Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

I noticed a real estate sign in front of this Two Notch building the other week and in checking further found an old Administrative Law Court decision that established this building was once The Locker Room, a name that sounds somewhat familiar to me, though I could not have placed it in this area.

The decision is somewhat interesting in that it is a denial of an ABC permit, mostly for the reason that the club's only idea for parking was a cockamayme scheme for valet parking to a lot two miles away.

I'm not sure if this The Locker Room was associated with the one in Eastover.

Judging from the reviews and menu, I think I might have liked The Tap Room though I rarely eat in the Rosewood Area. The building is somewhat interesting as it is on a steeply sloping lot at the corner of Rosewood and South Holly. From the Rosewood side, it looks like a two story building at street level, but from the South Holly side, you can see the third level below Rosewood.

(Hat tip to commenter Midnight Rambler)

I had thought these two separate stores when I took the pictures, but closer inspection leads me to believe that while they may have been operated as seperately licensed businesses for ABC reasons, they shared one door (the door on the right of the Party Store side appears to be blocked off).

Both were in the little plaza at the corner of Leesburg Road and Greenlawn Drive which also housed the former Leonardo's Screen Printing and still very much open Pizza Palace.

Corked at Sandhill is out of business. Their web site is still up and announces the closing, though it doesn't list the actual final day. I have no idea of Corked's circumstances, but it seems to me that, in general, Sandhill would be a poor place for a beer and wine shop in that it's not near home, or on the way home, or easy to get into and out of if it is on your way home. I would think 9 times out of 10, it would just be easier to stop by a grocery store -- Sandhill is a shopping destination, not somewhere to zip into and out of.

(Hat tip to commenter Cheryl)

Swensen's was a fairly popular restaurant chain in the 1980s. I'm not sure I ever went to the Columbia location (now The Hunter Gatherer) at the corner of Main & College Streets, but almost anywhere we went on a trip, there would be a Swensen's. I know for sure there was one on The Market in Charleston (now an Applebee's, I think) , and we ran into them on class trips to DC and Florida as well. The ad above from the 1985 Southern Bell phonebook has the logo I recall.

Swensen's started in San Francisco as an ice cream stand, but by the time it franchaised and locations hit the Southeast, they were casual dining restaurants (with ice cream, of course) and I think I had burgers there more often than anything frosty. Their fries were a bit unusual in that rather than being longer than they were wide, they were sort of square and waffle-hatched.

According to Wikipedia during the 1990s, the chain shrunk from 400 stores to about 200, and when it started to expand again, it was mostly overseas. I think the Columbia store closed during that wave of shrinkage. The current tenant in the building, The Hunter Gatherer brewpub has left the interior in a rather rough (if interesting) form. I suspect it was somewhat less distinctive as a Swensen's but I could be wrong. I would be interested if anyone can recall whether Swensen's had the main-floor and catwalk layout used by THG.

UPDATE 16 April 2010: Added Campus Club South and TW Muldoons to the post title and identified what year the ad is from. Added The Quarter Moon to title.

UPDATE 16 October 2023: Here is a story on the history of Swensen's. Apparently the orignal store is still around after the franchaise operation collapsed.

Also adding map icon and updating tags.