usually there, would look up, see me coming across the corridor and think Oh Lord, here we go again, but he and all the staff were always very patient and informative despite the fact that I took up way more of their time than my meager purchases of contact paper and chemicals would warrant. By middle school, I had more or less fallen out of the habit (and in high school, the darkroom had its own stock of chemicals and paper), so my visits to Jackson almost ceased.

Even as I moved out of town in 1985 though, the photo market was changing drastically. While the picture drop-off business had always (in my memory) been a chain dominated affair, in the 80s, national chains moved into the camera shop and specialty photo-finishing market. Wolf and Ritz were the big players, and when Ritz bought Wolf, they were the 500 pound gorilla that sleeps where it wants. Jackson kept on for years, but gradually closed more of their stores. The one pictured here is at the corner of Beltline Boulevard and Forest Drive, and is where, I believe, their Richland Mall shop moved when Richland Mall went to Richland "Fashion" Mall, driving out a number of stalwarts like Jackson Camera and The Happy Bookseller. Jackson finally sold out to Ritz a few years ago, and this location operated as a Ritz for a while, but with another Ritz just a few blocks away down Beltline, it didn't really make any sense to keep this one open.

Interestingly, as I went to take this shot, I saw that the follow-on business, some sort of beauty store is also closing up shop.

UPDATE 21 May 2010 -- Here's an ad from The State for 19 Feb 1979:

Also, I've added all the addresses from the ad to the post title.

UPDATE 3 December 2010 -- Here are two great shots of the Harden Street Store by Hunter Desportes on Flickr:

outside

inside

UPDATE 24 February 2013: I have added two pictures to the top of this post, above the one (of the beauty store) that the text of the post talks about. They come from commenter Thomas and were taken of the Main Street location in 1997. I love that huge marquee.. Thanks!

UPDATE 23 February 2014 -- The Forest Drive store is now Troy's Cutting Edge barber shop:

UPDATE 20 May 2018 -- Here is a picture of the Greenlawn location, which ended up getting its own post because I totally forgot Jackson had a Greenlawn location:

The Spring Valley Theaters were on Two Notch Road near I-20, where the Lowes now is. In order to build the place, they first tore down The Dreamland Motel, one of the stalwart US-1 motels, and where both my sister and I had swimming lessons once upon a time. I'm not sure why the place got the "Spring Valley" tag. Certainly it was closer to Spring Valley than, say, The Statehouse, was but "closer" isn't "close".

I know we saw a number of films at the theater, but one in particular stands out in my mind. It was 1977, and I was 16 years old. I finally had my unrestricted license, and I could drive by myself and at night. My pure unbridled freedom was marred only by my total lack of money, and my total lack of a car.

Earlier in the day, I had been listening to the radio. I'm not sure which station it was. I was still listening to WIS a good bit, but I had discovered rock & roll in 1976, so it could have been WNOK. Whichever it was, they were running a call-in contest. I used to try these quite often, and won several. (I won a ride on the first run of the Thunder Road roller coaster at Carowinds, a chance to meet Foreigner backstage, tickets to see The Beach Boys and a couple of free meals).

This particular contest was for tickets to a sneak-preview of a new science fiction movie, one I had never heard of. I had enjoyed written science fiction for years, and had seen my share of SF movies, both first run and on TV. I guess the "biggies" were 2001, which was visualy impressive, but ponderous and confusing, Silent Running, which was visually impressive but based on a silly concept and The Planet of the Apes movies which were less effect laden, but more fun. As it happened, I was caller number five, and I talked my parents into letting me drive myself to the show. So, I was out tooling around Two Notch in our 1972 Comet coupe and having a good time, actually getting to use the headlights as the sun went down.

I got over to the Spring Valley Theaters, showed my ID which was checked against a namelist (I think -- I'm a bit fuzzy on that), and went on in. I didn't have any money to buy popcorn or a drink, so I just went in and sat down. I also didn't have any great expectations and from what I could tell, the other winners didn't either, but I was quite prepared to have a good time, and to not be in any hurry driving home.

Of course the movie was Star Wars. I had never seen anything like it -- nobody there had. It's hard to remember what movies were like in the 70s, but "fun" was optional and present in a fairly small subset. Take a movie like The Great Waldo Pepper which should have been fun what with the chances for stunts and dogfights, but decided to go another way.

