Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

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.

I think this is the first post I've written about a place where the doors are still open, but the writing is definitely on the wall for Sofa Express: Literally. And the writing says things like "Chapter 11 Bankruptcy" and "Store Closing Forever".

I'm not sure if this says anything about The Village At Sandhills, but this is the second place out there that I've seen close. On the other hand, the time you are most likely to get a new sofa is when you buy a new house, so it's more likely related to the housing market than Sandhills itself.

UPDATE 10 March 2010 -- Well, after being a "Haloween" store on a temporary basis, it looks like the long-term future for this space will be as another Gold's Gym:

(also added full street address to post title).

UPDATE 21 May 2010 -- Looks like this location is being used by Gold's for presale only. The actual gym will be in the neighboring former Ashley Furniture Homestore location

UPDATE 14 July 2010: Well, the presale (and temporary gym) is closed. The new Gold's in the former Ashley building is completely set up and running now, and this building is again empty.

UPDATE 25 April 2018 -- This location is now Value City Furniture:

I never went inside this location of Tuesday Morning. I had never quite figured out what kind of a store it was supposed to be, except that it didn't seem like somehing I would be interested in, and was rarely open. I finally went inside the Pawleys Island location, and decided that the concept was essentially Big Lots by Martha Stewart, although it wasn't quite as bad as that sounds since there were a number of toys and odd bits of electronics I found interesting.

I don't know the exact date the Trenholm Plaza location closed. Even though I go to the Post Office around the corner almost every day, I hadn't noticed until this morning that Tuesday Morning was gone. Just to see what would happen, I called their number, and it was not disconnected (though noone answered), so I'm guessing the closing was within a month.

It will be interesting to see what goes into that location. Trenholm Plaza has done very well over the last 40 years in remaining viable while other strip malls have gone into decline almost as soon as they opened. (Look, for instance, at Midlands Plaza, which was very similar to Trenholm Plaza in its (brief) heyday).

UPDATE 23 April 2009: First, Tuesday Morning is back on Forest Drive in the old La-Z-Boy store.

And second, Rosso's Italian Restaurant is now open in the old Trenholm Plaza Tuesday Morning storefront. The menu looks promising! (and there's a nice review here)

UPDATE 2 June 2009: Added link to Rosso's review above.

UPDATE 2 Marcy 2023: Updating tags, adding map icon.

UPDATE 18 May 2023: Changing "Trenholm Plaza" to actual street address to post title.

Dixie Used Furniture was on Gervais Street below Assembly. If you were heading down towards the river, it would be on the left hand side of the street in the building which I think became the Vista's brew-pub and now houses some other restaurant.

Dixie was a type of store which was once fairly common but is now almost gone: The real "used furniture" aka "junk" store. To walk into Dixie as a child was to enter a world of wonder. The building was not air-conditioned, so there were always big fans keeping up a running chatter, and there was dust on pretty much everything. There were a few hanging light fixtures under the high ceiling, but parts of the store were always in shadow.

Although there was used furniture to justify the store name, it seemed to me that the main business was used appliances, and the center aisle was lined with rows of more or less decrepit refrigerators, stoves and washers. There were sometimes old vending machines too, and I think for a time the owners kept operating a Coke machine which had a manual crank like a Model-T. You paid the owner, then turned the crank, and a cold bottle came out the bottom.

My favorite part of the place was the bookshelves. These were alongside the left (closest to Assembly) side of the store, and could have absolutely anything that had ever been printed on them. The books ranged from gems like copies of the original Tom Swift books (Tom Swift and His Sky Train, Tom Swift and His Giant Searchlight etc) to semi-current hardbacks (a copy of Philip K. Dick's The Galactic Pot Healer [man I ended up hating that book!]) to old pulp magazines and trashy 60s & 70s paperbacks. After that, I liked to walk the aisles of junk: from old kitchen gadgets, toasters juicers and the like to odd electrical items I couldn't figure out.

My only problem with Dixie and other used furniture stores was that my mother was really into the "furniture" aspect of them, and it took her much longer to peruse that than it did for me to scour the shelves and sift the junk, leaving long periods of boredom after the initial excitement. The space race was on during the years of her heaviest visitations, and I recall clearly a dream in which I was on a rocket to the moon which she demanded stop at a used furniture store on the way..

As the years went on, the category of "used furniture store" gradually went by the wayside. I think that part of it was growing affluence and the migration of the best pieces of furniture to "antique" stores, the other part may have been the value of the real estate vs the value of selling junk. I very much suspect that was the case for Dixie with its gentrifying Vista location. At any rate, I think it and its sister store closed sometime in the 80s. Too bad. It sounds like they're considering "improving" our washing machines like they improved our toilets. A place with a row of used top loaders might not be so bad..

Wally & Crumb was a small cookie bakery on Forest Drive next to the La-Z-Boy warehouse near Trenholm Plaza. I stopped by a couple of times and got some chocolate chip cookies which were perfectly OK, but I think in the end the place had four problems:

1) Location

In general, a cookie store is not a destination in and of itself. I think if they had managed to locate in Trenholm Plaza, or the plaza with Piggly-Wiggly a bit up the road, they might have gotten some foot traffic from shoppers going to other destinations.

2) Signage

The main sign for the business read "cookies FOR SALE". If you were just driving by and looked over, your first impression would be that the building was for sale.

3) Lack of Marketing

Obviously I don't know what type of marketing the owners tried to do, but with their location, it would have made sense to try to get their cookies into Starbucks, The Fresh Market, Holey Dough, Hooligans & Books-A-Million at Trenholm plaza, if possible with a little placard like "We proudly offer Columbia baked Wally & Crumb Cookies!". I don't know how much freedom managers at national chains like Starbucks have to offer local products, but certainly Hooligans or Holey Dough would not have been out of the question.

4) The Product

As I said up front, the cookies were perfectly OK, but they were "hard" cookies, like Chips-A-Hoy. I think that goes against people's expectations for a "cookie store". When people go to a cookie store, they want something they can't get from Keebler or Chips-A-Hoy: freshly baked soft cookies. The hard cookie market is adequately served by the national bakers and by making hard cookies Wally & Crumb removed a reason to stop at their store.

Consider the video arcade: Is there a more 80s location you can think of? These places flourished in that relatively narrow span of years between "Pong" and ubiquitious PC and console gaming. Video games started out in corners, perhaps forcing out a pinball machine or other mechanical amusement device, then spread to their own parlors then, aside from Ocean Drive and Chuck-E-Cheese faded back into corners again.

At one time Columbia had 6 video arcades that I can think of: One in a building specially built for it on Two Notch Road near where the I-77 interchange is now, one at Decker Mall, one at Bush River mall, one at Columbia Mall, and two "Robo's" locations, one at the Jackson Blvd K-Mart plaza, and the other on Main Street.

The Robo's on Main was on the west side of the street, just across from USC's "Towers" dorms (now gone), next to the 7-11 (now gone) and the Pizza Hut (now gone) and Stuffy's (now gone), in a building now gone. You get the picture. I was living in the Towers from 1980 through 1984, when Robo's was in operation. At the time, the USC student newspaper The Gamecock ran Robo's ads which offered cupons good for a free token. Either I or my roomate would walk into the room with the newspaper and say:

Rob?

or

Galag?

Rarely would the other turn down the invitation. Robo's had a wide selection of games, some that are considered classic now, and some that are long forgotten. My particular favorites were Joust, Pengo, and above all Galaga. We played Galaga so often and so long that my hand would bleed from frantically working the controls, and while I never achieved really elite status, I could reliably get to stage 15 and above. My roomate and I developed names for certain of the games tactics and avatars. You really had to beware of "greenies" and the dreaded "triple bee-pass". I was heartened to find recently on a trip to Myrtle Beach that we both can still play the game, though perhaps not quite as well!

At some point, as I intimated above, video arcades became trailing edge, and the crowds left, leaving the businesses to gradually become more decrepit until they couldn't pay the bills. As I recall, Robo's folded long before the building housing it was torn down. I think the arcades at Bush River and Decker pre-deceased even those ill-fated malls, and the one on Two Notch became a carpet store. Oh well, we still had some good times. Got a quarter?

"Liggett's", as we called it, was in Trenholm Plaza more or less where The Fresh Market now is.

Liggett's was a Rexall drugstore, and like most drugstores, carried a good bit of general merchandise. Unlike most drugstores today, it also had a lunch counter, which, unlike Campbell's Drugstore across Forest Drive, boasted booths as well a counter seating. Before the invasion of Columbia by burger chains, Liggett's was one of the most convienient places in Forest Acres to have lunch. We didn't do it that often. I now eat out every day, but growing up, it was more like once or twice a week (almost always for Sunday lunch). I suspect we went to Liggett's when my mother was carting both of us kids around shopping. My clearest memory of eating there is the day my mother made me try ketchup, something she probably came to rue, since after that, I wanted it on everything!

Liggett's also had a now forgotten piece of equipment called a tube-tester. This was a complicated science-fiction looking console studded with tube sockets with a flip chart up above. You would look up your tube on the flip chart, put it in the correct socket, flip the indicated switches to the correct presets, let the tube "warm up" and then hit the test button. If the tube were good, a needle on the test meter would rise into the green zone. If it were bad, the needle would stay in red or amber. I was always pulling discarded radios and TVs from people's curbside trash on the assumption that I could fix them if I replaced the right tubes. There was actually something to this, but since we had several perfectly good radios and a working TV, my parents were generally not inclined to spring for buying new tubes when I found a bad one, and since my weekly allowance was $0.50, I wasn't often in a position to buy one. It was still fun testing though.

I'm a little hazy on exactly what happened to Liggett's. I have some idea that it might have been totally bought by Rexall, dropping the "Liggett's" name and then may have been bought out by Eckards, which definitely did eventually have a store in that general part of Trenholm Plaza. I think Campbell's outlasted it, and there was some sort of drugstore with a lunch counter that lasted at least into the late 80s (on Garner's Ferry), but I think all of the drugstores with lunch counters are gone from Columbia now. Am I wrong?

UPDATE 17 Nov 08: Thanks to commenter Dennis for the graphic of a tube tester. Try doing that with your Ipod!

UPDATE 14 March 2009: Added 1963 Yellow Pages ad.

UPDATE 30 April 2013: Added picture of the Rexall logo from an old sign displayed at the Antique Mall on Broad River Road.

UPDATE 11 October 2013: Here is an amazing picture of the old Trenholm Plaza, with Liggett's. Thanks to commenter Dennis for digging this up!

I don't know exactly when this Kroger closed, sometime in November is my best estimate. I was just driving by one day, and noticed that it was gone. It had been looking pretty thread-bare the last few times I was in it.

The closing of this location leaves only one of the inital wave of Kroger's entry into the Columbia market still open: the location at the corner of Forest Drive & Beltline Blvd. I remember when Kroger first came to town, it was the store. I was in high-school at the time, and the Decker Blvd location was convient to me when I first started to drive. My recollection is that Kroger was definitely a cut above anything else in town at the time. All of the stores had full bakeries, and a cheese section with more than the standard block chedder I grew up on. They also had small housewares (the second microwave I ever bought came from Kroger) and if they weren't open all night at the time (I can't quite recall) they were certainly open later than most Columbia grocers.

The initial wave was Decker Mall, Bush River Mall, Forest Drive, Fort Jackson Blvd, and US-1 just past Triangle City. I think the Bush River Mall location was the first to go, as that mall never really established itself. The next was the Decker location, a harbinger of the general decline of the Decker corridor. This was followed by US-1 and now by Fort Jackson Blvd.

Part of this wave of closings, aside from the poor location on Bush River was due, in my opinion to the changes in the grocery market. When Kroger came to town, it was up-market, but the next wave of store openings by its competitors trumped that by being even more up-market and Kroger found itself with suddenly dated looking properties that weren't as nice inside as newer competitors. They seem to have elected to compete by building new stores rather than refurbishing older ones, and the store on Two Notch Rd near Spring Valley High is built to their new standards. It will be interesting to see how long the old store on Forest Drive can survive. The new Piggly Wiggly by Cardinal Newman beats it for up-market, and the one-two punch of Publix and Fresh Market at Trenholm Plaza delivers everything other than 24-hour shopping.

UPDATE 5 April 2009

Here is commentor Melanie (looking cute as a button!) with a clown at the grand opening celebration of this store back in the day:

Thanks Melanie!

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

UPDATE 30 April 2010: Added some more pictures (utility work was ongoing in the parking lot at the time these were taken).

UPDATE 6 February 2012 -- Well, it appears that work on the Whole Foods uplift has begun:

(Also, I have finally got around to adding Family Mart to the post title).

UPDATE 10 May 2012 -- Construction continues in these pictures from 6 March 2012:

The rubble in the final picture above is from the demolition of the old Lucas Machinery building.

Photosets:

Photoset 6 March 2012