Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

I was cutting through the Fort Jackson Boulevard Kmart parking lot the other month, from Wildcat Road to Crowson Road, and noticed something I thought a bit odd: The store's former auto service bays were up for rent. I guess it makes sense from an economic standpoint (though to date there have been no takers), but it's kind of depressing, like the Dutch Square Belk closing off most of the third floor. It says not only weren't we doing well with our auto business, but we don't think we'll ever in the future revamp and give it another go -- in fact, we don't think we'll even need this part of the building again.

UPDATE 7 October 2019: Add map icon and update tags.

Here's another of Two Notch Road's many car lots. This one (which apparently also occupied the adjacent 6600 Two Notch Road address) seems to have moved. According to their sign, to 6729-A Two Notch., which google gives that as the address of the Very's plaza.

The buildings here are nothing special, but I really like the free-standing canopy in the parking lot, both for the canted roof and for the fact that it has only one support. And of course, what would any car lot be without the strands of flag triangles?

The first car we bought from Dick Dyer Toyota (or perhaps back then it was Dyer & Beck, with their catchy faux-asian "Dyer & Beck impor-ted-cars" jingle) was a 1980 Corolla station wagon, which I still have, and my main car is from there as well. The nice thing about Dick Dyer from my perspective, aside from the fact that they generaly seem to know what they are doing when they fix a car, was that I could walk home from there after dropping off a car, or I generally could -- I tried the hour walk in August once and nearly expired..

They have built a large new store on I-77 in Blythewood, which I have yet to visit. I believe the body shop (which I have used after taking out Bambi on I-20 once..) remains on Two Notch along with a pre-owned and scooter operation. That is all on the top part of the lot. The last time I drove by, it appeared the bottom half of the lot was for sale. I wish them well in their new digs, but it's another blow to the Two Notch corridor.

UPDATE 22 January 2021: This is now the home of Nuttall Tire:

Also adding map icon and updating tags.

I don't particularly concern myself with "timeliness" here. For one thing, I'm just one guy with a car and a camera -- there's no way I could keep up with everything closing, even if I somehow knew about it. For another thing, I may care more about some place that closed 20 years ago than some other storefront that went under yesterday.

With that said, after commenter Tom mentioned it in Have Your Say and after I saw the story in The State that today was the last day in business for Jim Moore Cadillac, I thought I might as well drive by and get some pictures.

According to The State the dealership is a casualty of GM's ongoing death-spiral restructuring. The story is a bit vague about whether the store was making a go of it otherwise, saying only that sales had been "improving".

I really don't have any mental tags for this dealership at all. We were never a Cadillac family, and the only commercials I recall were for what I presume was a related business, "Moore Hudson Olds", which all had a distinctively overmodulated announcer pretending to be live from their lot. Still it's always sad to see a landmark like this close, and Main street definitely doesn't need another vacant lot.

UPDATE 30 Nov 2010 -- Here's some more pictures taken on a brighter day:

UPDATE 19 May 2025 -- Time has not been kind to this property, and nothing else has ever moved in:

Also adding map icon and updating tags, and here is the LoopNet info.

Here's another empty car lot on Two Notch Road (this one is near Beltline). It would be interesting to count them all up some time. If you include Beltline and Decker, I'm sure you could get around a dozen. On the other hand, new ones pop up, and old ones come back, so it's not all doom and gloom.

UPDATE 30 Sep 2010 -- Well, they've knocked down the building now:

UPDATE 25 Feb 2011 -- Well, the new building on this spot is going up pretty quickly. It seems to have car service bays:

UPDATE 11 September 2011 -- It's a car-wash, and it's open:

Well, it appears that the Po Folks curse has struck again, and the building at 6246 Two Notch will need another new tenant. The phone is not yet disconnected (just constantly "busy"), but it seems that the Moore For Less used car dealership is gone. I would think that in this economy, used cars would be a sure bet, but perhaps the overall bank mess has affected financing, or people are holding on to what they have and not even getting new used cars...

UPDATE 13 March 2011 -- Well, in the last week they've knocked down the building and cleared the lot:

UPDATE 21 April 2011 -- It's to be a Dollar General and construction has already started:

UPDATE 25 June 2011 -- The Dollar General is open:

UPDATE 29 June 2021: Adding tags & map icon.

You can still see the empty placard in the K-Mart sign showing where the Advance Auto Parts sign used to be -- If K-Mart were in better shape itself, they probably would have pulled that down, as it looks decrepit and bad for their brand.

Anyway, the way I recall it, this space which apparently dates from 1970 like the K-Mart, was in its first iteration, a Western Auto.

The Western Auto that I remember best was the one at Trenholm Plaza, where I used to browse the Western Flyer bikes and buy those huge 1-volt carbon-zinc batteries with the screw terminals for hobby projects. I know I went into this store a number of times, but I can't really reall anything specific about it. Wikipedia says that Western Auto was acquired first by Sears, and then later by Advance Auto Parts, which phased out the Western Auto name (mostly) in 2003 (though many stores had already switch to "Advance" by then), and in fact this store was an Advance when it closed.

That history is a bit ironic since K-Mart like Western Auto was bought by Sears. If Sears had held onto the Western Auto brand a bit longer (Sears dropped Western in 1998 and bought K-Mart in 2005), they could have had some sort of super-mega store in this building

UPDATE 4 April 2022: Updating tags, adding map icon.

I drove up in the parking lot of the Kroger on Fort Jackons Boulevard because I had noticed some activity there and wanted to see what was going on. In the event I'm still not sure about that, though it appears to be water utility work, but while I was there, I noticed that this Goodyear car repair place on the Kroger outparcel was gone.

There's no date on the note they left on the door, but I believe it's fairly recent. I've used the one on Forest Drive, and they seem pretty decent, so I'm not sure what the issue here was. From this real estate report it appears that the property was built in 1974. I guess that would be not long after the Starlite Drive In there went out of business -- I know it was still there in 1973.

UPDATE 5 April 2009: I see in a comment about the Garners Ferry Kroger that I had forgotten that this place closed in April of 2008 -- I've updated the post title to reflect that.

UPDATE 29 February 2012 -- As mentioned by commenter Andrew below, this building has now been razed:

I noticed a few months ago that this little building on Two Notch Road, at the bottom of the hill between Pinestraw Road and Pine Belt Road, was now a Nationwide Insurance office. I see this month that they are moving to another location on Two Notch, leaving the building vacant again.

Insurance is usually a pretty staid business (unless you are AIG..), but this location has a somewhat racier past. In particular, back in 1987, you might have found the address listed under Escort Services:

The next iteration was a perfectly normal used car lot, except I always found the name, still on the shed out behind the main building, just a bit ironic:

UPDATE 20 December 2011 -- The Tonya D. Parks Nationwide has now moved into this place, following the other Nationwide office:

In a comment on a previous post commenter "Jonathan" identified this building on Two Notch Road across from Columbia Mall as Continental Sound. If not for that, I probably would just think of it as "that radio building".

The place is now some sort of loan operation called Cash -n- Dash and has been remodeled, so you can't tell it now, but at one time the whole front of this building was designed to look like a dashboard radio/cassette player. What is now the left star was then the volume knob, while the right star was the tuning knob. I believe the front windows did not have the opaque blue window then so they looked like a cassete insertion slot. I also believe that there was a digital tuning display above the windows. (Though they were not common in cars until later). In the beginning, it was set to "104.7" which was WNOK, which was a rock station at the time. Later, for whatever reason (advertising bucks, new manager whatever) the tuning of the building was changed to another station. My memory says it was WCOS, which was a country station, but I could be wrong.

At one time Continental Sound commercials were ubiquitous on Columbia television, so I really should remember exactly what they did. In fact I have only a vague idea that they sold and installed car stereos because the rest of the commercial was what drew my (and everybody's) attention. Their commercials were always tagged by a girl delivering the catch phrase Sounds Real Good! in a really appealing manner. I say "catch phrase", but I believe it was just meant to be a one-time commercial closing line, until she sold it so well that they went on to feature it in every commercial they did. Again, my memory may be playing me false as it often does, but I believe they actually used the same footage all the time, so perhaps the girl was never able to give the line the same oomph in later readings. Eventually, they did change it -- sort of. The original "sounds real good" girl was average looking -- perfectly OK, but not actress/model quality in the looks department. The final "sounds real good" commercials used a sexier girl who lip synched to the original girl's line.

I don't know what happened to Continental Sound. I think they folded or moved in the 1990s. Google suggests that after that the building was home to Big Apple Music which, I think, left the building's radio motif alone. I can understand why Cash -n- Dash wanted to change it -- it's certainly not what you would expect for that type of operation and would tend to confuse casual traffic, but it's still a shame to lose such a unique building. Though I suppose in a few years parents would have had to explain what a "cassette" was anyway..

UPDATE 14 September 2021: Adding map icon and updating tags.