Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

Well, I'm sure longtime readers have been wondering when this was coming, but consider how lonely your wall will be when you have to take down the 2015 calendar. Why not keep your wall happy with a brand spanking new 2016 Pawleys Island calendar? Happy walls make a happy house.

This year, we have a brand new set of Island images in either 11" x 8.5":

Or large 14.25" x 11":

Pawleys Island Large Wall Calendar by OnlyAtPawleys
Look at more Pawleys island Calendars at zazzle

And don't forget all of the other calendar designs are still available as well!

This storefront, co-located with a convenience store, was orginally Kotas Sandwiches. After that closed, the place re-opened for a while as Kotas Your Way!.

It appears from the signage, and the food truck parked in the lot that the new owners have closed the storefront and now concentrate on catering chiken & pizza from two food trucks.

UPDATE 11 July 2016 -- Now PK-BBQ:

Mari's Lake House was the followup operation to Bentley's Beach House in this North Lake Drive building in Lexington.

As far as I can tell, the setup was very similar, with even the same AMF Sunfish still sitting in the parking lot. I'm pretty sure the free beer offer was new though..

(Hat tip to commenter badger)

UPDATE 30 August 2016 -- Now Levi's Lake House:

UPDATE 27 January 2022: Adding map icon. Putting in a closing date, which I apparently forgot to do originally.

Feel Goods, in the old Taco Bell and Nick's location on Decker, is an interesting case of a flood closing.

This building is raised a good bit above the old Captain's Kitchen location where Decker washed through during the 6 October 2015 flood, and I don't believe there was water in the building. However, it was nonetheless on a section of road that was closed for several weeks, and that loss of access and business was apparently enough to tip the scales, at least for now. Hopefully they will be back, but there is no signage indicating anything one way or the other.

UPDATE 9 February 2016 -- It's official now, the building is up for sale:

4 December this year was one of the warmer iterations of Brookgreen Gardens Nights of 1000 Candles, and by that, I mean that I could feel the buttons on my camera without my hands going numb.

As usual, the Gardens were beautifully lit, and there were entertainment tents with jazz, vocal ensembles and rock sounds of the season and wandering bagpipers. My impression is that they are getting a little bolder in color choices for the lights though of course the hundreds of candles, floading candles and luminaries remain.

The festival runs for two more weekends, on 10-12 December and 17-20 December and if you have a chance, I highly reccommend you go.

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For many years this was Decker Billiard Club. It closed briefly and re-opened, probably unintentionally, as Decker Billaid.

I drove by recently and noticed the place is now a latin club called Serena Lounge.

Here's another Great Flood of 2015 casualty.

This little restaurant on the Fort Jackson gate off I-77 has been there under one name or another for years. Originally, it was Saki, then when the current owner, who was working for the former owners, bought it out, he changed the name to Saky. This is what The State had to say:

“Who expected all this rain and the flood?” Sun Suk said as repairs continue on the eatery on Fort Jackson Boulevard at I-77.

The 7,500-square-foot structure housing Saky was damaged by the same flash flood Oct. 4 that inundated homes in the King’s Grant neighborhood.

Saky bore the brunt of the flood on its side of the road.

Two feet of water came inside and a tree fell on part of the restaurant after the bank of a nearby creek eroded in the rush of water.

“I walked in and it was a little wet, so I thought maybe it wasn’t too bad,” Sun said. “Then I went in back and could see the sky from inside of the building, so I knew I had a big problem.”

The first picture is from some years ago, the others from after the flood, though I could not get too close.

Hopefully they will be back soon.

Planet Hollywood in Myrtle Beach was always an interesting building to drive by. I thought it looked a bit like an elephant "hoovering up" (as our Brit friends might say) customers from the parking lot through that trunk-like canopy and into the elephant's head. There also seem to be some scary teeth involved.

In the event, though I drove by many times, I only ate at Planet Hollywood once. I'm guessing it was back in the 90s, and I had an unobjectionable, but completely unexceptional hamburger. I have heard in recent years rumors that the place was in financial trouble, and I can only guess that people wised up to the fact that a burger's proximity to Bruce Willis's tennis shoes or whatever does not make it worth $15 -- the place limped through the 2015 Labor Day weekend and threw in the towel on the following Tuesday.

The night pictures above were taken on 3 May 2012, while the post-closing pictures below are from 3 October 2015, a gray day coming just before the bottom dropped out on 4 October (though it was not anywhere near as bad on the Waccamaw Neck as in Columbia). I find it interesting that while they did not spend a lot of effort destroying the celebrity handprints around the building, they *did* spend considerable time defacing the nameplates that would have told whose hands they were. (Though they did miss a few).

(Hat tip to my sister)

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UPDATE 23 November 2015 -- That was quick! Open again:

UPDATE 1 June 2018 -- Closed again, and for sale:

I'm not sure when this garage on Alta Vista closed as I can't find it in any of my recent phonebooks under the name on the sign, but I think I would have noticed it before if it were too long ago, so I'm going to say 2015 until someone says different.

As a side note, I never knew the name of this little uphill street which connects Fontaine Road to Shakespeare Road. Alta Vista was the first really useful Internet search engine, put together by the now defunct Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) to showcase their 64 bit Alpha chip. It was very successful, but DEC got into trouble by never fully realizing that the mini-computer was dead and that the PC was a commodity item and went belly up. For some reason, nobody bought the Alta Vista technology (that I am aware of) and the crown passed to Google where it still remains..

UPDATE 6 April 2017 -- Now Royal Automotive: