Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

This distinctive building is on Beltline between Rosewood and Devine Street. I don't know if they were the original tenant, but for many years it was an office supply store. I never went there myself, as I was living out of town for most of the time between when I started using "office equipment" (essentially printers in my case) and when I started buying supplies online. I'm pretty sure my sister did find a ribbon for the antique Brother "Diablo 630 compatible!" daisy-wheel printer I set her up with. Those things had a really unique machine-gun type staccato sound they made as the wheel spun and the solenoid hammerd the letters onto the page. I found the fan-fold paper feed almost impossible to adjust correctly such that it wouldn't gradually mangle the paper..

Anyway, the place was in the 1998 phonebook, but I believe Dollar General has been there pretty much for most of this century.

Well, I believe the only Indian restaurant downtown is now gone. There is no goodbye sign on their door, but the web site is gone, the phone is disconnected, and fairly major work is being done inside. I suppose it could be a remodel, but in that case I would expect a sign to that effect.

As things worked out, I only ate at the India Pavilion once. Growing up my father had occasional "American faculty mentor" relations with visiting foreign students. At one time, this included an Indian couple. They were nice and we had them to the house for dinner a few times (my father duly explained that my sister's guinea pigs were not being raised to eat..) and they returned the favor by having us to their apartment once. Now, I was a very finicky eater with very narrow tastes, but I was informed by my parents that I would try whatever was offered to us. The only thing I can remember about it is that part of the meal was some sort of chutney, which I thought was the worst thing I ever tasted. I'm sure that it was well made, and that I would probably like it now, but at the time it made such a strong negative impression on me that I never even considered Indian food as an option until I was in my 30s, walking in Charleston and thinking Hey! That smells really good! with no preconception of what type of food it was.

So, anyway, with a childhood dislike, then living out of town and then generally going someplace with parking, I go most often to the Indian places on Bush River & Saint Andrews Road. Still, the time I did make it to India Pavilion it was fine, and it's a shame to see another longtime (an archived version of their web site says founded 1990) Five Points restaurant go.

(Hat tips to commenters Joel & Luke).

UPDATE 2 Sept 2010 -- It's to be another Pho Viet restaurant:

Well, moving a bit further into Five Points than yesterday, today's posting is "ripped from the headlines", which is to say I was reading The Free Times at lunch today and ran across a breaking story by Patrick Wall to the effect that Elbow Room was closed as of Tuesday night. He has an update on his blog that the new operation in that building will honor the existing Elbow Room bookings, which is nice if a bit odd seeming.

I've written about this building before when it was Dodd's / Von Henman's / Monterrey Jack's / Agave / Nacho Mamma's / 5 Points Pub. To be honest, I wasn't really aware that 5 Points Pub was gone and Elbow Room had moved in. In fact I'm not sure what the last show I saw in a nightclub was. Perhaps The Swimming Pool Qs at Doc's Gumbo Grille if you want to call that a nightclub. Anyway, I wish the new operation luck -- it's starting to look like anything going into that storefront is going to need it.

I was cutting through the Fort Jackson Boulevard Kmart parking lot the other month, from Wildcat Road to Crowson Road, and noticed something I thought a bit odd: The store's former auto service bays were up for rent. I guess it makes sense from an economic standpoint (though to date there have been no takers), but it's kind of depressing, like the Dutch Square Belk closing off most of the third floor. It says not only weren't we doing well with our auto business, but we don't think we'll ever in the future revamp and give it another go -- in fact, we don't think we'll even need this part of the building again.

UPDATE 7 October 2019: Add map icon and update tags.

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: