Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

Here's another closed Food Lion to go with the ones on Two Notch Road, Taylor Street and Airport Boulevard. This Loopnet picture shows the store in happier times.

The story on the WLTX site, calls the store underperforming and gives 19 Feb as an upper bound on the closing date.

I had never been in this Food Lion, but I suspect it was an older store, which would have been up against a newer Bi Lo in the same general area. The newer Food Lion stores are actually quite nice -- I stopped at the one off the Ballentine I-26 exit the other day when I was looking for The Whale's Tail and it was very upscale.

Even after the Seven Oaks Shopping Center closing, there is still a Food Lion on Saint Andrews Road. It's on past the former Clusters of Whitehall towards I-26, in front of the discount cinema.

(Hat tip to commenter Jamie)

UPDATE 12 September 2011 -- Now open as a Big Lots!:

According to this Loopnet posting, there were three Larrry's Giant Subs up for sale at the same time, either retaining the Larry's franchaise, or as restaurant space. I would guess then that they were all run as part of the same operation.

I have not checked the Sunset Boulevard location, but both the Broad River Road and Garners Ferry locations have already been taken on by Steve's #1 Sub Contractor. In the case of the Broad River Road operation, this puts Steve's back very close to to their former location at Broad River & Saint Andrews.

I find it a little odd that the places flipped from one "guy's first name" chain to another "guy's first name" chain!

Also look how Steve's has pulled the "Giant" from the Garners Ferry sign. I know that it's just because it's not part of their branding, but it almost leads one to think that perhaps the size of the subs will be decreasing..

(Hat tip to commenter Alicia.)

UPDATE 28 Oct 2010 -- Well, Steve's didn't last long at all:

UPDATE 23 October 2011: Well, I wish I would have done this post as two separate entries, one for each location, but the Garners Ferry Steve's location is set to become Japan Grill:

UPDATE 3 November 2011: Well, it turns out I did do a separate entry for the Garners Ferry location, but never indexed it. What a mess! I'll copy the Japan Grill pix over there too and index it, but it will still be a mess!

UPDATE 25 October 2018: Add tags for both locations, but still a mess.

This building off of Saint Andrews Road is now an "Ultra Lounge". I'm not sure what it was built as, but I first recall noticing it in the 1980s, when it was a strip club, the name of which I can't remember. After that, it was for a number of years the original site of The Comedy House, now on Decker Boulevard in the old Winn-Dixie building. I think it may have been something after the strip-club and before The Comedy House and after The Comedy House and before Pure, but I'm not sure.

I saw a number of comedy shows there including one guy who made me laugh so hard it hurt, but whose name (or act) I cannot now recall at all. I'm not sure what happened to The Comedy House as it was non-existent for a long while after closing shop here. Normally if a place is moving just as a normal course of business, they will do it as quickly as possible to keep a revenue stream active, but I think it took over a year in this case.

UPDATE 15 October 2009: Added a bunch of extra names to the post title based on the comments.

UPDATE 29 March 2023: Adding map icon. Also this building has been razed. Click on the address tag for details.

When the sun is just right, you can look at the "tower" at the north-west corner of St Andrews Center and almost read the outlines of the lettering that has been taken down from the top. If you actually could read it, it would say The Clusters of Whitehall.

The way I remember it, at one time, The Clusters of Whitehall was a very tony place. It seemed to me that many of the shops had radio ads on the old WIS radio, and when the announcer would sonorously intone "...located in The Clusters of Whitehall", it sounded as though he might as well be saying "...located on Rodeo Drive".

Times change and areas go up and down. Saint Andrews Road as a whole has certainly seen better times, and The Clusters were really convienient neither to I-20 nor I-26 as traffic in the area increased and more stop-lights were added. By the 1980s, The Clusters were in decline.

I'm not really sure of the original store roster (we rarely went to that side of town at all) but I think they had a Fresh Market as sort of an upscale anchor. This report says that as of December 2000, The Clusters were only 55% occupied and that a new call center and Tuesday Morning would bring them up to 94% occupied. It also gives a partial list of former stores: Heavenly Ham, Nocturnal Home Diagnostics, Gregory's To Go, Gold Leaf Gallery and Avant Gardener.

After that, google turns up another hit for the property being sold to Ziff Properties Inc in April 2006. There is another story from The State that was widely linked, but is no longer generally available. There is enough text left in the google hit, however, to say that by May 18 2008, the place was being referred to as "the former Clusters of Whitehall", leading me to guess that the new name St Andrews Center was probably coined in 2007. Currently while the place doesn't appear in any terminal distress, it is obviously now a lower rent type operation than before with correspondingly lower expectations for the quality of tenants and level of occupancy.

Finally, I was always confused about The Cloisters of Whitehall vs The Clusters of Whitehall. I haven't made a deep study of the matter, but my googling for this post suggests that the Cloisters is a real-estate subdivision in the area while the Clusters was the mall.

UPDATE 27 January 2023: Adding tags & map icon, adding the full street address in the post title.

I had seen this place on Saint Andrews, and think I saw some of it's flyers, but since I'm not a really big steak fan, I hadn't ever really looked into it. I see that the concept is take out or delivery for steaks instead of pizza, burgers or subs, and that strikes me as pretty odd. First, I have never gotten the appeal of "take out". I'd say that's because I work at home, but even when I spent most of my life at the office, I still didn't want to eat at the house. At a restaurant they have people to bring stuff right to your table and you don't have to wash the dishes or take out the trash. Second, steak seems like an odd take-out item. People are very finicky about it and considering how often burger or pizza topping orders go awry, it's a big leap of faith to expect the right cut and the right degree of doneness when you can't send it back.

I have to say the business strategy being explicated by the door sign seems a bit dubious as well. I want Columbia businesses to succeed and certainly hope they will be back, but it's hard to see how several months without any money coming in will help to make that happen. (And if they remain part of the Steak Out chain, how can they revamp the menu?) It worked for Stevie B's, but more often than not any sign using the word remodeling is followed by a sign that says For Sale.

(Hat tip to commenter Kc!)

Update 24 Jan 2010: Well it seems to me that I can move this one from the "temporary" category to the "not coming back" category. The note from 4 May 2009 promising a "Fall 2009" reopening is still posted on the door, but now an un-picked-up phonebook is on the doorstep and un-picked-up mail is on the floor inside, also as far as I can tell no work at all has been done inside -- everything appears to be in an identical state as to when I posted the original closing.

UPDATE 7 May 2010 -- This is pretty conclusive, I'm afraid:

UPDATE 27 May 2010 -- Now it's up for lease:

UPDATE 19 July 2010 -- Finally got around to taking a picture of the original Steak Out location at 2421 Bush River Road (now Real Mexico):

UPDATE 13 Oct 2010 -- Tony O's Pizza is now open in this building:

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.