This film had the effects of 2001 -- heck it had better effects than 2001! -- and decided to be fun! I had never heard an audience applaud at the end of a film before, but they did, and I did too. Leaving the theater, I knew this film was going to be huge, and in fact after it opened, it was weeks before you could get a ticket. Not only was Star Wars a bright spot in the decade of stagflation, but it totally changed the way we see movies by paving the way for "the summer blockbuster". Now, that has had good effects and bad ones, but I sure wouldn't want to go back to "70s" films!

I forget exactly when the place was torn down. I believe it was the 80s, but it could have been the 90s, I suppose. At the time, Columbia was over-theatered, so it wasn't a painful loss, but I'll never forget that night!

In 1983, I bought my first car. In a fit of what I can only call insanity, I chose a Renault Alliance. The only thing I can say in my defense is that it was Motor Trend's 1983 Car of the Year, that I was naive enough to think that meant something, and that it was cheap.

The dealership was on Two Notch down near Beltline, where that children's dental clinic is now, though the old building and lot are completely gone -- I can't even remember what it was called anymore. The car was a complete piece of junk, and an unmitigated disaster. I can't even begin to remember everything that went wrong with it, but here are some of the highlights.

First the gearshift knob came off. Then something went wrong with the accellerator system somehow such that the engine was always running at top speed. It certainly was an adventure driving it back to the dealership in first gear -- hopefully I would be smart enough today to call a towtruck. Then the electrical system melted while I was driving back from the 1986 Worldcon in Atlanta, and I didn't know if it were going to fail completely before I got back to Columbia (let alone trying to get all the way to Fayetteville) or if the fumes were going to knock me out first. Then a window cracked from the Fayetteville heat. Then the speedometer melted. Finally a headlight burned out, so I sold it.

Anyway, that's somewhat discursive, but does sort of relate to my post: I should have known something was up when the dealership claimed they couldn't put a radio in the car, and recommended I take it to Roger's Car Stereo.

Roger's was on Two Notch Road between Pinestraw and Fontaine and was something of a hole-in-the-wall, but they seemed to have a general idea of what they were doing. I got the radio, and it was OK for what it was (a cheap am/fm/cassette). It never melted, had the knobs fall off, or suddenly started playing at top volume. I was happy enough in fact, that when the radio gave out in my father's 1980 Corolla, I took it to Rogers for a replacement, and later when the speakers gave out in my 1991 Corolla, I got them replaced there. They seemed to close rather suddenly (I can't recall any going-out-of-business sale), and the place is now some sort of custom shop. I doubt there's anything they could do for a Renault Alliance though..

Does the phone number 252-6341 mean anything to you?

If you were here when the whole state's area code was 803, it probably does. Certainly there were many times I dialed it to set my wind-up watch to the dulcet tones of Standard Federal Savings & Loan's time of day service. That was a time when you couldn't turn to CNN and get the time off the bottom-scroll, or get it to within a second over the Internet. Around here, it was pretty much wait for the NBC news-tone at the top of the hour on WIS or call Standard.

I don't know much about the early history of Standard. Apparently it was founded in the aftermath of the Panic of 1907 and weathered WW-I, The Great Depression, WW-II and the 70s. Up through the 50s and probably into the early 60s, it was known as Standard Building & Loan. You can see from my first passbook here that in October of 1962, they had just put a paste-on label reading Standard Savings and Loan Association over whatever had been printed there before. My guess is that they had just switched from Building & Loan given that the inside of the passbook and the coin-banks their kid members got still bore the B&L verbiage:

The passbook cover notes the association's two locations, Washington Street & Trenholm Plaza. The Trenholm location had to be pretty new at the time, given that the area was a golf course into the mid 50s, at least.

In that era, the way savings & loans worked was that you would bring your passbook with you to the bank (OK, technically it wasn't a bank..) whenever you made a transaction, and your passbook would be run into a printing machine (similar to the way checks are still sometimes handled at supermarkets) which would print the day's transactions on seperate lines. (I'm not sure how long it had been since the teller's actually wrote in the passbook, but there still seemed to be a lot of hand-inking involved.) If you didn't have any actual transaction, the bank could still compute your interest (dividends) and enter that for you.

On 12 October 1962, I had $396.36 in my passbook -- very likely the first money I had ever had in my own name, though as I was probably more concerned with learning to walk, I doubt I really thought on it much. I did enjoy later visits as the Trenholm branch had a magical coin machine into which the teller would dump all your coins and it would sort them out and give you a total after much pinging and whirring.

