Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

Lately the thing to do rather than remodeling an aging store is to simply build a bigger one right next door and move shop.

That's what happened to this Piggly Wiggly on Garners Ferry Road. The trouble with that, although it gives me something to take pictures of, is that it leaves behind a dead or dying strip mall as seems to be the case with "Garners Ferry Plaza". On the other hand, I would in general rather shop in a store like the new one (seen across the street in the last photo) than in a run-down store, and building a new store avoids a lengthy period of remodeling which can drive away customers. A remodeling store, even one open for business is like a road with ongoing construction -- you know you could get through, but you'd rather plan another route and avoid the hassle.

UPDATE 3 March 2010 -- some sort of work is being done on the old Pig and plaza:

UPDATE 9 March 2011: Updated closing date based on the comments (and added full street address).

UPDATE 16 July 2013 -- Garners Ferry Plaza has ben renovated now, including the former Pig site:

Also, The Pig is closing at its new location.

I'm afraid I went to take this set of pictures about 15 years too late. I think if I had taken them in 1993, you would be able to look at them and say "yep, I can see that was a Putt-Putt course". It not having occurred to me to do that then, you're just going to have to take my word for it now.

In the 1970s, the corner of Percival Road & Forest Drive was, if not a thriving retail hub, at least a viable one. The lot had a strip mall of sorts with a number of businesses. I think the largest was some sort of mini-grocery which was a size up from the 7-11 model, but not quite big enough to be the "country store" type. There was also a barber shop (which survived the longest, I believe). I'm not sure if the Carraige House strip-club had started then, or if that building (now Liquids) was some other retail.

Across the parking lot from the grocery, a few feet further down Percival, was the Putt-Putt course. "Minature golf" is the generic name for the sport while "Putt-Putt" is a specific brand. At the time, it was a fairly famous name (always struggling to make sure it wasn't used generically like Xerox and Kleenex) and its orange bordered courses tried to put some seriousness into the sport. Putt-Putt branded courses tended to eschew most of the whimsy of minature golf. They concentrated on making holes tricky through banks, caroms, dips, plateaus and hills rather than shooting through windmills or around dinosaurs. In retrospect, that may have been a mistake. I think people like whimsy on a minature golf course, and since it costs nothing to come up with your own ideas for holes, it's unclear what benefit paying Putt-Putt for a franchise gets you and in recent years, Putt-Putt has seemed to struggle, with parks closing on Clemson Road and in Augusta.

I don't recall that this particular course was ever really popular, but it was close enough that I could ride my bike there, which I remember doing the only time I ever played the course. It was, I believe the longest bike ride I ever took in Columbia (not that it was far in absolute terms, but my parents were very against our riding on main streets, and this was the first time they had let me cross Trenholm). At any rate, I rode up with a school friend, and we played a few rounds, and I think had a coke at the store. No big story there, I'm afraid. This would have been around 1974, and the course folded a few years after that. At first, they left the greens pretty much alone, but at some point they came in and ripped up all the carpet and frames, just leaving the concrete beds. I'm not sure why, unless they thought the lot would be easier to sell that way. If so, it was unsuccessful. The strip mall was torn down several years after Putt Putt closed, and I'm sure the owners thought that with the Interstate coming through, they could get a good price for the lot, but nothing seems to have happened so far.

I think they would get more interest if it had had dinosaurs and windmills.

Here's standing in the mall parking lot looking over at the Putt-Putt parking lot:

Here's standing in the Putt-Putt parking lot looking at the back of Liquids (towards Forest Drive):

Looking from the Putt-Putt parking lot towards the old "greens":

Standing on one of the old greens (concrete base):

Another old green:

Standing on an old green, looking at what appears to be a wild pyracantha:

Standing on a green looking towards Percival Road:

Standing on the shoulder of Percival Road, looking back into the course:

Looking down into the course from just past Liquids:

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

Apparently the Holligan's wing is to be re-built. Holligan's and, if I heard correctly, the UPS store will be moving to the old Roger's Brothers space on the other side of the plaza, and the barber shop will be moving off-site to the former Wally & Crumb cookie store. I'm not sure when this is supposed to happen though.

The same day I was driving down Main Street and noticed Lourie's closing, I saw a For Sale sign on the Capitol Newsstand building. Running a google on The State, I saw that, sure enough, it was closed for good.

I'm actually a good bit sadder about Capitol's passing than Lourie's, since it played a much larger part in my life. There was a time when downtown was a good place for books. There was the Paperback Exchange at 1234 Assembly Street (an easy address to remember, though the building has been long torn down), a fairly large selection at Belk's, and above all Capitol Newsstand.

You have to remember that the Columbia market for books was radically different in the 60s and 70s. There was an independant bookshop (Chapter Five?) in Trenholm Plaza, Waldenbooks at Dutch Square, The Happy Bookseller at Richland Mall, and that was about it. There was no amazon.com, of course, and when a new book by a favorite author would be coming out was a total mystery. The Trenholm store had a very limited selection; Waldens and The Happy Bookseller were better, but each had its own idiosyncrasies about what they would stock. Capitol Newsstand seemed to be better about getting in new paperbacks each month on a regular basis, and displaying them prominently on a "just arrived" table.

In particular there was a science fiction series I was following called Perry Rhodan. The series is produced in Germany and is perhaps the longest ongoing series of any kind now -- the issue numbers are way into the thousands. In the 70s, Ace books got the US rights and would translate two issues a month, and they would hardly ever show up anywere in town except at Capitol Newsstand. (If they did show up elsewhere, they would be months old, and out of order). Every month, I would talk my father into stopping by Capitol "on your way home" (it wasn't really on the way) and he would invariably find the new ones -- I never missed an issue until Ace lost the rights. (Another company tried reintroducing the series to the US in the 90s, but the translators were a lot worse and it read like something translated from German).

Capitol also had the largest collection of magazines in Columbia, and newspapers from all over the country and the world. When you walked in, the comic books would be in the front right, the new paperbacks table would be in the middle just past the counter, the left back would have the shelved science fiction paperbacks and magazines (it was pretty much the only place in town you could find the magazines). The right wall midway back would have the magazines your mother didn't want you to look at, and the right rear would have all the foreign language magazines like "Paris Match"

Capitol once had a thriving set of outlets. There was the main store, another one downtown (somewhere near Kress, I think), one on St. Andrews Road, and one on O'Neil Court. I think the second downtown one closed first, I'm not sure whether the O'Neil or St. Andrews one was next, but they are both gone as well. The Main Street location actually was closed for a while a few years ago and there was some speculation about its future. When it came back, it felt like a shadow of its old self to me.

Why did it close? Well the owner cites health reasons in The State story, but I suspect that was just the final straw on the camel's back. The market has changed radically since the 70s. For one thing, the big box chains have come to town. A Barnes & Nobel or Books-A-Million store has many more books than Capitiol could ever stock, and they get the new books as regularly and display them as well as Capitol used to. Likewise, a big box store has so many magazines that Capitol didn't have an edge there either, and as for out-of-town papers -- well, if I, for some reason, want to see what The Cleveland Plain Dealer had to say about something, I'll check their web-site. Add to all those factors the location, which has metered parking, and not much of that and the mid-level possibility that you will be pan-handled on the way to the store or back to your car, and it's just a place that doesn't make economic sense anymore. I suspect that this didn't help either.

Still in its day, it was a Capitol idea.

UPDATE 4 May 2010: Added full street address to post title.

UPDATE 26 Jan 2011 -- It's now a botique-looking place called Uptown:

UPDATE 24 February 2013: I have added as the first picture on this post one taken by commenter Thomas in 1997. It shows the old-school Capitol Newsstand in operation. (And Capitol Restaurant too!). Note the missing building (at one time a theater, I believe) that was between those two spots, with longtime fixture Know So Servicemen's Center. Thanks!

You get a very inaccurate idea of what bus travel is when you take class trips. When I was in middle and high school, our long class trips (Washington DC and Disney World were the most notable) were done on chartered Trailways buses, and the administration always requested, and got, the same kid-friendly driver. When the bus is filled with your friends and classmates, the ride is almost part of the attraction.

I've never actually ridden a scheduled long-haul bus as a party of one, but from seeing the Trailways stations and the people in them on rest-breaks during those class trips and from talking with aunts and cousins, I think I have a pretty good idea that, unfortunately, the "scum of the earth" passengers make life very unpleasant for the "salt of the earth" ones, and that the novelty of having a bathroom in a land vehicle is rather eclipsed by the horror of having it overflow.

What that adds up to saying is that I never took a bus at the Greyhound station downtown, but we did wait there once to pick up my aunt from Florida (she never did it again), and once to see off a cousin. I was fascinated by the Art Deco look, and by all of those glass blocks. I don't suppose it was any nicer than the more newly built stations inside, but sometime after this was built, US architects forgot how to design good looking buildings.

Wikipedia has a great very high-res shot here and says the station was built in 1938 & 1939 with Grehound moving out in 1987. That's about what I remembered. Apparently the building is a doctor's office now.

If you look up above the station, in some of these shots you can see another Columbia icon as well.

As perhaps some of you may have guessed if you have read many of these posts, I have rather odd tastes. In particular, I don't like chicken, or even the smell of chicken at all. My visits to KFC over the years have been very few.

The last time I stopped by a KFC was in an Interstate "any port in a storm" situation where I just desperately needed something to drink. There was a line at the drive-through, so I went inside, and was releived to see tea urns on the drink machine counter. I ordered and took my cup over only to find that they were fake urns. They were deliberately designed to look like fresh-brew tea urns, but were in fact connected to a fountain dispensing pressurized, undrinkable Nestea!

Of course, that has nothing to do with this KFC (near the intersection of Two Notch & Beltline) other than putting me even more off on stopping by than I would otherwise have been. It does sort-of explain why I hadn't noticed that this store was closed, despite it having been long enough for the front "awning" to have started falling apart.

Which makes it difficult to understand how the plants inside are still alive :-)

UPDATE 3 Oct 2008:

Well, it's open as a Titlemax now, and it looks like they ask for a lot of collateral!

UPDATE 7 Jan 2010: Add full street address and KFC abbreviation to post title.

I was driving down Main Street the other day, and noticed that Lourie's was closing. I suppose that if I actually read the paper I would already have known that 30 June is the last day for this venerable institution.

Of course, I suppose it's a little dishonest for me to describe it that way, since that ascribes to me a sentiment I don't really feel. The truth is that back when we actually shopped on Main Street (the 60s up until the mid-70s), I hate-hate-hated shopping for clothes, and I'm sure I made all those trips a very unpleasant chore for my mother. In my eyes, Penny's & Belts/Belks at least had some stuff other than clothes (Penny's had Boy Scout items, some electronics and a candy counter, Belks had book racks) while Louries seemed to be all clothes.

Still, if I'm not devastated to see Lourie's go, I am a bit sad. Main street used to have so much retail, some of it even places a kid would like (Kress and the movie theaters come to mind..) and it's all gone now. On the other hand, on the Lourie's corner, you can see some of the pathologies that have driven people away, even apart from having places closer to where we live with lots of parking. After turning off Assembly, in fact, I saw enough that I was a bit nervous getting out to take these pictures.

By the way, does anyone else think the display window with the bicycle and bare butts is a bit odd?

Here's an imposing looking place. It may not have beaten any other dealerships on size, but the building itself puts on a great front with the massive black columns -- It's The Parthenon of Columbia showrooms. (It's a bit less impressive from the back however..)

I'm not sure exactly what happened here. The sign in the door reads Closed Due To Relocation to Atlanta, but closing signs often (more often than not, I suspect) fail to tell the whole story, if they are not outright lies. For a Columbia business, relocating to Atlanta is like relocating to Mars, except for the part about Mars being an underserved market.

Whatever happened, it happened quickly enough that they didn't bother to settle with Pepsi and have the machine picked up or pack the car display racks, and recently enough that all the tinsel hasn't blown down from the parking-lot display.

UPDATE 30 April 2009:

It's open again as Global Automotive

UPDATE 26 July 2010: Added full street address to post title.

Columbia has had more going on in the tech sector than you might expect. Back in the early 1980s, NCR in West Columbia was making a well regarding line of Unix mini-computers called the "NCR Tower" (because of the thin & high deskside profile). Of course at that point, AT&T, flailing around after losing the long distance monopoly, bought NCR, didn't have a clue what to do with it, and ran it into the ground.

Sometime later, in the early 90s after the PC revolution was well underway, a Columbia company called, if I recall correctly, Wells American made a name for itself making IBM PC compatibles which were completely modular, even the CPU was on a plug in card, and upgrading the processor was a simple card swap. Unfortunately (for them), at that point, generic motherboards became the big thing and were able to way undercut what Wells was doing with its custom parts, driving the firm under.

One business that lasted a bit longer was Softek.

I first became aware of Softek when I needed a dumb terminal and modem. I was working as a graduate assistant at USC (in a better office than anything I ever have had in the private sector though the pay was, um, nominal), and my office had an RS-232 connection to a Unix minicomputer, and a number of phone jacks, so the idea I got was that I could hitch one of the department modems up in my office, hitch a dumb terminal and modem up at home and then do work on the computer from home, ie telecommuting before that was really a word. I asked around and one of the guys told me of a store on Main Street that could sell me the equipment, and I walked over there from campus to check it out. That was Softek. Their store was on the East side of Main, somewhere near where Rising High was, I think. The staff was friendly and I had no problem finding what I needed. In the event I ended up with a Liberty Freedom-100 green-on-black terminal, and a US Robotics 1200 baud modem, both of which I still have (though I'm pretty sure the terminal is non-compos-mentis at this point). My telecommute plan worked out well, except for the part where I hitched the modem to an "unused" phone jack that was actually the department head's line.

As I became immersed in computers, I quickly fell in love with text processing tools, and came to view typewriters with great alarm. When my sister decided to make a serious bid at writing, I decided that she had to have a word processor, and made another trip to Softek. This time I ended up with a "Leading Edge Model-D", one of the first IBM PC Compatible computers, the "NewWord" word processing program (I had initally wanted to go with WordStar, but the Softek staff explained to me that all the WordStar developers had quit and gone to found NewWord), and a Brother daisy-wheel (remember those?) printer. This worked out well, and my sister was able to use it for quite a number of years before moving to an iMac. (I have the Leading Edge, and it still worked last time I booted it).

Thus emboldened, I also got a Leading Edge from Softek for my father a few years later, though he never really got the hang of it.

When that second Leading Edge bit the dust (power surge, I think) I went back to Softek to replace it, but found that they had moved from Main Street across the bridge to Parkland Plaza in Cayce. They had quite a bit more space there, and were running a sizable repair operation as well as selling equipment. In the few years since my last visit, they had also moved from selling other brand computers to building their own. They were now a white-box operation: You would tell them the specs of what you wanted, and they would put it together from generic parts and slap their brand sticker on the front. My understanding was that they had a profitable contract, or contracts with some State agencies to supply computers with local support.

After that final purchase from them, I kind of lost track again, and didn't check them out until I was back in Columbia for some reason and needed a cable or some sort of part. I went out to Cayce, but Softek was gone. Some googling around established that they still had a (minimal) web site where they promised they could build you a computer, but it seemed like a one-guy operation. (That web site now seems to be gone). I have no idea what happened, but if I had to speculate, I'd think that when Dell and others went to the "build-to-spec" model and added on-site support firms like Softek probably lost a lot of State business. That's just a guess though.

At any rate, from the signs on the door, the successor business in the Parkland Plaza location has moved on as well.

Well, I don't know exactly what's going on here, but something's definitely happening!

This is the lot between Goodyear auto service and The Columbia Athletic Club on Forest Drive, across from The Happy Bookseller. Originally, or perhaps not originally, but before this at any rate, the lot held one of Columbia's three Quincy's Family Steakhouse locations. After Quincy's closed, they tore down half the building to make room for Goodyear, and converted the other half for the trophy store and other businesses, none of which I ever shopped at. Now the old Quincy's building has been completely knocked down, and they are digging a whopping big hole on the property. Of course, as with almost all construction projects where you are interested in the final result, there is no signage indicating what is going to go in there.

The marquee sign also lists "Woodfield's Barber & Beauty", but it appears to me that that may actually be located inside the Columbia Athletic Club building and still a going concern.

Update 29 May 2008: It's going to be an AAA "Super Center".

Update 12 Sep 2008:

The $2.50 Cleaners moved to the strip mall opposite Bruegger's Bagels:

However, they didn't last long, perhaps because they moved next door to a cleaner which was already established at that location:

UPDATE 4 March 2010 -- Nope, I was wrong, they must have just been consolidating and adjusting signage. The $2.50 Cleaners is still there:

Salon De La Lune moved to a Forest Drive location directly opposite Falcon Drive (the A.C. Flora street):

Northeast Trophies moved down Forest Drive to more or less opposite the movie theater and Golden Corral: