Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

Well, back to Dutch Square for another closing...

Gamestop was in Dutch Square on the south side of the main corridor just down the hill from customer service, and the Eckerd's/Piccadilly side corridor.

I don't know a lot about modern video gaming (give me Galaga, Gorf, Joust,Pengo any day..), but this is the third such store that I am aware of closing in the past year (after Game Crazy on Garners Ferry, and Play N Trade on Forest Drive). On the other hand, the Gamestop on Harbison is still going, so it's more likely an artifact of the continuing downward spiral of Dutch Square than anything else.

(Hat tip to commenter Jason.)

Well, another original Dutch Square merchant bites the dust. This cafeteria started with the mall as a Morrison's back in 1970. At some point, Piccadilly bought the Morrison's chain, and the place stayed open with mearly a nameplate change, so I do consider it the same operation over the whole period. The place was on the north side of the mall, on the west entrance corridor, the one where Edkerd's used to be.

I don't believe I have eaten in a cafeteria since the early 1990s. In my mind, they were always associated with visits by elderly relatives, and involved liver, weird rice that didn't stick together like it should, and various carrot concoctions. I do believe the last one I ate in was, in fact, a PIccadilly. I had just started working in Augusta Georgia, and for some reason or other we needed some maps at the office to plan a trip (this was pre Mapquest), so a co-worker and I drove down to the ill-fated Regency Mall on the Gordon Highway to visit a bookstore and eat lunch. I could tell the minute we stepped inside the mall that it was on its way down (what can you expect when the anchor store was Montgomery Ward?), but nonetheless we got our maps and stepped into the Piccadilly. I saw enchiladas, and made the mistake of thinking that cafeteria enchiladas would be like mexican-restaurant enchiladas -- man, they were bad! (To go even further afield, I was probably the slowest guy this co-worker knew, and he was the fastest guy I ever knew. Not on this trip, but on one of our lunch trips, he locked me into his car and was already back into our building before I even realized the inside locks wouldn't work without a key..)

Anyway, with the closure of Piccadilly, I believe only Radio Shack and The Rogue remain from the original contingent of Dutch Square stores.

(Hat tips to commenters Andrew & Joe.)

Here's another recent vacancy in Boozer Shopping Center. I don't know if it's just coincidence, but there were a number of storefronts that moved out at more or less the same time, including The Book Dispensary, Gift's of Love and this one, Ron Grahams Allergy Center.

I don't know much about the place, but the full name is Ron Graham Allergy & Air Quality Center Inc, they can help you filtering all the allergens from your home air, and they are now out in Lexington on Sunset Drive near the Target and McAlister's Deli.

This move leaves Boozer at least three storefronts to replace on the north side of the center.

There's been a good bit of churn in the venerable Boozer Shopping Center lately: Golden China closed and became an Indian restaurant, the Book Dispensary moved, the allergy store moved, and the idiosyncratically apostrophed Gift's of Love florist has moved as well, or at least I hope it has. The sign says so, but the web site seems to point to something generic, and the new location is described in a rather non-specific way.

On the plus side for Boozer, Manifest is hanging in there after some initial plans to close, and a Dollar General has recently moved into the old Heroes & Dragons / Key Catalog Wholesalers slot.

I wish Zorba's Express in Irmo were closer to home so I could get out there for pizza more often, but last time I did, I noticed that this nearby storefront in the same Publix plaza was now vacant.

Judging from the google hits, Kwik Kopy seemed to offer the same range of services as The UPS Store or FedEx Office. I wonder if the copying business is taking hits from home printers and electronic documents. I vividly remember the first time I used a copy center (it was kind of a new concept then) to make a copy of The Lions' Book. It took hours and cost me a considerable chunk of my nearly non-existent college-student cash. Today, someone would just download the PDF..

UPDATE 7 June 2010: Changed post closing date from 2010 to 2009 based on comments.

UPDATE 15 March 2022: Updating tags and adding map icon.

We never ate at The Whale's Tail growing up. I wasn't a big seafood fan (which is to say I refused to eat the stuff), and my parents didn't push the issue too often (in fact we used to go to Oliver's Lodge before 5pm because I could get spaghetti before 5 but not after. (Which really sounds odd to me at this remove, but I'm pretty sure thats right..).

Anyway, while I never went there, I used to see the billboards from time to time, and I decided to go looking for it today. The old phonebooks (the above ad is from the 1977 one) never give a real street address for it (it was pretty far out in the boonies back in the day) but I took exit 97 both ways and didn't see anything that looked probable. There's certainly a lot of new construction in the area, and I suspect the building must have been torn down long ago. Can anyone confirm or refute that? The only possible place I saw was Little Pigs barbecue which looked to be the right vintage, but I always imagined The Whale's Tail as a bigger building.

