Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

I've written about this building before, when it was a D's Wings. Since then, a Tex-Mex operation called Baja's Southwestern Grill has moved in -- and out. I was going to give them a try sometime, but in the event never got around to it until it was too late, and the restaurant curse on this building (and Saint Andrews Road in general) continues.

I think something fairly easy the owner could do to make the site viable would be to connect the parking lot to that of the gas station next door. That would give people exiting this site access to a traffic light so that left turns to get back on I-26 wouldn't be so bad. It seems like an obvious idea, so perhaps the station owners don't want the extra traffic.

Good on the owner for the forthright and informative closing door-note!

Hat tip to commenter Ken for the heads-up that Baja's was gone.

Continuing my recent theme of defunct Eckerd stores, this one on Broad River Road at the intersection with Saint Andrews Road (and across from the old Steve's #1 Sub Contractor sub shop) was, if I recall correctly, one of the newer stores. It has the "modern" corner-lot siting with a drive-through. It sits, in fact, catty-cornered across the street from a new-ish CVS of the same vintage, proving the site is viable for drugstores -- I suspect that if Eckerd's in general hadn't had problems and had held on to this store a few years more, Rite Aid could have done a viable business there.

UPDATE 8 March 2011 -- It's now a Dollar Tree:

UPDATE 10 August 2020: Add map icon, update tags.

When they initially started out, I liked Ryan's a good bit. When I was living & working in Fayetteville, there were a couple of years where I ate lunch at Ryan's several times a week. I particularly enjoyed the salad bar, which I believe they had dubbed The Mega-Bar because it had peanuts instead of sunflower seeds and wheels of cheddar slices of which went well with the large, hot yeast rolls. About the only drawback was that the lettuce was shredded rather than torn.

After I left Fayetteville, it was a number of years before I ate at a Ryan's again. As it happened, I was in Georgetown one afternoon and stopped in at the US-707 location. I'm afraid I found it much less appealing that I had remembered. I found the chairs clunky and uncomfortable and the salad bar was much diminished, with no cheese, rolls or peanuts. I later talked to a friend of mine who at the time was writing cash-register and point-of-sale software for the restaurant industry, and he said he had heard that the owners of the Ryan's brand were unhappy and felt that a number of their franchises had trashed the brand's reputation. (Their solution was to open a new chain called Fire Mountain to go into areas where the Ryan's name was bad).

Anyway, I don't know exactly what happened to this Ryan's on Saint Andrews. It may have been an exemplary store which simply suffered from the location and the chain's falling fortunes, but whatever reason, the building is now not even a restaurant at all, but has been converted to offices.

This closing continues a recent series of dead restaurants on Saint Andrews Road. One of the very first closings I did was of the Wendy's on Two Notch in Dentsville. If I recall correctly, I said how much I enjoyed Wendy's when they first came to town, and how they gradually seemed to lose their way as many fast food chains have.

I don't know specifically what happened to this store (being on Saint Andrews can't have helped!), but the last two times I have had occasion to stop at a Wendy's (once in Aiken and once on Forest Drive), the service and food have been very indifferent -- not at all like the can-do! store that could get you a decent burger the way you wanted it almost by the time you finished being rung up. I don't doubt the disasterous ad campaign with the guy wearing the red "Wendy" pigtails helped more than a few of their stores shuffle off this mortal coil as well.

UPDATE 8 September 2017: Added full street address and some tags. Also found this LoopNet listing that says the building is still vacant, but has recently had a plan approved to connect to the traffic light and "would be great for a breakfast restaurant".

UPDATE 13 December 2019 -- Now Ms B's Southern Soul Food:

This is not the fancy Piggly Wiggly that was once at the top of the hill on Saint Andrews Road, but a later store. It was a typical Pig of its time, which was somewhat before the chain's current upscale push with stores like Forest Drive and Litchfield Beach. As I recall, I only stopped here once, and found nothing in particular to like or dislike. The plaza where it was located is below the Bush River Road / Saint Andrews Road intersection, near the industrial plant and Seven Oaks Park. It was the anchor store, and the whole strip has been hurting since it closed. I'm not entirely sure why that happened, but I think it may have been leap-frogged by the upscale new Bi-Lo which opened a few blocks down the road. The property was vacant for a while after the Pig pulled out, but is now some sort of fitness center.

UPDATE 2 Feb 2011: Added store number (102) and full street address to post title.

UPDATE 9 March 2011: Added specific closing date based on comment by commenter Andrew

UPDATE-2 9 March 2011: Oops! There were two Pigs on Saint Andrews road, and I got the wrong date and address. (Which also means it was not store #102..) -- Fixed.

UPDATE-3 9 March 2011: OK, the store number moved here from the other Saint Andrews store, so it was store # 102, just not the first location for store #102.

UPDATE 20 May 2021: Adding map icon and updating tags.

I wrote about the closing of Capitol Newsstand on Main Street. That was always the flagship and the final store to go, but at one time Capitol had three other branches that I know of. There was another one downtown on the south side of one of the streets parallelling Taylor Street, there was one in Dentsville on O'Neil Court, and this one, now Aladdin on Saint Andrews Road. I may have the order wrong, but I think this one closed after the second downtown store and before O'Neil Court.

I didn't get to Saint Andrews Road that often, but on my few visits to this store, I got the impression that the selection of magazines was smaller, even discounting the foreign language ones the Main Street location had, and that the timely appearance of new paperbacks was less reliable. That could just be an artifact of my irregular observations though. I'm not sure why the store closed, certainly parking and panhandling were not the issues they were on Main Street. I suspect however, that with the opening of Books-A-Million and Barnes & Noble on Harbison Boulevard, the market this store served dropped markedly.

UPDATE 21 November 2020: Added full street address to post title and put the name Saint Andrews Newsstand in parentheses as it seems to have been the name used on the plaza marquee. I changed the closing date from "1990s" to "Late 1990s" as I found a listing in the 1998 phonebook. Also updated tags and added a map icon.

I'm not a big fan of chicken -- in fact, the smell of it puts me off a restaurant. I'm also not a big fan of breakfast. Well, that's not true exactly; it's more that I'm not a big fan of waking up early enough to have time for breakfast. I like bacon, eggs, grits and biscuits as well as anyone. So on those rare occasions when everything comes together and I'm on the move -- Bojangles makes a very good sausage biscuit!

Perhaps not enough other people think so though as this Bojangles location on Saint Andrews Road near the dollar cinemas has been gone for a while now. I'm not sure what the story on the property is. The for-sale (reduced!) sign suggests that it has been unsuccessfully on the market for a while, but I can't figure out why anyone would be doing work on the building in that case as seems to be happening.

UPDATE 7 October 2009: Looks like the building will be The Delhi Palace Indian restaurant. I'm not sure if that means The Delhi Palace will be moving from The Economy Inn on Broad River Road, or if this will be a second location.

UPDATE 10 November 2009: Add street address to post title.

UPDATE 23 February 2024: Adding map icon and updating tags.

This is yet another of the many restaurants in Columbia that I always intend to go to "someday" but in the event don't make it before they close. The Hilltop Restaurant building has been a landmark for as long as I can remember, though I think it has gone through several different names and incarnations over the years. It seems to me that there was one in particular that used to do a lot of advertising on WIS radio in the late 60s and early 70s, but I can't bring the name to mind right now (and may be mistaken since I had no clear idea of the geography of the Saint Andrews area in those days).

From the way the parking lot and signage is configured, it appears that Hilltop had some association with the adjacent Econo Lodge (which used to be something different also).

UPDATE 10 March 2011: Updated closing date and street address based on commenter Andrew's research.

Thanks to commenter "O'Reilly" who reminded me of Hilltop and pointed out a lot of other restaurants on St. Andrews on which I'll do some future closings.

UPDATE 2 January 2012: As noted in the comments, this place has been torn down:

UPDATE 25 January 2022 -- There is now a QT gas station being built on the Hilltop site:

(Also adding map icon and updating tags)

D's is a local (I believe) chain of casual restaurants with an unusually large menu. They have a little something for everyone, and are the only restaurants in Columbia (that I know of) which fry their own potato chips ("raw fries" they call them). They have a number of locations; I can think of Clemson Road, Parkland Plaza, and Beltline Blvd. They now have one less.

This particular building on St. Andrews Road appears to have a restaurant curse attached to it, as I have seen a number of operations go into it over the years, and none of them have lasted very long. More prosaically, it may just be that while it is easy to exit I-26 to eat there, it is difficult to get back on the Interstate because a left turn out of the parking lot is almost impossible when traffic is moderate or heavy.

UPDATE 24 Feb 2010: Added a bunch of previous names to the post title based on the comments. Also see here (Baja's Southwestern Grill) and here (Delmonico Diner) for the next two operations in this building.

UPDATE 31 Jan 2011: Added the full street address to the post title, finally.