Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

Although I've never eaten at a local Quiznos, I believe I did eat at a DC area location once, and recall it as pretty good. Of course that may be partly because one of the other guys I was eating with was a nice guy but had an interesting personality quirk such that he was never completely satisfied with anything, so at least I liked it better than he did! I find it a little bit interesting that the name they use in their signs has no apostrophe and has the singular, "Sub", not "Subs". You almost have the image that if you were the second guy to get there, the sub would be gone.

This Quiznos, the latest of a number of the chain's outlets to close around town, was at the intersection of Airport Boulevard with the Charleston Highway, across the street from Piggy Park and at the edge of Airport Square with the closed Food Lion. The building looks to have been some other type of fast food outlet before the Quiznos.

I think the door note in this case is pretty straight-forward and classy.

The main Airport Square building is like two sides of a square, with one side parallel to the Charleston Highway and the other parallel to Airport Boulevard. While I was taking these pictures, I noticed a family picking some sort of fruit from trees growing at the end of the building that comes closest to Airport Boulevard. I can't think what is in season now, and I didn't want to bother them by heading towards them and maybe make them think I was some sort of Airport Square guy coming to say "stop that" -- I'll have to go back and see what that was.

(Hat tip to commenter Tom)

UPDATE 4 Feb 2011 -- It's now open again as Best of China restaurant:

(Hat tip to commenter Andrew)

This closing has been talked about long enough that I actually got these photos last year, knowing I would have to deploy them eventually. This Hardee's has been a fixture in the old Five Point's Sears parking lot for years. I think it may even date back to when Gene's Pig & Chick across College Street would have been its competition. (It certainly does not date back to Hardee's original space-age designs such as at Silver City or The Eggroll Station though).

This story from The State last year tells how the Hardee's is going to be replaced with a Chick-Fil-A, and how it will all be carefully landscaped in accordance to the new Five Points streetscaping guidelines. Color me unimpressed. You have only to compare US-17 as it passes through Mount Pleasant where everything is set-back so far and blends in so blandly that you can't even tell you are passing stores that want to sell you something with US-17 in the Myrtle Beach area where even failed and vacant storefronts are exuberant to see how guidelines can suck the life out of a road. Not to mention this quote:

"Chick-fil-A is a business of high quality and we anticipate this development will add great character to the already diverse and eclectic makeup of Five Points," she said.

Of really? Replacing one national fast-food chain (which is actually currently on the rebound) with another national fast-food chain will add character and diversity to Five Points? I guess character and diversity aren't what they once were..

(Hat tips to commenters Tom, Mike D, Larry & Jim)

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Let's Dish was a take & bake operation in Sparklebery Crossing at the intersection of Sparkleberry and Clemson Roads. It's a regional chain, but I believe this was the last location in South Carolina. Personally I don't really understand the appeal of the concept. I can certainly understand not wanting to actually cook at home, especially involved dishes, but it seems to me that take & bake still leaves you with dishes and silverware to clean up, plus you don't get out of the house. Of course I realize not everyone actively dislikes eating at home as I do, but it still seems a minimal benefit. Steak Out seems to have failed with a similar concept, but as far as I know, Piggly Wiggly's "Dream Dinners" take & bake is still going.

I think Sparklebery Crossing seems to have dodged the bullet of perceived failure -- so far. They have had Coldstone Creamery, D's Wings, Al Amir, and Za's Pizza all go under, which is a lot for such a new development, but to date they have managed to get reasonably top-tier replacements (though D's was vacant for quite a wihle).

(Hat tip to commenter Jason)

Columbia Northeast Drive is the official name of the easternmost little access road from Two Notch back into the Big Lots / Dunkin' Donuts plaza on Two Notch Road just west of Spring Valley. Both the main plaza and this little side strip-mall have been down at the heels for years though they have generally avoided vacancies. Aside from having the only Peurto Rican restaurant in Columbia (that I know of anyway), the strip also has the only Indian Restaurant in the Northeast.

La Pizza Cucina was, I think in the storefront now occupied by San Juan (which itself used to be at the bottom of the strip parallel to Two Notch at one time). A, personal web calendar (apparently not updated since 2004) describes La Pizza Cucina thus:

La Pizza Cucina

Serving gourmet pizza pies and over 100 beers and wines to choose from, this quaint little pizza parlor offers you the infectious hospitality of a "Cheers" styled pub. Come eat here once, and you're a friend for life. "There's edible and there's Incredible" - La Pizza Cucina.

I suspect the restaurant supplied the text to the performers as I think it is pretty close to how they used to advertise. I'm saying the place closed in 2007 because it is not in the 2008 phonebook but it was still in a newspaper restaurant listing (which are notoriously slow to fix closures) in February of 2008.

I had only two problems with La Pizza Cucina:

1) I expected "gourmet" pizza to be, you know, good, and instead found it pretty mediocre.

2) The staff, at least on shift the one time I went, was rude. In particular, there was a table of teenage boys -- being teenage boys. They weren't thugs, they weren't trying to create a disturbance, they were just having a good time. One of them rocked his chair onto the back legs, and the manager came down on him like a ton of bricks. I thought it was totally inappropriate. No, it's not good for the chairs, but your restaurant chair is not going to be handed down to your grandkids. If something absolutely had to be said, it could have been said politely.

Anyway, I never went back.

I don't get onto Farrow Road that often, and in some cases it surprises me when I do since my mental geography for that corridor is pretty vague. It's another one of those streets that seems to have seen better days, with bygone restaurants like The Fountain Bleu Club that are fixtures in phonebooks year after year, but are now long gone.

Here's another form that era. The first ad is from the 1970 Southern Bell phonebook, but the second one from the 1985 edition is almost exactly the same, except for the change in phone number, and the ominous reduction in the number of open days from "7" to "6".

I don't know exactly when the Farrow Road Drive Inn closed, but the building is still in service as a restaurant, now operating as The Paper Moon Cafe, and is apparently going to be annexed into Columbia proper:

This annexation is part of the City’s initiative to bring in those parcels of land that are part of another jurisdiction, but are surrounded by the City of Columbia. These are known as Donut Holes. These areas pose a number of challenges to the City that can be addressed through annexation. They can often cause inefficiencies in the delivery of services due to confusion about jurisdiction. Also, if the land is in a jurisdiction with a different approach to code enforcement, these areas can negatively impact the quality of life for adjacent City residents. Such inefficiencies and the costs to taxpayers are germane to City and County property both, which results in a greater impact to City residents since they pay City and County taxes.

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Recommend Approval. This property is commercially zoned within Richland County and is currently being utilized as a restaurant with frontage on Farrow Road. The property is contiguous to the City Limits north across I-277 with RS-3 (Single-Family Residential) zoning and east by single-family residences and offices that are zoned RS-3 and C-1 (Office and Institutional). In that the property is occupied by a restaurant which is a permitted use within the C-3 zoning classification, the C-3 zoning is appropriate at this location.

OK, in case you wondered why yesterday's post about Andy's Deli on Parklane started out with such a mediocre picture -- it was like this.

I had xeroxed the restaurant section from the 1985 Southern Bell phonebook, and was deciding what to try and get pictures of. I saw Andy's Deli and a Parklane address and thought to myself "Oh, I know what that was", and went and took these pictures of Albert's Deli. I even started writing up the post that way, then happened to check the "7260 Parklane Road" address in Google Maps, and the spot that came up was way off from where I thought it should be. Then I checked the actual address of Albert's and found it was 7358, not 7260.

Thinking son-of-a-gun, I was completely wrong I rewrote the post, and found a picture I had taken for the comic store that used to be in the same strip that happened to include the current Monterrey / former Andy's off at the edge, and went with it. All the while I was also thinking, but didn't Albert's used to be something else?.

Then I remembered to look in the 1998 phonebook I actually have a copy of here at home. Albert's is *not* in that one, so I went searching for what was at 7358, and lo-and-behold, it was Andy's. So, sometime between 1985 and 1998, Andy's moved from the Monterrey site to the Albert's site, and sometime between 1998 and now, it closed.

As for Albert's itself, I stopped there a year or so ago. I think I was going to or coming from the old Sears Repair Center on Parklane. I have to say it did not knock me over. The food was OK, but as I recall, there were no booths, and you had to take your cup back to the counter for refills, so it would never be a hangout of mine.

UPDATE 14 February 2020: Update tags, add map icon.

(oops! photo screw-up -- I'll get a better one in an update!)

