Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

I suppose it dilutes the concept and Columbia-anity of this blog a bit to do Grand Strand posts, but I said I would way back in the Mission Statement, and I've always considered the Grand Strand as a disjoint suburb of Columbia anyway.

The Hammock Shop (now "Shops") has been a Pawleys Island landmark since forever, and for most of that time (or for most of my life anyway), it has been anchored by two unchanging shops, The Original Hammock Shop (which sells the famous Pawleys Island rope hammocks) and the General Store.

The product mix at the General store has changed over the years, (it doesn't have the "horehound" candy canes we used to get there as kids) but it's always been identifiably the same place, with the same feel. In fact, the local paper, The Coastal Observer printed a story last year that pointed out the historicity of the place:

While doing renovations at their business, David and Alicia Norris made a discovery.

They knocked down a wall in the back of the General Store at the Hammock Shops to make way for a coffee bar and found a wallet they suspect has been hidden there for about 36 years. Based on the contents, it appears to have belonged to a child.

The wallet is made of brown, embossed leather with stitching around the edges and contains four photographs and $2.65 in change, two silver dollars, a 50-cent piece, a dime and five pennies.

The photos are of a young boy and girl, who David believes are the wallet's owner and his older sister. The boy looks to be about 5 and judging from the style of clothing in the photos and the dates on the coins, David said he thinks the wallet was lost sometime around 1971.

The section of wall that was torn down had built-in waist-high cabinets with a few inches of empty space both behind and underneath the cabinets, David said. He suspects someone either set the wallet on top of the cabinet and it fell behind it, or it was dropped on the floor and got kicked underneath.

There was a followup story later about finding the (now middle aged) man who lost the wallet and returning it to him.

That's a rather roundabout way of saying I was shocked in January when I stopped by the Hammock Shops, and the General Store building was empty.

A sign on the door pointed me South down US-17 a few blocks (and on the other side of the road) to the new location. As it turned out, I was able to talk to the owners for a little bit about what prompted the move, and I see how it made a lot of sense from their point of view, but it's still very odd to see a new tenant in that particular spot. Actually it seems to be two tenants. The Candy Cottage has been in the Hammock Shops for a number of years now, off to the right of the General Store building. I like it a good bit, and have gotten a number of presents for my neice there. I think Pawleys Island Mercantile is a new operation, and seems to be trying to fill the same general niche the General Store filled. I wish both operations well, but am still sad to see the General Store move.

UPDATE 17 Nov 08: Well, that didn't last long. The General Store didn't even make it through the Summer in its new location. I guess that moving an established store with 40+ years of history and strong associations with its original site was always going to be fraught, and the new location was not very eye-catching, but I had hoped for better. Oh well.

As I was taking one of the pictures for the Circuit City post, I found myself standing in front of a little store called Serendipity that I had never noticed before. I had no idea what it was, but looking in the windows (which works better in person than with my camera..) quickly established that it had been a florist shop and probably a rather interesting one. It just goes to show how even a medium sized place like Columbia has much more stuff than I can keep track of. Apparently a fair sized parcel goes with the shop, and it will be interesting to see what happens with the land.

UPDATE 21 May 2009: Looks like it's open again as a florist Forget-Me-Not:

One thing to remember about Two Notch Road is that is is also US Highway-1, and that at one time that meant a good bit. Back before Interstates, US-1 carried a lot of the national North/South traffic, and many of those travellers needed some place to sleep. For them, Columbia seemed like a logical place to stop, and Two Notch Road still has a number of the motels that were built for them to park their cars and rest their heads.

It doesn't still have them all, of course. I remember two in particular that are now gone. Dreamland Motel once stood where the Lowes on Two Notch now stands. Since we lived in town, we never stayed there of course, but after long-haul traffic on US-1 started dying down, they decided to earn some some extra money (or perhaps it was just goodwill) by having Red-Cross approved swimming lessons taught in the summer at their pool. I figure that between there and the pool at my cousins' country club, I must have taken Red Cross "Advanced Beginners" four times. My mother would drop my sister and me off at Dreamland for the lesson and go run errands. At least she did the first time, but it developed that for some reason my sister completely refused to get in the pool (and she was a stubborn kid) so I may have finished the lessons there alone. After that, the place was torn down to put up the Spring Valley Theaters. The other motel I recall was the Chat 'n' Rest at the corner of Two Notch and Forest Drive at Providence Hospital. We never had swim lessons there, and in fact never set foot on the property, but I always used to think, riding by, how friendly the name sounded. You might almost imagine the place had a screen porch with rockers.

There are a number of these US-1 motels still hanging in on Two Notch, and I'm sure they are all perfectly legitimate places and I'm not at all saying anything libelous about them. However, as the US-1 traffic died off, and as newer motels were built at all the Interstate exits, you started to read things in the paper and observe things driving down Two Notch at night that might lead you to believe that some of the motels on Two Notch might perhaps rent their rooms on a basis more hourly than daily, and I'm afraid to say that it's in my mind that The Thoroughbred Motel might have been one of those. Whatever the basis of its operation, it finally folded a few years ago, and I can't imagine that whoever buys the property will leave it standing, classic sheetmetal horseheads or no.

UPDATE: Be sure to read the comments. I was wrong and Throughbred was an absolutely legit, family, place!

my grandmother was very proud to run a family motel she would not tolerlate the “working girl’s” walking on her parking lot or let them use her Motel and would chase them across the street

UPDATE 28 Feb 09:

Well, lots of changes here. First, on 29 Jan 2009, we see the place marked off with danger tape:

(By the way -- Note the horse-theme wallpaper inside the office!)

Then on 13 Feb 2009, demolition is well underway:

Finally by 25 Feb 2009 (when I got back into town after a trip), the whole place is gone:

UPDATE 31 March 2009: Added the Yellow Pages ad from the 1970 Southern Bell phonebook.

I noticed the other day that this Food Lion on Taylor Street just above Two Notch is closed. I know that Benedict has been doing a lot the last few years to try and upgrade the area a bit (the new sports stadium on Two Notch being the biggest part of this), and it's unclear (to me) if this closing reflects a success or failure. The sign in the window is a bit ambiguous, but it seems to tilt towards this being an upfit for this Food Lion location (and Food Lion has been doing some nice work remodelling their older stores). On the other hand, going businesses tend to bend over backwards to stay open during remodelling (I'm pretty sure the Pawleys Island Food Lion was open during the course of its remodelling), and there's no sign in the window to the effect of "Pardon our Progress!" or "Changing to Serve You Better!", so we'll see.

UPDATE 28 Jan 2010: The place is now "Allen University Mall", so not Benedict at all. Also, added the street address to the post title.

UPDATE 17 March 2010 -- Here's a picture after the remodel:

UPDATE 20 Oct 2010: Added "Store #719" to post title.

UPDATE 9 March 2011: Changed closing date based on discussion in the comments.

Red Wing Rollerway is on Decker Blvd adjoining and behind Zorba's and the old "Aloha/Los Alazanes" restaurant. I'll admit that I've never been inside. In fact, I haven't put on a pair of skates since about 1979, which wasn't too long after I finally figured out how they worked. We used to skate on the road at home, and I could figure out how to roll down the hill, but the actual "make progress on level ground" part of skating took me another decade to figure out. Timing-wise, I just missed the "skate-key" era on one side, and the roller-blade era on the other. (We seem to be into the "Wheelie" era now..)

You have to love the Red Wing sign. Yes, it could use a little maintanence, especially on the North side, but it really speaks to a vanished design aesthetic that I really like. If someone did one like that now, it would be self-conscious and "retro".

For now, it appears that the place is still open for business while it is for sale. While I was taking these pictures, I saw a pickup deliver some sort of arcade game or pinball machine, and several people were in and out the front doors. I hope that if someone does buy it, they keep it open. It's not like Decker needs another strip mall..

UPDATE 2 October 2008:

Well, it's official, Red Wing Rollerway is gone. I noticed the Sold sign last week and interior demolition is already underway.

I stopped by today, and the folks working on gutting the place were kind enough to let me go in (the first time I'd been inside) and take some pictures. They did not know what the building was going to be used for, but didn't think it would be torn down. It was kind of surreal seeing those two disco-balls sitting down on the floor like that. If you keep watch on the dumpsters you could probably latch on to one. I think somebody alread scored the skates pictured..

UPDATE 31 March 2009:

Well, the Redwing building is open again as KNC Trading one of those companies you see but that you're never sure exactly just what it is that they do. They've preserved about as much of the Redwing sign as we could reasonably expect (probably because since they don't do retail business, a spiffy new sign to lure customers is a useless expense).

UPDATE 13 July 2009: If you enjoyed this blog post, you may be interested that some of the images are available from the Columbia Closings web store.

UPDATE 10 August 2022: Adding map icon.

Two Notch is an interesting road. Even though parts of it are pretty industrial or heavy retail, there are still all sorts of odd little residential areas and one-off businesses. The Plant Barn (on Spring Ct. ,in between Pinestraw Road and Arcadia Lakes Drive) was one of them.

I can't say much about The Plant Barn as I'm not much of a plant person. My mother was, and I think she went there sometimes, but she never took me (I certainly would not have volunteered). I do know that for years I saw the sign on Two Notch and thought "maybe I'll turn down that road someday", but never did while it was still in business. About ten years ago, they put a little note up on their sign to the effect that they appreciated everyone's business, but were closing down.

Spring Ct. is just a spur off of Two Notch and doesn't go through to anything, but I found the other interesting business there entirely by chance and from the other side. Growing up, since I never could seem to get to sleep at night, I was very aware of the train tracks that ran between Two Notch and Formosa Drive. Trains would come through late every night with a lot of click-clacking and horn blowing. Furthermore, the "cliff" the tracks ran by had the only cave I was ever aware of in the Columbia area. Years later, on a really nice Spring day, I decided to walk the tracks from Arcadia Lake Drive to Satchelford Road. It was an interesting experience, seeing the back side of everything, including a very odd set of buildings I couldn't figure out. It turns out there's a bait farm (Springdale Bait Farm) on Spring Ct, right off of Two Notch. Who knew?

When Circuit City came to town, their first location (as I recall it anyway) was on Two Notch Road, by the first Columbia Mall entrance. I didn't go there very often because, in short, I had no money at the time. I also found that the salesmen, who worked on commission, were rather predatory, and it was hard to get a close look at anything without one swooping down. In the late 80s or maybe the early 90s, they changed their corporate direction to be a "big box" player, and moved out of their original store (which now houses Wes Bolick bedrooms) and around the corner, so to speak, into a large store at Capitol Centre.

By this time, I had a real job, and a little money, so I would go browsing a bit more often. They always seemed to have a lot of interesting electronics (and appliances, which didn't really seem to fit with the rest of their concept). I found that if I stayed away from the TVs and large stereo systems, I could generally look unmolested by staff, but that checkout was now a big pain. At one time, Radio Shack had the most annoying checkout experience in electronics retail, belying their supposed tech savy by writing everything down on a pad by hand and running a total with a calculator and then nosing about your phone number and address. After Radio Shack reformed, Circuit City seemed to take up some of their nosiness, and I recall on a day when I was in a bad mood anyway, and just wanted to pay cash for a $10 tape for data backup that I rebelled when they started digging for all my personal data, and ended up boycotting the chain for about 5 years.

In that interval, they fell upon hard times. I think part of it was the DIVX debacle. Back when it was clear that technology was advancing to the point that VHS would be obsolete and that the next medium for distributing movies to retail would be some sort of CD sized disc, there were two contenders. One of these was, of course, DVD, and the other was DIVX (which has nothing to do with the current video codec called DivX, btw). The difference between the two formats (from a consumer perspective) was that DVD was "forever" while DIVX discs could only be played for a limited time period before expiring (making each purchase essentially a rental). Circuit city backed DIVX in a big way, and apparently shaded the truth in a lot of their sales-floor pitch, earning a lot of consumer bad-will.

In the meantime, Best Buy was challenging them with even bigger stores and more tech choices, and they have never completely recovered. None of that, I suppose, has anything to do with the move of this particular store from Capitol Centre to their current location out on Two Notch near Sandhills -- that was just the combination of the decline of Capitol Centre and the general flight from the Columbia Mall/Decker Blvd area out towards the north-east. (Once again, we can see that it wasn't lack of parking that did it.. :-) I ended my boycot years ago, and have been in their new store a number of times. It seems to me that Best Buy is still better at computer stuff (though neither compares to the late, lamented CompUSA in that regard), but that Circuit City is better than it was. Certainly they seem to have done away with commissions and you can generally browse more comfortably now, and the last time I bought something, they didn't ask for my phone number at all.

Doing the post on Forest Lake Park made me think of Forest Lake TV.

Why? Because the original (as far as I know) location for Forest Lake TV was in the Forest Lake Shopping Center, directly across from the park:

You can still see the stenciling for "Forest Lake TV" across the top edge of the building, though there is now a frame shop in the location. Back in the 60s and early 70s, this was the place we called whenever one of our TVs was acting up. In the case of our floor model (a large 25-inch) black & white behemoth, they would make a house call, fix it there if they could, or otherwise cart it back to the shop. In the case of our 12-inch black & white portable (purchased after I assured my mother that I could fix the big tv -- I "fixed" it all right..), we would cart it to the shop ourselves. In some cases, when the fix was more than just changing a tube (kids, these were like incandescent light bulbs inside your tvs and radios! :-), the set might sit for weeks at the shop awaiting parts. This always seemed unreasonable to me (a kid missing all his shows..) but my parents seemed to feel the guys there knew what they were doing. I think we called them a few times after getting our color TV, but gradually it seemed that TVs were something you didn't fix. New sets were full of more integrated circuits and fewer components that could be swapped out one by one (to be fair, new sets were generally more reliable from the get-go as well).

I think this trend hurt Forest Lake TV, and sometime in the 70s or 80s, they moved to a location I considered a bit more out of the way and a little downscale, a site on Covenant Road near Trenholm park:

In this case as well, you can still see the stenciling for "Forest Lake TV" if you look hard. I think they had also added "and VCRs" at this time as well. I was living out of town by this point, so I never brought anything to them, and I'm pretty sure I would have heard if my sister or parents did, but I would drive by from time to time, see that they were still open and think "that's nice".

Sometime after that, they moved again, just a little ways down Covenant to a place that struck me as a bit more downscale still:

I'm guessing from the "Y2K" (remember that?) signage in the window, that this would have been the late 90s. After that, well, VCRs got so cheap that nobody ever had them repaired, and I don't think DVD players were even considered fixable. Sometime in 2006, I think, I was back in town, and the old color TV finally blew. I debated whether it was worth having fixed (it was about a 1978 model..) and called Forest Lake TV to see what it would take. I got an answering machine with a Mexican accent, so I'm guessing the place changed hands at or before the final move. I never followed up on it because I started moving my stuff back into town and just set up my TV from Aiken, and by the time I considered it again, TV technology was clearly changing too quickly to even consider fixing the old set.

Out of curiosity, I did call the number on the sign after taking the picture a few days ago, and it's been disconnected, so I guess the place's 40 year history has come to a close..

