Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

I found a number of different names for this building at the corner of North Main and Belleview Circle. As they all seem to relate to jobs or contracting, I have to wonder if at one time or another it was operating under several monikers simultaneously.

The street sign, which I would assume represents the most recent operation reads

North Main Street Construction Office
(LJ, Inc. General Contractors) (City of Columbia SC)

This sounds like the City hired LJ on an official basis, especially since the city seal is present. Perhaps it had something to do with the North Main Street roadwork of the past few years.

The LoopNet listing for this building describes it as having one space availabile. The realtor listing which I found and lost in a thunderstom crash described it as "vacant". I'm not sure if that means the Council has moved or closed shop. There appears to be a sign taped to the door that I should have gone and looked at, but I somehow missed noticing that while I was over there.

(Hat tip to commenter tonkatoy)

UPDATE 23 June 2011: Added South Carolina Employement Security Commision to the post title based on comments by Bo & tonkatoy.

There was an interesting story in The State about this place a few days ago and how it has been there over 50 years. It seems the current owners do want to retire, but that the usual Main Street problems and changes in dress habits may have hastened that.

I don't get out past the airport to South Congaree much at all. I used to drive out every now and then in the 1970s to see if the South Congaree Book Exchange were open (it never was), and I think I drove through there on the way to AIken once. It still seems to be a pretty rural area, without much urban advance (though quite a nice Food Lion has made it there).

This particular building is on the west side of the road before you get to Food Lion (coming from the airport). I neglected to look for a street address, and google suggests a number of different possibilities (some of which may be previous or later locations for the same business).

UPDATE 31 March 2011: Added a full street address based on the comments. Apparently Edmund Highway is Main Street within South Congaree city limits.

According to this link the Boyne Building was designed in 1900 by local architect James Hagood Sams. I'm sure it has been a large number of things over the years, but the one which gets mentioned here more often than anything else is The Elite Epicurean. Unfortunately, I know almost nothing about it. I believe that for the majority of the time it was open, I was living out of town, and at any rate just the name would have put me off as being "too fancy" (not to mention the iffy-ness of Main Street at night).

All that aside, I can say it was listed in the 1998 phonebook (though with no Yellow Pages ad) and here's what some of you have said:

Club Dreams would seem to be one of those short lived dance clubs commenter Dave mentions -- the night picture is from a Friday night, when one would expect a dance club to be open, so I think it is gone as well.

Things move really fast sometimes. I had first written about this little space fronting on Gervais Street just across from the Capitol and above The Whig in a closing for Holey Dough Cafe. By the time I got around to taking pictures of it, all the Holey Dough identity was gone, and the place was in full operation as a sub shop, Jumpin' Jacks Giant Jersey Subs.

The first I knew that that place was gone was when commenter Midnight Rambler mentioned that the next operation (which I had never heard of) had closed!

All I can say about the Gervais Street Deli is that a) it had wi-fi and b) It was, technically, not on Gervais Street...

(Hat tip to commenter Midnight Rambler)

When I started Computer Science at USC, we submitted "jobs" to the central campus computer on punched cards. These cards had 80 colums and were created on a "keypunch" machine, which was a typewriter-like keyboard affixed to a rather imposing and noisy machine about the size of a large gas grill. The punch would print what you had typed across the top of the card, and punch out chads underneath each letter or number to create a digital representation of the symbol. This was a very mechanical process and with lots of paper chips flying around, the machines tended to jam with some regularity -- so much so that the computer lab operators kept special tools (hacksaw blades carved into curved hooks) to unjam them. Obviously, since you were actually punching holes in the card, there was no way to "undo" a mistaken keypress. Once you got your cards punched correctly (or what you thought was correctly) you took them to a "card reader" which was sort of a cross between a vacuum cleaner and a las-vegas card shuffling machine, and assuming it didn't jam as well, it sent them down a leased line to the Amdahl at CSD (it had been an IBM-370, but the rumor we heard was that the guy who authorized buying it got sent on an all expense paid vacation by IBM and so the State required it to be re-bid).

I am going somewhere with this, and I'm starting to get there now: When your "job" was processed, the output was printed at the computer lab on a band printer with green fanfold paper, and it was printed entirely in upper case (and usually with a fading ribbon). So here's what I'm driving at: The whole process was more difficult than using a typewriter and the output looked worse. The idea that using a computer would make writing easier or look better would have sounded pretty stupid to me in 1980.

That's why it was a real revelation to me when I got access to the PDP-11 minicomputer at the CSCI department and discovered a non-IBM environment called Unix (the spirtual ancestor of Linux). Apart from its many advantages as a platform for programming, the first commercial sales of the system (which had been developed for internal use by then monopoly AT&T) had been driven by its documentation tools, including the text processor troff. Not only did the system have tools that made formatting documents much easier than typing -- the department actually had a printer which would print both upper and lower case!

I was hooked, and even though troff is now considered obsolete, I use it to this day for any significant document I have to do unless I'm specifically told I must use Word. (Or as I put it: If troff won't do what I want -- I change what I want). Thus, when it came time to do my thesis, I knew I wasn't going to type it on a typewriter. By that time, I had a daisy-wheel printer (remember those?) at home and a stripped down PC version of troff that would do for proofing when I couldn't access the department mini. The only fly in the ointment (aside from actually writing the darn thing) was the fact that the University required that all theses be submitted on 50% rag paper.

First of all, I didn't even know what that meant. It certainly sounded weird. How would I even know such paper? As it turned out paper with a high rag (cotton) content lasts longer, or as Wikipedia puts it (not that I could look it up there then!):

Certain cotton fiber paper is known to last hundreds of years without appreciable fading, discoloration, or deterioration;[1] so it is often used for important documents such as the archival copies of dissertations or theses. As a rule of thumb, for each percentage point of cotton fiber, a user may expect one year of resisting deterioration by use (the handling to which paper may be subjected).[2] Legal document paper typically contains 25% cotton. Cotton paper will produce a better printout than copy paper because it is able to absorb ink better.

OK, that sounded good, except for the part where I wanted to feed my thesis through a daisy-wheel printer in fanfolded, sprocket-driven form. Was my box of fanfold paper 50% rag? It was not. Was any box of fanfold paper at Softek 50% rag? Nope. Was any box of fanfold paper at any office supply store in Columbia 50% rag? Apparently not.

Enter If It's Paper. What I was looking for certainly was paper, and the implication of their name was If it's paper, then we have it. So, to bring this in for a landing -- the one time I walked into If It's Paper, looking for something I had never heard of until a few days previously, and which apparently not only did not exist anywhere in Columbia, but did not even have anyone who understood what I was asking for anywhere in Columbia, they knew exactly what I wanted and had a shelf full of it. Mission accomplished.

Of course, now I would google it and probably find someplace online within a few seconds -- I don't know if that was a factor in closing the store, but I do know I was glad to have it then.

(Hat tip to commenter BethB)

UPDATE 10 March 2011 -- Open again!

UPDATE 28 June 2011: I've been meaning to get some better pix of the store now that it's open again. The State also ran a nice story about the place. In essence, International Paper decided it didn't really want to be in the retail business despite the store making money and closed it. A local investor and the store manager got together to buy the name from International and re-opened as an independant business.

I don't think I can actually remember this vacant showroom on Main Street being Hampton Pontiac Jaguar, but that's how it's in the EPA database and it clearly was a showroom of some sort.

One of the follow on operations, Ware We Customize was apparently automotive also.

In 1996 the building seems to have been the headquarters for Elliot Close's unsuccessful Senate bid against Strom Thurmond.

Currently it's looking pretty delapidated, and is flagged as unsafe, but apparently the property has been bought by some sort of religious organization and has been flagged as Hope Plaza Campus, so I would expect to see some repairs, or perhaps a tear-down and new building in the near future.

UPDATE 4 October 2016 -- This building has now been razed:

This venerable building is on Main Street at the intersection with Summerville Avenue and River Drive. This property valuation says that it was built in 1930, and I can believe that. The side view is fairly nondescript, but the angled entrance gives it character, and does hark back to that time. The last tenant, Terlizzi Home Improvements is in the Feb 2008-Feb 2009 phonebook, but not this year's, so I'm saying they closed in 2009. I don't know anything about Terlizzi except that every time I see the name, I can't help but think

The boys are back in town!