Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

This much retailed (and once churched) spot on Cross Hill Road next to the former Kroger Sav-On has never seemed to catch fire for any of its many tenants, most of which I have only a vague recollection of. Aside from all those listed above on the post title, I'm pretty sure it was a menswear shop also at one point, and I either got or thought about getting a suit there. (Something I hate like posion).

This PDF at the City of Columbia website suggests that the city was thinking about buying the building back in the 2006 timeframe and wondering what the absestos and lead paint implications would be, but apparently nothing came of that. The document describes the building as being "used as a former antiques store" -- that's certainly an odd turn-of-phrase, but implies that the building was vacant at that point, with Fletcher's having been the most recent tenant.

Cross Hill Road is an odd little stretch whose name I never could remember. For years growing up, I thought that Beltline Boulevard ran all the way to Garners Ferry Road instead of turning off towards Rosewood. I can only think that at some point a lot of road work must have been done to make the setup so illogical. (Of course it didn't help either that until last year, I thought that Garners Ferry started where Cross Hill runs into Devine Street and Fort Jackson Boulevard -- I never realized that Devine Street runs all the way to Wildcat).

At any rate, whatever you call it, this lot, along with the Kroger lot, is now Interstate feeder property (which neither was in the beginning), and I expect that eventually a hotel or national chain restaurants will take the real estate.

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I was looking for the place where The Copper Door was on Rosewood Drive last weekend. As far as I can tell, if I have the right address, it no longer exists. However, I did notice while I was in the area this vacant storefront for Southern Pottery. As it turns out, they are not gone, but have moved to Devine Street. Their web site tells the story. I always liked the smell and feel of raw clay, and enjoyed my pottery class at Trenholm Park (though, frankly, I was never any good at it). It's nice to see someone is still teaching pottery and that we have actual "potters" amongst us muggles in Columbia.

This storefront on Devine Street between Beltline Boulevard and Fort Jackson Boulevard is now a tax service, but while I was growing up it was the town's best known French restaurant, or at least that was what I thought from always hearing the radio ads on WIS.

In general I don't now have any great interest in French cusine (though the best cheese sandwich I ever had was in Paris), and I certainly didn't have any growing up when I was as cheeseburger as the day is long, but the ads did have a certain appeal. I didn't know any French at the time, and the cadence the announcer used always made it sound like "Lupity Shadow" to me, which had kind of an aura about it. It seemed to me that those ads ran for years, always with the same announcer and same cadence. I'm not sure what the heraldry used in their 1970 Southern Bell ad is supposed to mean. "We cook" would be the basic message there, I suppose.

Looking at the tax storefront, the space Le Petit Chateau would have had to occupy seems pretty constrained to me, and parking along that strip of Devine is somewhat fraught as well -- it can't have been a very big place at all.

I'm not sure when the restaurant closed, but I'm going to guess the 1980s because I went to a comics store in that strip several times then, and can't recall seeing Le Petit Chateau on those expeditions.

UPDATE 14 November 2009:

From commenter Michael Taylor, a possible drumhead for the band "Lupity Shadow" (read the comments):

UPDATE 20 Oct 2010: Changed closing date from "1980s" to "1990s" based on the comments.

I was at Za's and noticed that Momo's Bistro in the same strip was dark, so I went over to take a look and snap a few pictures (the flash worked better than I expected). After that, and a bit of googling around, I'm not entirely sure of the status of this place.

The sign on the door suggests that they will "hopefully" be back at the start of August while the message on their answering machine says the end of August while their facebook pagedoesn't commit them to anything specific. On the other hand, this site (which I would expect to be pretty careful about what goes out under their logo) seems to imply that they are gone for good.

I would say that the phone still being connected and the website still being up are good signs, but it sounds very iffy at best.

UPDATE 16 November 2009: Open again!

UPDATE 27 May 2014 -- Momo's is closed again, this time for good. According to The State, an Eggs Up Grill will be opening there soon. Eggs Up started in Litchfield Beach in the same building as Latte Litchfield (and they originally shared ownership). Currently their flagship store has moved to the old Piggly Wiggly shopping center a bit north on US-17 and they have several other coastal locations for the breakfast and lunch concept.

I noticed on the electronic sign you see when you're at the Harden Street light heading downtown on Gervais a month or so ago that Peter Glenn Ski & Sports was going out of business.

The only time in my life I've even almost gone skiing was in, I think, ninth grade when we had a class trip to a North Carolina slope but I got sick and had to give my place to a cousin. It's probably just as well as I'm sure I would have broken something. All that is to say that I never went into, or considered going into, Peter Glenn.

The window "murals" were nice though!

UPDATE 16 April 2009: Commenter Brian notes that this place used to be "Jeff Price Tennis & Ski". I have updated the post title to include that. He also notes that the last day of "Peter Glenn" was probably 8 March 2009, and I have made that update to the post title as well.

UPDATE 13 May 2010: Rearranged Post title to put "Jeff Price" first, and added the "& skate"

UPDATE 4 February 2016 -- As noted by commenter Joe Shlabotnik, this place has been torn down:

UPDATE 13 July 2017 -- The new building is up:

I drove up in the parking lot of the Kroger on Fort Jackons Boulevard because I had noticed some activity there and wanted to see what was going on. In the event I'm still not sure about that, though it appears to be water utility work, but while I was there, I noticed that this Goodyear car repair place on the Kroger outparcel was gone.

There's no date on the note they left on the door, but I believe it's fairly recent. I've used the one on Forest Drive, and they seem pretty decent, so I'm not sure what the issue here was. From this real estate report it appears that the property was built in 1974. I guess that would be not long after the Starlite Drive In there went out of business -- I know it was still there in 1973.

UPDATE 5 April 2009: I see in a comment about the Garners Ferry Kroger that I had forgotten that this place closed in April of 2008 -- I've updated the post title to reflect that.

UPDATE 29 February 2012 -- As mentioned by commenter Andrew below, this building has now been razed:

I wrote at some length about Robo's on Main Street some time ago, and that's the location I overwhelmingly went to to hone my Galaga skills (and by hone, I mean, I was "ok"). That made sense as I lived across the street from there, but when I was home and had access to a car, I would come to this location from time to time. I recently parked near there to get some pictures of the Advance Auto Parts demolition, and decided to take this shot.

At this remove, I'm not entirely sure which storefront Robo's was, but I think it was the one to the left of the blue dumpster. My memory also says that this location was something of a poor stepchild in the Robo's family -- I recall it as being smaller, less busy, and having a smaller variety of games. Unlike the University location, it didn't have a clear constituency (ie: college kids), though I suppose there are plenty of residences in the general area. I'm not sure if it outlasted the Main Street or Dutch Square locations -- it did have the advantage of not having its building torn down, but I think Main Street had folded long before that happened to its former home.

I was going to Panera Bread the other day, and noticed that this Advance Auto Parts store in an outparcel of the Garners Ferry Road K-Mart was gone. Actually, the day I noticed it, one of those fly-by-night sofa sales operations had set up shop in the parking lot (which is well located for access and visibility). The door sign optimistically states "closed temporarily", but we shall see. Interestingly (or not :-) this place is just catty-cornered across the street from the NAPA Auto Parts store I wrote about a while back.

And as a special added bonus, the historical marker for "Camp Jackson", which is in the store parking lot:

UPDATE 18 March 2009:

Well, looks like I took those pictures just in time. I went by on 12 March, and they had already knocked the whole place down (except for the front steps) and were digging a honking big hole where it was. So far the historic plaque is untouched.

UPDATE 17 Dec 2010: Fixed the post title to indicate "Devine Street" rather than "Garners Ferry Road". Added a second picture of the new store.

UPDATE 5 October 2009: The new store is built and open:

UPDATE 17 Dec 2010: Changed post title to indicate Devine Street rather than Garners Ferry Road. Added another picture of the new store.

UPDATE 4 April 2022: Updating tags, adding map icon.

The whole area on Garners Ferry near where this Pizza Hut sat has been reworked so much over the years that it's hard to say exactly where the restaurant actually was, but I think it's not far off the mark to say it was about where Ruby Tuesday now is.

I don't know what the ownership structure of Columbia Pizza Huts in the 70s & 80s was, but as far as I could tell, they were almost all about the same, with no real standouts or bad stores. (I believe PH was in general better back then -- I don't care too much for it today). I say almost because this store was something of an outlier.

I remember that my sister and I stopped there once in the late 70s, and after our pizza came we ate for a few minutes before, independantly, coming to the conclusion that while the crust was fine, the cheese properly melted, and the toppings we had ordered had been duly applied -- there was no sauce anywhere on the pizza. I believe we raised it as an issue to the manager, but decided to take a discount on the check rather than wait for a new pizza to be prepared.

I didn't think much of the incident though obviously it did not move that PH to the top my "where to eat pizza" list. Still about five years later, I found myself in the area when it was time to eat and decided to stop by again. As I'm sure you already suspect, my pie was once again served sauceless. Now, the old saying is

Once is happenstance
Twice is coincidence and
Three times is enemy action.

and I didn't try a third time, so I can't rule out coincidence, but I can't help suspect that there was a management policy to cut costs by shorting the sauce. After all it's the least noticable bit of the pizza, being normally mostly hidden under the cheese anyway.

I can't remember exactly what happened to the place. Either it burned down (I know the one of Forest Drive did, so I may be conflating with that) or was torn down during one of the plaza remodels. At any rate, it was never rebuilt, and I can't say I'm too heartbroken about it.

UPDATE 5 March 2011: Changed the post title to use "Devine Street" rather than "Garners Ferry Road". I thought the name changed at Fort Jackson Boulevard, but actually Devine Street goes all the way to Wildcat Road.

UPDATE 26 June 2023: Updating tags and adding map icon.

I only went in to Columbia Photo Supply once. I have an old Fujica ST-605 35mm camera that my mother bought me in tenth grade (75 or 76 I think) for photography class. Aside from a built in exposure meter, this is a completely manual SLR and had given me years of good service, and in fact I took a number of the older pictures on this site with it (for instance The Towers).

Unfortunately, the film advance started giving me trouble resulting in double exposures in some cases and missed shots in others when I could not advance and cock the shutter at all. With the closure of Jackson Cameras, I didn't really know of a full service camera store in the old sense (a store that might actually have local people that knew something about fixing cameras), but I decided to try Columbia Photo. I thought it did have a bit of that old Jackson atmosphere, and I enjoyed looking at all the paraphernalia like developer and stop baths that I hadn't come into contact with in years, but in the event it turned out that the camera was too old to get parts for, so I wasn't able to get it fixed.

Not too long after that, the store went out of business, and now Rogers Brothers Fabrics has moved from Trenholm Plaza into the old Columbia Photo building.

And the camera saga had a fairly happy ending. I went on ebay and got an identical ST-605 (which came from Australia with a roll of film showing some kid posing in his karate uniform with his pet rabbit..) which works fine and which I still use when I want to shoot something high-res (though that may change now that I have a new digital "closing cam 2").

UPDATE 27 July 2010: Rogers Brothers at this location has now closed