By the time 1973 rolled around and I got my second passbook, you could see that the intervening decade had been good to Standard:

With five locations in Columbia and new branches in Newberry, Orangeburg, Sumter, Mount Pleasant, Charleston and Myrtle Beach, they were obviously an institution on the move.

This was even reflected in the passbook itself, which had moved from being strictly utilitarian to a design with some panache, embossing and even gold-leaf for the text.

You could see the effects of inflation too in that the FSLIC guarantee had been raised from $10,000 per account to $20,000:

At some point in the 1980s, Standard started offering checking accounts as well as passbook accounts, and that's were I got my first checks. They were also fairly early into the ATM market, and though they never had many, the Trenholm location was convienient while I was living in town. (It was a walk-up, and I can distinctly remember thinking, I hope I'm never so lazy that I need to use the ATM without getting out of my car).

In 1985, I took my first real job and moved to Fayetteville NC. I kept my Standard accounts, but as there were no branches up there, mostly dealt with the (now defunct or subsumed) Southern National Bank. While I was living out of town, the S&L crisis of the 80s struck.

I know it's a complex issue, but I think it can be boiled down to the following: Gradually the state and federal governments took the position that George Bailey could go head to head with Mr. Potter -- and kindly, befuddled Uncle Billy was in charge of the new direction.

Standard was far from the only solid-seeming institution to dig its own grave at the time, but it was still a shock to me. I'm sure the taxpayers, en-masse, took it in the shorts as usual, but the government handled it pretty well from a member perspective. There was no panic, just an orderly takeover of the bank. It went so smoothly in fact, that my father decided he wasn't going to move his money and would just keep it in whatever institution ended up with the assets. At this remove, I can't remember what bank that was. It may have been NBSC. They certainly have the location at Trenholm Plaza which used to be occupied by the Standard Branch (which was a much smaller building, and was torn down when the current NBSC was built).

The downtown building is still there (it was obviously remodeled or replaced after 1908 if that was the original location), with its distinctive landmark clock beside it. My memory is that when Standard was at its peak, the building had one wall which was a waterfall -- that now seems to be gone. I have no idea what happened to the other branches either in or out of town.

The 2 August 1991 date for the closing comes from an online lawsuit which references the RTC takeover.

And that little coin-bank? It still has some change in it.

The Time At The Tone Will Be: Too Late

UPDATE 23 March 2010 -- Here are two pictures of the old Trenholm Plaza branch. They were taken inside another Trenholm Plaza store where Standard just happened to be in the background through the window, so the quality is not high:

UPDATE 21 June 2011 -- Here is an older picture of the Trenholm Plaza branch from a Chamber of Commerce promotional book:

I've written about Kroger Sav-On before. I believe the fate of this Kroger, near the Wal-Mart on Highway 1 near I-26 came about for similar reasons.

When Kroger first hit the Columbia market (and I believe this store, like Decker & Fort Jackson, was in the initial build-out), it was upscale, but by the time these stores closed, it had been leapfrogged by other chains' new generations. This store in particular has a nice new Bi-Lo across the street from it, and a Wal-Mart Supercenter just a block or two away. So (and this is all pure speculation), they weren't as nice as the Bi-Lo, and couldn't be as cheap as the Wal-Mart. Kroger's answer, in general, has been new stores like the one near Spring Valley High School, but that requires new construction.

Anyway, I noticed the other day that the building is no longer empty -- Kimbrell's furniture has set up there now. That's good to see, and I wish something would take the buildings on Fort Jackson & Decker!

UPDATE 11 March 2011: Changed closing date to 2000 based on commenter Andrew's research. Also added full street address.

Whatever exactly it is that they sell at The Crate, they'll not be selling it much longer. This place is on Two Notch more or less across from the Big Lots plaza, and is, I think, a pretty bad location for retail. Unless you're specifically going there, by the time you see any of the places in there, you're past the whole strip, and there's no easy way to get back. I'm vaguely aware of having seen their sign driving by that way before, but if it made any impression on me, I suppose I figured in the back of my mind that it was some sort of "organizer" store, one of those places that sells boxes, bins and other miracles of storage so that you can get all your stuff off of the couch in the "junk room" and actually put up. Or it could be WW-I bi-planes. Anyway, on actually stopping to take these pictures, it looked more like a clothes store, which I find rather less interesting than either of the alternatives..