UPDATE 27 May 2010: Added shots of Little Pigs which turns out to be the old Whale's Tail building.

UPDATE 15 February 2012: The Italian restaurant was Rubino's Italian Restaurant and I have added it to the post title along with the full Broad River Road street address.

I continue to have a bit of a fascination with Intersection Center. The whole property has been up for sale several years now, but (rather unsurprisingly) it has yet to sell. Fairly recently, the owner (I assume) went as far as to blank out the "Intersection Center" sign on the Broad River Road entrance to the complex, though it is still up on the Dutch Square side.

Despite the rapidly increasing decrepitude of all the buildings in the area, a few stores (or storefronts anyway, I think one may be some sort of church) do hold on. All Breed Dog Grooming Shop is not one of those. I do know it was open as recently as 1998, so I've simply listed the closing date as 2000s.

We used to get our dogs sheared evey summer, but we never had one groomed. It sounds like kind of a poodle thing to me (not that there's anything wrong with that..)

UPDATE 22 January 2020: Add map icon, update tags.

I was saddened yesterday when I heard that The Book Dispensary at Boozer Shopping Center had closed. As it turns out, like Mark Twain, reports of its death have been exaggerated. (OK, I suppose this is no longer the case for Mark Twain..).

In fact, Columbia's Book Dispensaries have always been a bit peripatetic. The one in the Northeast has had three locations that I can think of, Two fairly close to each other on Two Notch Road, with one stint in the former Winn-Dixie plaza on Decker Boulevard.

I don't think the one near the VA in the Big Lots plaza ever moved before closing, but this one will now have had at three locations. My memory is that it started at Boardwalk Plaza. Boardwalk Plaza was on Bush River Road, somewhere between the K Mart and I-26. The place was called Boardwalk Plaza because all the stores were connected via a raised wooden deck rather than sidewalks. Looking back on it, I think that may be because they were basically in trailers rather than real buildings set on the ground. I could be wrong about that, but whatever the configuration, the plaza was entirely gone by the 1980s, though I can't identify exactly which buildings replaced it.

After leaving Boardwalk, the Dispensary moved to this location in Boozer. As you can see from the pictures, it is actually a fairly large space, indeed larger than I remember though that's not too surprising since the book shelves would have always broken up the view.

As I mentioned in Have Your Say, I used to spend a lot of time in this store (and the first Two Notch location). I would go through the entire science-fiction section book by book, running triage on the books I wanted vs the books I could afford. I would always check out the humor section as well, looking for old books of cartoons, and the juvenile section looking for original series Tom Swift books (though these were becoming collector's items during that period with the prices climbing accordingly).

You can also trade in old books at the Dispensary for store credit, but in general I never could bring myself to part with much of anything, even books I regarded as real stinkers.

I'm afraid my patronage of the Dispensary dropped way off in the late 80s. There were a number of factors, some specific to me, some general. Firstly, I moved out of town. Secondly, I got a real job, and could generally afford to buy any new book I wanted (within reason). Thirdly and perhaps most importantly, there was the Internet. Whereas I used to spend hours going through the shelves at used bookstores and the cutout bins at record stores, now I can find almost any book ever published with a few mouse clicks. There's still the possibility of seeing a book I didn't know beforehand that I wanted at a store, but it's no longer the norm...

Anyway, I wish them luck at the new location, and will try to get over there and check it out at some point.

(Hat tips to commenters Tom & Thomas)

UPDATE 7 May 2010: Well, The State says that the new location is consolidating the Boozer and Two Noch stores, with the Two Notch store already having been closed. I did not know that! I guess it really has been a while since I've been in a BD.

UPDATE 4 June 2012 -- Here (finally!) are some shots of the new location at 710 Gracern Road (parallel to I-126):

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.

Taco Bell continues to retire its "old style" south-western looking stores for larger new stores. This one is on Broad River Road just to the south of the abandonded Pizza Hut.

It's interesting that they've left so many of the fixtures inside the old store, but on the other hand, what are they going to do with them? They don't fit the concept at the new store.

Although I'm not realy sure what the Taco Bell concept is anymore. I guess they have a small niche between places like Moe's, Qdoba and Chipolte and table-service Mexican restaurants, but I'd much rather have Moe's on the fast-food end and go to a table-service place if it's more than a burrito.

The new store is visible in the last picture and is 1928 Broad River road, though further down the street than the adjacent numbering would lead you to believe.

UPDATE 24 September 2011 -- Now open as Atlantic Seafood Restaurant: