Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

I noticed this one last week when I was heading over to Atlanta Bread to see if they had pumpkin soup this year (answer: apparently not). Pioneer Machinery was on the West side of Sunset Boulevard in-between I-20 and I-26.

From the looks of the roadside placard, there were apprently several other businesses in the building, or at least suites for several other businesses.

I don't know anything about Pioneer but they were apprently in defense contracting and won contracts as recently as 2007.

If you click through to the high-res picture, you can see a lost-dog poster on the phone-pole. Hope he got home.

This interesting little building is on Sunset Boulevard just south of the chicken plant. According to LoopNet it's now off the market, though the realty sign was still out front a few days ago when I took this picture. (The picture at LoopNet still has the WPC signage up).

I don't know anything about First Source or WPC Engineering or what happened to them, but apparently the town of West Columbia offices are also at 130 Sunset. I'm not sure if that means in the back of this building, or somewhere else on the lot. The utility-sounding West Columbia filtering plant is supposed to be at 130 as well.

UPDATE 5 Nov 2010: See the comments -- It was also the Free Times building for a while, so I've added that to the post title.

UPDATE 7 May 2012 -- This place is now Kickstand Studio a wedding and commercial photography studio. Looks like they got the kudzu or whatever off the building and power pole too:

Westland Square is just East of Grecian Gardens on Sunset Boulevard, and is a fairly typical Food Lion anchored strip mall. This unit, just up from the former Gooney Birds was a Burnette's Cleaners when I left town. Apparently sometime thereafter, it converted into another cleaning operation, Palmetto Fine Cleaners and then into a night club, which apparently closed this year.

If I'm reading this LoopNet listing correctly, Westland Square is not currently for sale, but was recently as a package deal with "Waterway Plaza (Little River, SC), St. George Plaza (St. George, SC), South Square (Lancaster, SC), and Clover Plaza (Clover, SC)". That's a pretty geographically diverse set of properties to bundle!

UPDATE 6 June 2012: I was in error in stating above that Palmetto Fine Cleaners took over this spot. I was relying on the fact that PFC had a street address of 2250 Sunset Boulevard, but as it turns out, they were at 2250-A, the other end of the strip mall from this suite at 2250-M. I have removed Palmetto Fine Cleaners from the post title for this closing, and have given them their own closing.

I first wrote about this building when it was a former Quincy's. Now it is a former Maurice's. It seems the current recession has made a hash of the barbecue business, as this is the second Maurice's to close recently.

To me, the location seems a little awkward to get into and out of. I can't remember if that were the case when it was a Quincy's or if it is an artifact of all the road work that's been done on the I-26 / US-378 interchange over the last couple of years. However, the selling realtor is apparently quite upbeat about the plot as the the current asking price is $1,350,000.

UPDATE 8 November 2009: Forgot to hat tip commenter B.C.

UPDATE 22 September 2020 -- This place has been razed. Also, updating post tags and adding a map icon.

I find this Rite Aid closing interesting because it happened so soon after the conversion from Eckerd's, so in 2007, they paid a lot of money to redo all the signage and branding, interior and exterior, and then in 2009, closed the store.

I think it was a classy touch to transfer the store's perscriptions across the street to their competitors at CVS rather than sending customers to a Rite Aid further away. I hope the building can be re-used, it's still fairly new and appears quite nice.

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I noticed this defunct building / strip mall on Sunset Boulevard recently when I stopped to take some pictures of the old Quincy's building next door.

Of the three businesses that google suggests were here, I can only sort of recall hearing about or perhaps seeing Pizza House. At one point back in the 90s, I went on a quest for Columbia's best pizza and hit a large number of pizza restaurants, but never this one. At this remove I'm not sure why. It could be the distance, but during that time, I did try the nearby Grecian Gardens for pizza, so I doubt that was it. It could be that it was one of those places where you order at the counter rather than at your table -- I try to avoid those. Or perhaps it looked decrepit even back then.

The other two businesses I'm fairly sure I never heard of. Debbie's Plants seems like a fairly self-explanatory name, but not one that would attract me, and the medical facility seems to have either been eldercare or mental health care or perhaps both.

I see that the whole complex is for sale. It looks like it would take fairly extensive work to make it look decent again -- it wouldn't surprise me if whoever buys it just knocks everything down.

UPDATE 11 April 2010: Added 1977 Bellsouth yellow page ad.

UPDATE 18 October 2012 -- As I speculated above, the whole place was knocked down some time ago. I have a more extensive set of pictures (though taken on a much less sunny day) somewhere, but for now these from 19 February 2011 tell the story:

UPDATE 13 February 2017 -- This strip is now Salsaritas and Starbucks:

Site of the 5437 Forest Drive DQ:

The old 1366 Rosewood, DQ building:

The old 135 Sunset Boulevard store (now an Eggroll Station):

This fish market at 3939 Beltline Boulevard isn't on the phonebook list above, but was clearly a Dairy Queen at one time:

Actually the ad lists a lot more Dairy Queens in town than I was aware of back in the day. The one I remember was the one on Forest Drive at Percival Road, about where the oil-change place is now. I'm not even sure we ever stopped there -- after Bell's closed, we were more of a McDonald's family as far as fast-food burgers went back then.

The main reason I remember this Dairy Queen was because of the national ad campaign featuring Hank Ketchum's Dennis The Menace. Dennis was one of the comics I always read in The State, so it really caught my attention when he and his pal "Joey" started doing radio spots for Dairy Queen. Most of them were not that memorable, but there was one where Dennis & Joey were discussing all the "brazier" treats that it was possible to get at Dairy Queen in those days, and Joey delivered the line

Yeah, Dennis, like a super-brazier chilli-dog!

so memorably that it became sort of a catch-phrase with my friends. Almost any conversation could be punctuated by dropping Yeah Dennis, like a super-brazier chilli-dog! into a lull.

I'm not sure what happened to the Forest Drive Dairy Queen. I have it in my mind that it may have burned down, but I know that happened to the very nearby Forest Drive Pizza Hut, so I may be confusing the two stores. At any rate, the whole brazier thing which was supposed to propel DQ into the top ranks of fast food joints didn't really work, Dennis The Menace or no, and the chain exists today under much reduced circumstances.

UPDATE 22 April 2009: Added pix of the Forest Drive site, and the Rosewood building.

UPDATE 13 May 2009: Added pix of the Sunset Boulevard building.

UPDATE 25 May 2009: Added pic of a Beltline location

UPDATE 12 June 2024: This post is a mess since it was still fairly early days for the blog, and I tried to shoehorn four different locations into one post for some reason. I should separate them out and put a map icon on each, but for right now, I am just going to update the tags a bit.