UPDATE 3 Feb 2009:

When I drove by the Forest Lake TV building today on my way to Moe's, there was a crowd gathered outside. I turned around and went back to see what was going on. The whole side of the parking lot was littered with VCRs, TVS, cassette decks, tuners amplifiers, vaccum tubes -- the works, and a crowd of people had gathered to rummage through the detritus.

I talked with one guy who seemed to be in charge of the building, and he said that the rent had been unpaid since last May and they finally got the OK from the Sherrif to clean out the building and throw everything to the curb. He expressed some amazement as to the sheer amount of equipment stored in the space and said it took several hours just to get all of it out and that there had been much more before people started picking through it (which he was encouraging). There were even enough large screen TVs to cordon off most of the parking lot to keep traffic from getting out of hand.

UPDATE 7 July 2010: Added two more pictures of the second location exterior above. For the record, the second building is not on Covenant Road as I said above, but on Bethel Church Road (and I have updated the post title to that effect), and is in fact, the old Ravenwood Pharmacy building. Also, it appears someone (perhaps the church next door?) is now using the end of the pharmacy building closest to Dollar General for storage:

Capitol Centre is a hard-luck strip mall directly across from Columbia Mall (it shares access from the loop road around the Columbia Mall parking lot). It has never prospered, and as Columbia Mall has declined, it has done even worse. Most of the places there that have come and gone, I didn't care about at all, but there were a few that caught my notice.

The Capitol Centre Theatres were one such place:

This was a typical multiplex, built before the current fad for stadium seating, not bad not great. I think its main problem was that being only a parking-lot away from the (twice dead and resurrected) Columbia Mall theaters, it was hard to establish a unique identity or to make it the default theater of habbit for locals. Back when Pat Berman was still doing movie reviews in The State, she did an interview with a local theater manager at a time when several local theaters were going under, and asked him if the market were overbuilt. He replied that no, it was "under-fannied" (too few fannies on seats). I think circumstances conspired to make Capitol Place Theater under-fannied.

You would think that working movie projectors would be valuable and salable assets, at least until the digital switchover of the last few years, but apparently not:

Not much of a theater without projectors in the auditoriums, but it wouldn't take much to put the lobby back in service:

This lets us date the closing to no earlier than 28 Jan 2000 when Eye of the Beholder opened:

It also lets us pinpoint the proximate cause of the theater's closure: Robin Williams

UPDATE 29 September 2017 -- Changed the post title to Capitol 8 Cinemas from Capitol Centre Theatre based on an old phonebook. Also added the street address from same.

It seems to me there have always been fabric stores on this part of Forest Drive. Even with Rogers Brothers move to Divine, there's still Forest Lake Fabrics across the street near the former Frans. I do think there are fewer in general nowdays though. I suspect people (and to be non politically correct, women mostly) who can sew are a declining breed. When I was little, a fabric store was about the lowest place on the food chain of "stores my mother drags me to". Maybe paint stores with their endless color chips were lower. I haven't been in a fabric store in years, so I don't know if this is still true, but at the time, all the dyes on the fabrics were somewhat volatile so that your eyes would start to tear up almost immediately as you walked in. I don't know how people worked there; I guess they developed immunity. About the only thing to do while my mother looked at bolt after bolt of fabric, was to play under the tables, which for some reason generally seemed to all have a raised platform under the table top. In the cases where the table also had a skirt, you could go under the skirt and sit on the platform and pretend that you were in a little fort. There were generally also a number of yardsticks to play around with, but in the end there was still only so much you could do to keep away the thought that you were in a store with NOTHING BUT CLOTH and that your eyes were watering.

The move of Rogers Brothers adds to the recent loss of Tuesday Morning and leaves Trenholm Plaza with two vacancies. In general the place has either been lucky or well managed over the years, and vacancies have always been made good (even after the fires at Ponderosa and Fresh Market. I hope that continues to be the case.

UPDATE 27 July 2010: Rogers Brothers has now closed after their move.