Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

This bank building sits on the corner of Trenholm and Decker across from Dent Middle School, catty-cornered from the Staples/Goodwill plaza and across from the Longhorn/Comedy House plaza. For some reason, it has been vacant and derelict since the 1980s. I can't recall what the original tenant was, or what happened to it. Perhaps it was a victim of the Great Savings & Loan Crisis; perhaps during the great bank merger boom it was swallowed up by a chain with a branch close enough that keeping it open didn't make sense. Maybe a teller cleaned out the vault and took off for Mexico..

That the architecture is so obviously bank-ish may explain why no other business has ever bought the building: If you put a restaurant or shoe store there, people's eyes would register "bank" and just skip over it. It doesn't explain, however, why the lot hasn't been sold and the building torn down for something new. There are no real-estate signs on the lot -- it appears that the owner has just given up on the property. I can understand that it might be hard to sell now with Decker in decline (both neighboring plazas are somewhat of hard-luck cases), but I don't recall ever seeing signs there. Access from Decker heading towards Two Notch would be a bit of a problem, but there is access from Trenholm and Decker heading towards Percival, so it's not awful.

At any rate, the clearly legible "CLOSED" sign in the drive through window (still mostly unbroken!) describes the situation more clearly than originally intended.

PS: If you need any CD jewel cases, there's a whole stack of them in a pile in the parking lot on the drive-through side).

UPDATE: Commenter Mike suggests it looks like a C&S branch.
UPDATE: Commenter Jim says South Carolina Federal Savings & Loan

Well, something is going on at Forest Lake Exxon.

I suppose they could just be upgrading the pumps, but then why take down the gas prices from the sign? And usually in an upgrade like that, they try to do it in stages so that there's never a day when they are completely unable to serve customers.

I looked in the window of the convenience store part of the station, and all the food is still in the coolers, and all the tools are still in the car bays, so I'm unsure what's going on. It would be a shame if this place closed as it is one of the last gas stations around which can actually fix anything. I took a slow leak to them a year or so ago, and they had me patched and out of there in under 15 minutes.

I'll check again when I get back in town and see how it turned out.

UPDATE: Commenter Cha Cha says that a "Five Guys" will replace the Exxon.

UPDATE 30 May 2008:

It's official now:

UPDATE 30 June 2008:

They've stripped the Exxon trim from the "patio" roof and have started work inside:

UPDATE 3 Oct 2008 (with pix from 20 Sep 2008):

Still coming along, and looking pretty good.

UPDATE 17 Nov 08:

Well, 5 Guys is now open:

UPDATE 19 December 2017: Add full street address and tags

UPDATE 1 May 2023: Adding map icon.

Richway was the discount arm of Rich's. Now, half of you are thinking Rich's had a discount arm? and the other half are thinking What is Rich's?, but that can't be helped.

The idea of Richway was to be K-Mart, but a little more upscale. (Wal-Mart was not a factor at the time). To accomplish this, they made their store architecture a bit more "modern" and eye-catching and the insides somewhat less cluttered and more pleasant looking. Whether the architecture "worked" was a matter of some dispute. At the time, Mazda had just come out with a car called the RX-7 whose shape was very triangular, and whose ads featured all the "hip" RX-7 owners having triangular garages. When Richway built its stores (Decker Mall, Bush River Mall and Woodhill Mall), the question I heard several times was Why did they put RX-7 garages on the roof?.

I think they did suceed in making their stores a better shopping experience than K-Mart (it didn't take much!), but failed in creating their own distinctive brand and "experience". In fact, the only distinctive part of their branding that I can remember was a sham. In front of their battery of check-out lines, they had a pole with a light-switch on it, and a sign that said something to the effect:

If you ever find all the open lanes have more than two people waiting, flip this switch, and we will open another lane.

This raised two questions: 1) Why should it be the customers' job to monitor Richway's checkout lanes, and 2) what would happen if you actually flipped the switch?

I think the answer to the first question was: It shouldn't be, and the answer to the second was: Nothing. I actually made the experiment during one holiday season when I came in and found about half the lanes open and all backed up; it didn't accomplish anything other than me losing my place in line.

I'm a bit hazy on the circumstances of Richway's downfall, but it happened years before the actual Rich's stores were phased out. It might have been Macy's purchase of the parent chain that did it, or it might just have been that the stores weren't really profitable as the rise of Wal-Mart reshaped the retail world. At any rate, the whole chain went under, and the local Decker and Woodhill stores were aquired by Target (the Bush River store was not), which had a more successful "upscale discount" branding concept. After Target joined the flight from Decker, the building stood empty for a good while then was remade as a self-storage facility, anchoring what remains of Decker Mall (with the DMV anchoring the other end).

UPDATE: SAL (thanks for the link!) says it was a Gold Circle after being Richway and before being Target. I don't really remember that, but I may have been living out of town at the time.

UPDATE 21 Dec 2010: FInally added Gold Circle and Target to the post title.

If it's another day, it must be another Hollywood Video closing. This one is on Garners Ferry Road next to Ruby Tuesday.

UPDATE 23 October 2009: Actually the address is 4500 Devine Street, Garners Ferry doesn't start that soon. I have updated the post title.

UPDATE 29 January 2010 -- Buffalo Wild Wings Grill & Barr is now open in this location:

Here's another furnishings store on the way out of business. It could be a marginal location, or it could be another casualty of the housing market.

Mr. Muffler was a very low-key, "We only do one thing" auto shop on Two Notch. As far as I could tell walking or driving past the place, they were never overwhelmed with work, but never wholly idle either.

"Mr. Muffler" himself was a cheerry 1950s looking cartoon guy who had a big smile as he carried a muffler. In the picture, you can see where he used to be, but the cut-out itself is gone. That makes me think that Mr. Muffler must be a chain with some other locations. Chains like to take all of their branding down from defunct locations while one-off stores don't really care.

This shop was located next to a sketchy trailer park, and all around the park are now signs warning that the park is closed and there is no tresspassing. One of those signs has been affixed to the Mr. Muffler store, making me wonder if a developer bought out the park & Mr. Muffler to mark this whole corner of Two Notch & Pinestraw for development.

UPDATE 30 Jan 2009:

Here's the "Mr. Muffler" cartoon character from the Earl's Mr. Muffler on Sunset Boulevard in West Columbia. (Note that he is facing in the opposite direction from the one which was taken down from the Two Notch store building).

UPDATE 17 March 2010 -- I've added the full street address to the post title. Also, the building has been boarded up now:

UPDATE 11 January 2012 -- More pictures (27 August 2011) of the place boarded up:

UPDATE 30 September 2011 -- at some point someone has torn down the plywood window sheets. I'm thinking this was a break-in, or just random vandalism as they have now been put back up:

UPDATE 10 January 2012 -- As this picture from a few days later (1 October 2011) shows, the property owner has put up stakes around the parking lot to keep people from driving in there. I noticed 18-Wheelers in particular using the lot as an inpromptu pull-off:

UPDATE 28 August 2017 -- Looks like as of 15 August 2017, this place is destined for a tax sale:

UPDATE 13 November 2024 -- Lots going on here, though I'm not sure what or why. Perhaps it's related to the ongoing road work in the area, but but the building has been broken open. I would say partially razed as well, but it's not clear how much was there from the initial cleanout of the building plus the years of neglect. Also taking this time to add a map icon and update the tags.

UPDATE 11 February 2025 -- I suspect most of the new damage was somehow incidental to the road work, which crews seem to be using the lot for storage and porta-potties, but nonetheless the property owner, whoever it is at this point, is under warning for numerous violations:

UPDATE 10 July 2025 -- As mentioned in the comments, it's gone:

Eating at Moes on Main today, I was struck by the sign at University Corner (the small strip mall at the corner of Devine & Main), and how it harked back to an earlier era. Of the businesses listed on its directory

Carolina's
Stuffy's
Bits & Pizzas
Smoothie King
Varsity BIlliards

only Varsity Billiards is still actually there (and to my memory has been there forever). Apparently the wi-fi coffee shop that was there last year didn't last long enough to make it onto the sign, and apparently they are holding off on putting Firehouse Subs up there..

UPDATE 8 Feb 2010: Took the opportunity tonight to take some pictures of the lighted Varsity Billiards sign as it's a classic design (From the same school as the old Redwing Roller Way sign).

During the 1970s, Dutch Square was a major retail hub for Columbia. Columbia Mall in Dentsville had not yet been built, and Columbiana Center in Harbison was not even on the radar. While Dutch Square thrived, the surrounding area thrived as well. Cookesbury Books did a good business across the street, Boozer Shooping Center was at its peak, and Sam Solomon dominated nearby Intersection Center.

At the time, I always assumed that Sam Solomon was a national chain, but I have since found out that it was a Charleston based outfit. As I recall, it had something of a hybrid floor-concept. There were a few "catalog" stores which had only sample items on the floors as opposed to the current nearly universal "all our merchandise is on the floor" sales model. In these stores, you would look at items, and take coupons to the checkout at which point your items would be brought from the warehouse and rung up. At Sam Solomon's, larger items were displayed as samples while smaller iterms were taken by the shoppers themselves to the checkout. Sam Solmon had a little bit of everything, though my memory is that it skewed away from clothes and towards jewelry. I didn't care much about either. Whenever I came, invariably in the company of my cousins making a power-shopping trip to Columbia, I would concentrate on the electronics and gadgets (which I couldn't afford) and the paperback books (which I could -- sometimes). I remember in particularly getting a copy of Asimov's The Stars, Like Dust and a number of "Kenneth Robeson"'s Avenger books.

I don't know the story of Sam Solomon's demise, but have found a New York Times story dating its bankruptcy and takeover by Service Merchandise to 1982. By that time, the Dutch Square area was already losing its luster, and Intersection Center was particularly badly hit. Apart from the vacuum cleaner store at its entrance and Service Merchandise, the anchor, I think every store there turned over or went empty. By that time, I was driving and had a little money, but Service Merchandise never really had anything to interest me. For a while they billed themselves as "America's Leading Jewler", but they were already in decline when they lost that title to Wal-Mart. The last time I went in, it was rather sad. Most of the store was empty except for the central part where they were running a retail operation no bigger than a typical drugstore. I was a little surprised, googling later, to find that they had lasted until 9/11 when the retail crash took them out for good.

Intersection Center never even came close to recovering. I believe about the only operation left there is an ethnic grocery of some sort, and currently the whole tract is up for sale.

UPDATE 5 March 2010: Finally remember to add Service Merchandise to the post title.

UPDATE 16 May 2010: Added full street address, tags.

UPDATE 30 Sep 2010 -- Well, with the ongoing work at Intersection Center someone has (possibly unintentionally) got the Service Merchandise sign illuminated for the first time in 8 years:

UPDATE 22 January 2020: Add map icon, update tags.

I recall that when I was around 6 or 7, Midlands Plaza ran a promotion to get shoppers out during the weekend. There was some sort of ride to entice the children, and the whole thing was promoted on WIS radio. Midlands wasn't where we normally shopped, but I bugged my mother until she took me out to experience the much ballyhooed kiddy-ride. I can't remember what it was now except that it was small, groundbased and freestanding (to make it easier to transport from promotion to promotion, I suppose). I have the impression that it was supposed to hop around the parking lot, but really it didn't matter, because they could not get it started. Apparently there was a gas motor in there somewhere, because they kept pulling on a lawn-mower-like starting cord, and occasionaly the thing would sputter a few strokes, but it would never fire up. And that is a metaphor for the history of Midlands Plaza.

I don't know if this is actually the case, but Midlands Plaza seems to have been conceived as a sister site to Trenholm Plaza (perhaps even the reverse was true?), with a Post Office and A&P anchoring a choice corner site with easy access from major roads, but for some reason the place exhibited a failure-to-thrive for most of the period I can remember. Certainly it was in bad shape by the 70s, bottomed out in the 80s, and has currently come to terms with a post-retail mode of operation.

It is rather appropriate that A&P was the anchor store for Midlands, since that chain itself underwent a similar experience during the same time period. It used to be the case that you could find A&P's distinctive, steeple capped, stores all around Columbia and other area cities. You can still often find the buildings, but the chain itself has withered away. I think part of it was the fact that while grocery stores were getting bigger and bigger, A&P was entrenched in small sites, and didn't make any effort to build bigger until they had finally been leap-frogged by newer chains. Of course for that to happen bespeaks a certain complacency at the management level, perhaps best exemplified by the last A&P advertising campaign that I can recall: A&P: Putting Price & Pride Together Again. It's always risky to run a "we were wrong" campain, and much more so to run a lame "we were wrong" campaign.

After the failure of that campaign, and the closure of the stores at Trenholm & Midlands Plazas, the only other A&P activity I saw in South Carolina was the attempt to establish a "Supercenter" in North Myrtle Beach, something that might have worked if they had done it before Kroger and other big stores moved in, but which in the event went under after no more than a few years. So, with over a hundred years in business, the legacy of A&P, at least in South Carolina, is the (confusing to youngsters, I'm sure) reference in the Waitresses classic "Christmas Wrapping":

A&P has pride in me with the world's smallest turkey..

The store at Trenholm Plaza was torn down and replaced with a Publix, the store at Midlands Plaza became, for a time, Giant Food World (invoking nightmare images of boxcar sized potatoes, and Sequoia-ish brocolli), then I think became a furniture store and finally became empty (but the steeple and wether-vane have withstood the ravages of the years..)

UPDATE: Added picture of old A&P on Sunset Drive.
UPDATE: Added picture of old (but re-roofed & de-steepled) A&P on the Charleston Highway

UPDATE 4 April 2013 -- Well, I wish I had made totally separate posts for all the old A&P buildings, but I was still kind of feeling my way along way back in 2008. That aside, the Midlands Shopping Center A&P building is now gone. Below are pictures from mid 2012 and then March 2013:

I was just reminded today that the Hollywood Video attached to the Food Lion plaza on Two Notch Road near Dick Dyer Toyota is gone. A quick google reveals that the whole chain is in Chapter 11 Bankruptcy, and is closing "underperforming" stores. It appears that they made a fatal mistake in trying to buy their nearest competitor and become a solid #2 to Blockbuster's #1. I think the handwriting is on the wall for most video rental places. If it's not Netflix, it will be Internet or cable-box downloads (legal or not..)

On the other hand, when Hollywood closes a store, it has a big "to the bare walls" sale, which is a nice touch.

UPDATE 23 October 2009: Added the street address (3810) to the post title

UPDATE 20 December 2011 -- Well, something has finally moved into this space, HomeSmart, which seems to be a household furniture and electronics rental operation:

UPDATE 12 October 2020: Updating tags and adding map icon.