As promised, better picture:

I don't actually know why Parklane Road exists, or conversely why Decker Boulevard exists. I can only guess that once-upon-a-time, before all the roadwork on Trenholm and Two Notch in Dentsville, these two roads did not dovetail together as they do now and really were two roads instead of one road with two names. Anyway, like its sibling Decker, Parklane has over the years "failed to thrive". Considering that it is a corridor between two Interstates, and feeds Columbia Mall, it's hard to say why exactly, but it's not been prime retail or restaurant territory.

I had totally forgoten than this Monterrey next to the old comic store and Sounds Familiar had been an Andy's Deli back in the 1980s. The ad is from the 1985 Southern Bell phonebook. I'm not sure when Andy's moved out (keeping the Lum's Hotdogs location on Greene Street), but it seems like Monterrey has been there forever now.

UPDATE 20 April 2010: Added "better" picture. Better in that the right storefront is centered. Unfortunately the sun went away though..

Swensen's was a fairly popular restaurant chain in the 1980s. I'm not sure I ever went to the Columbia location (now The Hunter Gatherer) at the corner of Main & College Streets, but almost anywhere we went on a trip, there would be a Swensen's. I know for sure there was one on The Market in Charleston (now an Applebee's, I think) , and we ran into them on class trips to DC and Florida as well. The ad above from the 1985 Southern Bell phonebook has the logo I recall.

Swensen's started in San Francisco as an ice cream stand, but by the time it franchaised and locations hit the Southeast, they were casual dining restaurants (with ice cream, of course) and I think I had burgers there more often than anything frosty. Their fries were a bit unusual in that rather than being longer than they were wide, they were sort of square and waffle-hatched.

According to Wikipedia during the 1990s, the chain shrunk from 400 stores to about 200, and when it started to expand again, it was mostly overseas. I think the Columbia store closed during that wave of shrinkage. The current tenant in the building, The Hunter Gatherer brewpub has left the interior in a rather rough (if interesting) form. I suspect it was somewhat less distinctive as a Swensen's but I could be wrong. I would be interested if anyone can recall whether Swensen's had the main-floor and catwalk layout used by THG.

UPDATE 16 April 2010: Added Campus Club South and TW Muldoons to the post title and identified what year the ad is from. Added The Quarter Moon to title.

UPDATE 16 October 2023: Here is a story on the history of Swensen's. Apparently the orignal store is still around after the franchaise operation collapsed.

Also adding map icon and updating tags.

The Daily Grind was one of probably hundreds of coffee-shops of that name across the country. Not that it was part of a chain -- it just seems to be a mildly clever name for a coffee-shop. I only stopped there once. As I recall, it opened when the concept of espresso drinks was pretty new, at least for those of us not in New York or the Pacific Northwest. (If you'll recall, in the terrible Bruce Willis movie Hudson Hawk they had to explain to the audience what a cappucino was). Certainly it was long before Columbia got a Starbucks. Frankly, I can't remember being either pleased or displeased at the coffee, and Rosewood was enough out of my Columbia haunts (which I was only hitting on weekends anyway as I was out of town at that point) that I just never got back. I'm not sure when the place closed. It's listed in the 1998 Bellsouth phonebook, so I'm saying early 2000s.

Compusouth I wasn't aware of at all. I have never had any luck getting parts at these small computer storefronts. They can fix your PC or sell you one, but if you want an EIDE controller or whatever, you'll have more luck at Office Depot. (I really miss CompUSA in Augusta which was very good for parts, Best Buy -- not so much). Again, I don't know when it closed, but as they haven't gotten around to taking down the sign yet, I'm saying late 2000s.

The place is currently a lacrosse equipment store. I didn't even know we had lacrosse players in Columbia..

As I was coming out of Staples the other day, I noticed that Cici's Pizza Buffet in Fashion Place, the hard-luck plaza at the corner of Decker & Trenholm Extension was closed. Frankly, I had only been vaguely aware that it was there. I kind of took Cici's off my list of places to try when a soldier in Augusta told me that the one on Washington Road was the worst pizza he'd ever had and he'd had a lot of bad pizza. Now, it could have been a purely local issue, or he could have just been wrong (after all, could it really be worse than Chuck E Cheese?), but I figured Why risk it? and have yet to darken a Cici's door.

Cici's is not the first pizza restaurant to close in Fashion Place as The Italian Oven blazed that trail years ago. The first day I noticed it, there were still some guys inside doing inventory-looking stuff, and as of today there is still a lot of equipment and pizza boxes in there.

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