Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

Not sure what happened to my pictures here -- it looks like maybe I forgot to reset from a nighttime ISO to daylight before starting to shoot. The essentials are clear enough though, if more than a bit washed out.

The Atlanta Bread in North Myrtle Beach closed either last year or in 2011, I'm not really sure anymore. The only other ABC at the beach was this one on SC-54 just west of the US-17 bypass interchange. For a number of years, it sat sort of all by its lonesome (though the sideroad it was on obviously implied grander plans), but finally this last year Target started building behind it, and finally opened in late 2012 or early 2013.

I had had some concerns about the place -- it was the sort of operation which seemed to have no idea how many cookies to bake to last out the whole day (I'm pretty sure your loss in day old cookies is smaller than the loss you have from not making a sale..) and had the infuriating habit, which is pretty rare in chain stores, of not honoring their posted hours if things were slow. Still, it was nice to have a bread-bowl of soup there for lunch every now and then, and I figured that if they had hung on until Target opened, they were home free. That proved not to be the case, and the place was closed when I went by in late July.

The rest of the little strip mall has a gym, fro-yo, and a party shop. I had to include some pictures of the punch-me-pirate, including the one below from a few years ago.

Apparently this was not the last Krystal in South Carolina, but it's pretty close. It looks like the other few that are left are clustered along the Georgia and North Carolina border areas with none in the Midlands, Pee Dee or Low Country.

This store, on US-17 Business near to Inlet Square Mall is not in an obviously bad location (though a Five Guys did open nearby a couple of years ago) but is in a little strip that doesn't seem to prosper. In particular, a Moe's failed a few storefronts down, something that seemed unlikely to me at the time, and one end unit has cycled through quite a few entertainment concepts (comedy club, karakoe..) in the last few years.

UPDATE 7 June 2023: Adding map icon.

Made a nice little ride out into IGA territory on Sunday to check out this spot in Swansea, a place that to the best of my memory, I'd never been to before. Third street is apparently the business district, and there were several restaurants in the general area. While I concede tans look good on other people (especially of the female persuasion), I've never seen the appeal myself, especially with Irish skin. Anyway, if you do, it looks like you can latch on to a turnkey setup here.

(Hat tip to commenter Jay)

This little Irish pub was tucked away at the bottom of the hill in the little strip mall fronted by Dunkin' Donuts. In fact, it was so tucked away that while every time I saw it, I meant to try it out sometime, it would always slip my mind completely when I actually was looking to go somewhere.

I noticed recently when I was looking at Golden City, that it had, so to speak, changed its stripes and is now Kwagga.

UPDATE 9 April 2014 -- Here are a few pictures from early January 2014 of the new building, which is now open. (Unfortunately, it was a very grey day):

There was a place in Camden on US-1 that used to do the same thing, though I'm not sure how being able to put a car on a stick indicates the same skills needed to *fix* a car..

Here's a little barbecue joint (and live venue apparently) in between Andrews & Georgetown on US-521 west of US-17Alt.

It looks as though there were some attempt to rebrand it after Little PaPa's closed.

The pig does not appear to have fully grasped the gravity of his situation..

Commenter Terry's remarks on the Hostess bankruptcy, and his list of other vanished American icons brought to mind once more Borders Books. I have posted before about the closed stores I found in Gainesville and Tampa.

Those stores have now been re-purposed. This store which I found in Orlando on Sandlake Road opposite a huge mall, as of August had not been. In fact, all the fixtures and some of the office equipment are still in place just as if the book supply truck could pull up any minute.

The distinctive look of a Borders puts me in a nostalgic mood, as though I might once more spend my Kansas City evenings there, drinking coffee and poring over racks of books I could never find in Columbia, Fayetteville or Aiken, or leafing through low circulation magazines I had known of only by repute until seeing them there.

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The Glenns Bay Connector runs, under a couple of different street names, from oceanfront in Surfside Beach, across US-17 business, across US-17 bypass and to SC-707.

Between US-17 and 17 bypass, it is two lanes only. This has not been enough for years, especially since a large number of appartments have been built off of the road in this area. If you are trying to go from the bypass to US-17 in the afternoon, there will always be somebody stopped in the road trying to make a left turn into their complex, backing traffic up for blocks.

Currently there is a project underway to widen the road, and it has apparently eaten this Kangaroo Express on the north east side of the intersection. Don't cry for Kangaroo because there is *another* one on the south east side of the intersection.

It looks to me as though the carwash has been closed longer than the store itself.

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