Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

I've written about this building before since it was once "that building that looks like a car radio" and make the "Sounds Real Good!" commercial.

I'm not sure if Cash-N-Dash was the immediate next tenant in the building after Continental Sound, but I think they were. Sadly, they un-radioized the building though you can still see signs of the old design (the stars were the knobs, and the windows were the radio tuner readouts, I think).

I'm not exactly sure when this place closed shop, but I'm pretty sure they dashed sometime this summer.

Joyner's (as we called it) was a place my mother liked to visit every now and then. That's because you never had any idea what they might have in stock (and probably they didn't either!). They listed under Surplus & Salvage, and that pretty much describes the place.

It wasn't quite the same concept as Big Lots because while everything at Big Lots may be overstocked or something that no sane person would want, Joyner's specialized in beat up stuff that may have been fine items in themselves but couldn't be sold as new. Or that was a lot of it anyway, though I do specifically recall buying some bottles of Rodenberry's Cane Patch syrup there (a memory from growing up, which it was a favorite of my grandfather, who put it on biscuits) that didn't seem damaged.

Commenter Dennis described the store this way:

I went to Joyner’s a few times. We called it the trainwreck store because they had merchandise that was so beat up. They had cans of food with no labels. So you paid about 7¢ and had to wait till you opened it to find out if it was peas or corn or whatever. They also had cans of paint with no way to know what color it was except to open the can.

The place closed not too long after I left town in 1985, last listing in the Feb 87-88 phonebook. The space now seems to be some sort of transmission and towing operation.

Unique Lighting Center has been on O'Neil Court, just down from Parklane and beside the former NAPA store for a number of years. I actually had occasion to go in there about a year ago. I was looking for a replacement bulb-clasp shade. I had looked unsuccessfuly in a number of non-specialty locations with no luck, but they actually had one here. I figured that eventually I would go back to see if they could replace the globe in an old mogul-base floor-lamp I have, but that's yet another task I didn't get around to soon enough.

UPDATE 16 Oct 2010 -- They are definitely closed now. The banners are still up, but the door signs say "Store Closed" & "Out of Business":

I'm not sure exactly when this store, in Dentsville across from Columbia mall, and near the Two Notch / Decker intersection closed, but it is still listed in this years phonebook.

The motto, "Furniture, flooring and more" seems rather ambitious for what is a pretty small storefront. They must have had a warehouse somewhere to support everything shown here in this archived version of their website from 2008. This area of Two Notch is still struggling. I'd like to see something go in there, but I have to say that since there's no light, it's not well situated for traffic heading towards town.

UPDATE 28 Sep 2010: Added "Color Tile" to the post title based on the comments.

UPDATE 22 March 2011 -- It's now a "Cheapo" grocery:

I only went into Superpetz a few times. I'm pretty sure I got pigs ears for my sister's dogs there once, and think I was in there one other time, though I can't remember what for. The place was kind of a Wal Mart for pet paraphernalia, with the non-WalMart touch that you could actually take your pets inside with you.

According to the chain's web site, this was the only Columbia store, which makes me suspect issues with the chain as a whole rather than the standard "things don't do well on Decker" issue. This closing is a further blow to the Fashion Place plaza which housed Superpetz, although it did recently make good the Cici's Pizza vacancy with the opening of Gabby's Pizza in that spot.

(Hat tip to commenter Matt)

UPDATE 8 Oct 2010: Added Phar-Mor to the post title based on the comments.

UPDATE 10 September 2011 -- It appears that Goodwill will be moving across the plaza from its current location in back to this location:

I went to Sears at Columbia Mall on Wednesday to look for something and decided to take the closing-cam and walk the mall afterwards. There are so many vacant storefronts that the place almost feels like Inlet Square Mall now. I thought about taking pictures, but then decided there was no point because I didn't even know what these places had been. In high school, I probably went several times a week, but now it's once every six months or so. Is the mall in trouble? Let me put it to you this way -- the Dollar Store is gone, and there are kiosks selling flea-market type merchandise...

I did take a few pictures, and I really like the first one. It is almost an Edward Hopper-esque scene of isolation.

This isn't a current events blog. I don't feel compelled to do a post on everything that closed this week. Even assuming I knew about all that, I'm just as happy to do a post on something that's been gone thirty years. On the other hand, I don't feel compelled to not do a post on something that happened yesterday, since it's kind of odd, interesting and nearby.

Commenter Jamie pointed out this story on the WLTX site:

Richland County, SC (WLTX) - Some Ramada Inn employees and customers are looking for answers after the hotel on Two Notch Road shut down suddenly.

Employees say they haven't gotten paid and customers have been showing up looking for refunds on their deposits.

"It's sad. Why would they do this? Or how could this happen," said employee Stacey Knight. Knight and her coworkers are without a job and without a paycheck. They say the owners of the Ramada Inn closed for business, padlocking the doors shut.

It's not too uncommon for employees at a restaurant to show up for work and find the place closed, but hotels are not a day-to-day business. People make long term plans involving hotels, and normally, at least for a chain hotel, I would expect some sort of orderly wind-down, with people being rebooked to alternate properties or having up-front money refunded. Apparently not so here:

There was one lady in particular that made a deposit for a family reunion, $1100, and she wanted her money back," said another employee.

I'll wager that's one family that never uses any Ramada again..

Anyway, my first memory of this property is when it was a Holiday Inn. I never stayed there (why would I need a hotel in my hometown?), but I think I did go inside once. If I recall correctly, I went with a group of friends after a wedding, probably in the late 70s or early 80s. At that time, the lounge (now McKenna's) attached to the hotel was called Pawleys (a name calculated to attract my attention), and they catered to the backgammon boomlet (which petered out not long afterwards) by having backgammon sets available in the bar area.

I believe Holiday Inn dropped the property after I-77 came through to move closer to that Interstate. For a while the place was (I think) independant, with a big sack covering up the old Holiday Inn sign.

(Hat tip to commenter Jamie.)

UPDATE 26 July 2010 -- Here are some more pictures:

UPDATE 28 August -- After commenter Matt pointed out goings on at this closed Ramada, I decided to take a look and I'm still a bit puzzled at what is happening. It looks like the whole place is being gutted, but they don't seem to be knocking it down in toto. Perhaps it will be like the old Columbia Athletic Club and Splendid China where they have replaced everything except the actual outer walls..

UPDATE 12 September 2012 -- The whole building has now been fenced off. Driving by, I could still hear the chirps of hundreds of smoke dectectors needing new batteries..

15 June 2013:

Full demolition has started. For a long time it appeared they had only done enough demolotion to "poison-pill" the structure, ie: make sure nobody could buy it and reopen it as a motel. In these pictures, the full knockdown is well underway. Also, note the for-sale sign just off of Trenholm Extension.

14 July 2013:

Not nearly as much "progress" as you might expect, but the demolition goes on.

10 August 2013:

I had never seen a freight train stuck on this stretch of the track by Two Notch, but in this case a long train was stopped for upwards of 45 minutes, blocking off both Dawson Road & Oakway Drive. I had to go all the way down to the Two Notch / Trenholm Extension intersection to get back to the old Ramada. As I finished taking this set, train finally started to move and the railway maintainence pickup truck (fitted with track wheels) came along the tracks behind the train. What a track crew could have been fixing behind a stopped train, I'm not sure.

As you can see, the Ramada is now entirely gone except for a pump building and some incidentals like TVs and silverware.

UPDATE 17 August 2013: Added verbiage and pictures for 15 June 2013, 14 July 2013 and 10 August 2013. Also added complete photosets for those days.

UPDATE 5 December 2014 -- This is interesting. Apparently I missed it, but the property went to forced auction in August 2014. That means that whoever originally owned it tore down a perfectly good hotel property with no idea, or no workable idea, how to make money off the property any other way:

Photosets:

Photoset 26 August 2012
Photoset 15 June 2013
Photoset 14 July 2013
Photoset 10 August 2013

Here's another vacancy at The Shoppes of O'Neil Court. According to Loopnet there are currently six open spots there. This one has been vacant going on half a year now, and the Pro Golf of Columbia slot has been vacant at least a year and a half..

According to the Roundabouts web site, they were established in 2003 as Capital City Consignments and this site was their second storefront, the original one being another slot in the same plaza. This January they moved into the old Stein Mart location at 70 Polo Road. To me it seems like sort of a wash from a visibility point of view. O'Neil Court is off the beaten path, but while the Polo / Two Notch location gets a lot more drive-bys, it's up on a hill that makes it invisible from the road, and there's really nothing else in that plaza to pull traffic in...

UPDATE 7 September 2012 -- There is now (and has been for a while) another consignment store Divine Consign in the old Roundabouts location:

Tronco's General Arts Floors was in Arcadia Lakes in the office/retail plaza which is just behind (or in front of) the Arcadia Lakes lily pond which has been the subject of local controversy lately.

I'm pretty sure I've seen work by Tronco's and found it fine. I know I've seen their truck around for years. Their new location is 5127 Two Notch, which puts it pretty close to The Impulse Club, but I can't quite visualize it.

I have also wondered off and on over the years where the Arcadia Lakes town hall is. Turns out it is in this plaza.

UPDATE 2 November 2011 -- Here are some pictures of the back side of the store (with floor samples):

OK, in case you wondered why yesterday's post about Andy's Deli on Parklane started out with such a mediocre picture -- it was like this.

I had xeroxed the restaurant section from the 1985 Southern Bell phonebook, and was deciding what to try and get pictures of. I saw Andy's Deli and a Parklane address and thought to myself "Oh, I know what that was", and went and took these pictures of Albert's Deli. I even started writing up the post that way, then happened to check the "7260 Parklane Road" address in Google Maps, and the spot that came up was way off from where I thought it should be. Then I checked the actual address of Albert's and found it was 7358, not 7260.

Thinking son-of-a-gun, I was completely wrong I rewrote the post, and found a picture I had taken for the comic store that used to be in the same strip that happened to include the current Monterrey / former Andy's off at the edge, and went with it. All the while I was also thinking, but didn't Albert's used to be something else?.

Then I remembered to look in the 1998 phonebook I actually have a copy of here at home. Albert's is *not* in that one, so I went searching for what was at 7358, and lo-and-behold, it was Andy's. So, sometime between 1985 and 1998, Andy's moved from the Monterrey site to the Albert's site, and sometime between 1998 and now, it closed.

As for Albert's itself, I stopped there a year or so ago. I think I was going to or coming from the old Sears Repair Center on Parklane. I have to say it did not knock me over. The food was OK, but as I recall, there were no booths, and you had to take your cup back to the counter for refills, so it would never be a hangout of mine.

UPDATE 14 February 2020: Update tags, add map icon.