Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

This building, on Pinestraw Road just below Satchelford Road, was a convenience store in the 1970s. I can't now recall if it were a "national" brand or a one-off, but I don't think it lasted very long. I'm not sure why -- the area is mainly residential, and I would have expected a good bit of foot traffic, especially since kids were still allowed to roam a little at the time.

At any rate, after the store closed, the (somewhat remodeled) building was still apparently in use, but never for anything "public". I think I saw service type trucks pulling in and out a few times, but it was always a bit mysterious. I guess that has ended, as the building is now up for lease.

UPDATE 22 September 2016: add Young's to the post title and update the closing date from 1970s to early 1980s based on the comments.

When I was growing up, my grandmother had a La-Z-Boy, as did two aunts. We kids always loved to get into them, lever out the footrest and throw ourselves backwards, listening to the chair ratchet up. When my sister moved out, she got one for herself, and I finally took the opportunity to get one for myself a few years ago.

In the event, I find that I spend more time sitting in front of this computer than in my comfortable recliner, but still it's nice to finally have a good chair. I picked it out at this outlet on Forest Drive, just down from Trenholm Plaza heading towards Fort Jackson, and they delivered and assembled it with no drama. There were a number of contractors working in the building today, so I suppose it is going to have a new life as something though I didn't see any indication as to what. I'm also not sure what happened to La-Z-Boy itself. I'd guess another casualty of the housing crash -- you most often need new furniture for a new house, otherwise you can live with the pieces you have for a while longer.

UPDATE 20 April 2009:

As Mrs. SK notes below, Tuesday Morning is here.

It's interesting that they came back this close to Trenholm Plaza. That makes me guess they were shown the door there as part of the plaza upgrade rather than just not being viable there as I had initially thought.

UPDATE 18 May 2023: Updating tags and adding map icon.

I talked about the doughnut store on Saint Andrews Road a few days ago, and that made me think of Mister Donut on Forest Drive.

I've written earlier about how we used to get hot Krispy Kremes when we went to wait for my aunt at the train station, but after Krispy Kreme moved across the river, Mister Donut was the only doughnut store near us, and it was always a special treat to stop there.

I had a little trouble with the name of the place. Their sign used a flowing cursive script, and to me it looked like "Wister Donut", which when you are a kid doesn't seem like an impossibly stupid name for a store, so that's how I always thought of it, though I was always able to get it straight when talking about the place.

Mister Donut dougnuts were both larger and more substantial than Krispy Kremes. My favorite was the "honey dipped", which I would say was about twice the size of a Kripy Kreme "original glazed", and much denser (though it was still a true [non "cake"] doughnut). In those days, I wasn't allowed coffee except on special occasions, so I liked to get the hot chocolate (which I remember as very good) for dunking purposes.

I was upset when Mister Donut was replaced by Dunkin' Donuts, a chain which I felt (and feel) had inferior recipies (and which at this location, according to my sister and The Free Times, can not operate a competent drive-through window). I didn't know until I looked it up today that Dunkin's parent company bought out Mister Donut and mostly dropped the brand in the US (it survives overseas).

The Dunkin' operation was smaller than Mister Donut and the east side of the building stayed vacant for years but has recently been occupied by, I believe, a travel agency.

UPDATE 26 March 2012: Added full street address to the post title, and added some tags.

Hair Cuttery is yet another casualty of the ongoing renovations at Trenholm Plaza which will eventually result in the entire wing of the plaza in which it was located being torn down. With its departure there are only two businesses still left there, The UPS Store and Holligan's. I've heard that Hooligan's is moving to the other side of the plaza though perhaps not into the spot they wanted. I'm not sure what is to happen to The UPS Store.

I couldn't get a really good picture of the informational signs at Hair Cuttery due to the morning light, but it appears that if you had a favorite stylist, you can still find her elsewhere in town.

UPDATE 11 Sept 2010 -- It's to be 32 ° a Yogurt Bar (32 Degrees a Yogurt Bar):

UPDATE 26 Jan 2011 -- 32 ° a Yogurt Bar (32 Degrees a Yogurt Bar) is open:

Interesting story here on why frozen yogurt stores are so popular right now.

UPDATE 5 Feb 2011: Replace the picture with one with the sign illuminated.

UPDATE 29 Jan 2019: Updated post title with street address. Added tags and map link.

I probably would not have noticed this small consignment shop coming and going except that it is in the same building as the final location of Forest Lake TV about which I had done an earlier post. Driving by from time to time, it seemed to have gone through several phases. In the first phase, it was open during "normal" hours. Then it was open "by appointment" and finally it was difficult to say from the store-front if it were still in business or not. I suppose even now, it could be, but it's been a long time since I saw a car there, so I'll say not.

UDPATE 3 March 2015: Added full street address to post title.

The Forest Acres area used to have several Pizza Huts. There was one on Forest Drive more or less across the street from where Golden Corral is now. There was one on Garners Ferry about where Ruby Tuesday is now, and then there was this one on Beltline in between D's Wings and the Japanese steakhouse.

I was noticing that Casa Linda looks a bit like an old-style Pizza Hut (though with some additions) and that this building is one of the newer style Pizza Huts, so it's possible that they moved here from the Casa Linda building. However, I have no recollection of any such thing, so that's just speculation.

At any rate, this Pizza Hut was part of my ongoing disenchantment with the chain, becase the service was consistently... not good. In fact this store had an innovation I had not seen before, and have not seen since: A Neon Help Wanted sign.

Honestly, do you want your customers to notice that your help turns over so often that you have a built-in, lighted, Help Wanted sign? Much better to just continue to tape a paper one in the window every week. That will go below most people's radar.

After this place went under as a Pizza Hut it became a Rising High. This was sort of interesting because it was one of the most protracted re-purposings I can recall. My memory is that the Coming Soon Rising High! sign went up at least a full year before they got around to opening, with the actual work seeming to happen on a very off-and-on basis. I suspect that opening this store while also trying to cope with the road-work on Harden Street was what drove Rising High under. At any rate, this store didn't last long.

I think there may have been another operation between Rising High and the current tenant, Shane's, but if so I can't now recall what it was.

UPATE 26 June 2023: Updating tags and adding map icon.

(Pictures 30 September 2008 & 1 November 2008)

The Happy Bookseller opened in another world than ours, a world called 1974. In some ways, it was a world very like our own, but in other ways it was very different. You might, were you to find your deLorean transported there, be able to find your way around town with very little trouble -- Although buildings have come and gone since then, the major thoroughfares and landmarks of today's Columbia largely existed. What you would have trouble navigating would be the media landscape. Columbia had three commercial television stations: WIS (channel 10) for NBC, WOLO (channel 25) for ABC and WLTX (channel 19) for CBS. Of the three, only WIS occupied a coveted spot in the VHF range and only WIS had good reception throughout the Columbia metro area. The other two UHF stations (and the fledgling ETV network station WRLK on channel 35) worked best if you put tinfoil on the rabbit ears and stood in just the right spot in the room. Few people had cable, and those who did only got a few extra "trash" stations like WTBS out of Atlanta -- there were no CNN, BRAVO or MTV. Nobody had a computer at home. The ARPANET barely existed and few dreamed it would become The Internet, or what that might mean.

Printed media was a different world as well. Dutch Square had been open a few years, and there was a Waldenbooks there which focused on paperbacks and bestsellers. Capitol Newsstand on Main Street was mainly magazines with a modest number of new paperbacks; there was a small specialty bookstore in Trenholm Plaza and the various locations of The Richland County Public Library and that was about it for Columbia and books.

Richland Mall at the time was still an open-air promenade anchored by J. B. White, Woolworth's, The Redwood Cafeteria and grocery stores. The Happy Bookseller started in Richland Mall on the far side of the promenade (the side away from Beltline Boulevard), and if I recall correctly, just a bit Whites-ward of Woolworths; that is you would come out of Woolworths, cross to the other side and head just a bit towards Whites to get to The Happy Bookseller. Along the way, you would pass some of the concrete animals which gave the mall a homey touch -- I remember a grinning turtle in particular.

When the ill-conceived "upgrade" to Richland Mall started (the process that has left us with the largely empty "Midtown at Forest Acres" [though I refuse to call it that]), The Happy Bookseller found itself priced out of a home and made the move down Forest Drive, towards Trenholm Plaza, to the spot it occupied until yesterday. The new location was quite a bit larger than the original store, and the staff took advantage of it by increasing their stocking depth. I recall that when I was in grad school, I even found a copy of Doug Comer's XINU book on operating system construction -- a pretty obscure computer science topic for a general interest store.

I don't know where the name of the store came from for sure -- I've always assumed it was playing off the bestselling (and notorious) 1971 book called The Happy Hooker, drawing an amusing contrast between two very different paths to happiness, but I could be completely wrong about that. At that time, it was certainly a name that caught your attention, though that was hardly the only thing the store had going for it. In particular, despite it's initially rather cramped quarters, Rhett Jackson decided to make The Happy Bookseller a real general interest bookstore in a way the others in town largely weren't. You could certainly get paperbacks and bestsellers at The Happy Bookseller, but they tried to have a bit more depth than that. I know that I really had only a limited appreciation of that in the beginning, given that I was 13, but over the years I would notice that the store always had a slightly different mix in science-fiction and humor, the two sections I perused most, and later that they were quicker than the chains to pick up on the fact that (some) graphic novels weren't just well-bound comic books and when I became interested in history, I found much more depth there than anywhere but the main library.

Jackson and the store were interested in bringing literature to Columbia and in promoting Columbia literature as well. An author I know had a number of signings for her books there though she has never been approached by one of the big-box stores like Barnes & Noble, even though she is with a well-regarded national publisher, has been well reviewed and sells a respectable number of books. They simply don't devote resources to local authors unless a directive comes down from corporate.

So, after lasting 34 years and being widely beloved, why did The Happy Bookseller close. Well, look in the mirror -- I know I have. Apart from retirements, tragedies, and the like, stores generally close when they aren't making money, and they don't make money when people don't shop there. I was amused when I was working in Augusta and Macy's pulled out of Augusta Mall. When the plan was announced, some of the locals started a petition saying how much they loved Macy's and how it should stay. My thought was that while someone in Macy's mailroom might appreciate their petition, what would keep the store in town was enough people buying stuff there that they made money. And it's the same, I'm afraid, for The Happy Bookseller.

Remember that different world of 1974? Well, we're not living there anymore, for better and for worse. Just on the local retail level, Columbia has four big-box bookstores that have more floorspace than The Happy Bookseller could ever dream of. They can get volume deals from publishers that a local store can't, and even when they are indifferently run (and not all of them are) they can stock in depth in a way a small store simply can't due to the laws of physics and the inability of more than one object to occupy the same space at the same time. And that's just local retail. I haven't even mentioned The Internet yet.

I recall that once, after my father stopped driving, he was looking for a particular book and wanted me to take him to The Happy Bookseller. I don't recall what it was, probably something about opera or English literature, but as it happened, they did not have a copy. That's understandable, I think it was fairly obscure. Anyway, we were in the stacks looking where it would be, and I suggested we drive over to Books-a-Million and see if they had it. He said he would rather have The Happy Bookseller order it. I argued that might take a while, and it's possible we could find it that same day. He looked at me, and said with one of his old fashioned turns of phrase Yes, but I would rather give this store my trade.

In the end, that's what not enough of us did -- give this store our trade. I include myself. I enjoyed browsing the store, and if I saw something I liked, I would buy it. But.. If I discovered I needed a technical book, or found an interesting sounding book mentioned in an online forum I was much more likely to point my browser at Amazon.com than drive to The Happy Bookseller even though it was only a few miles away. That's disintermediation, and it's been even worse for music stores. Given my general night-owl nature, I was also much more likely to find myself in a big-box store at 10pm wandering around drinking coffee and buying books I saw there rather than remembering what they were and getting them at The Happy Bookseller. So, as we shopped online, or shopped elsewhere The Happy Bookseller did what it could. They tried a coffee bar, which didn't last too long, and then a lunch counter which did a bit better, but at the end of the day, the numbers just weren't there to continue and so at the end of the day, they couldn't.

So, thanks folks, for helping us out of that 1974 media wasteland. I know that in the end the future didn't turn out as any of us expected, but it was a great ride!

UPDATE 9 October 2020: Adding full street address to the post title. Updating tags and adding map icon.

The Steak 'n Egg Kitchen was in this building on the bank of Gills Creek across the street from Trenholm Plaza and in front of Forest Lake Park. Commenter Lisa B's parents ran the restaurant (and another in Cayce), and she has an interesting rememberance here.

What I remember about the place is that it had a counter fitted with round, floor-mounted, stools on which a kid could twirl for as long as a parent could stand it and unpadded booths, like at the Waffle House or Huddle House lining the outside walls. I don't remember much about the menu, though I think it inclined towards hearty breakfast and lunch fare, but I do remember one item in particular. We didn't get to go there often (and in fact generally ate only one meal a week 'out'), but when we did, I had to have "Black Bottom Pie". I don't remember what was inside the chocolate cracker crust, but whatever it was, it was good! I think it's rather interesting that with the Steak 'n Egg Kitchen, there were at least three lunch counter operations in this block of Forest Drive. The other two were Liggett's Drugstore (later Ligget Rexall) at Trenholm Plaza and Campbell's Drug Store at the other end of Forest Lake Shopping Center. All three are gone now..

I'm not sure how long the Steak 'n Egg Kitchen lasted, but I'm pretty sure it was gone by the time I started college in 1980, and think it was in fact several years before that. This article from 1987 says that the chain still had 130 units then, but that it was troubled and that the new owners were attempting a turnaround. I don't find a corporate web site, so I'm guessing it didn't work. Anyway, after Steak 'n Egg Kitchen closed, another restaurant set up shop briefly in the building (which was remodelled). I can't recall the name of the place, but I got the impression that it was family run, and it had home-made raw fries. I think there was a non-retail business after that, perhaps an insurance office or some such and then the current tenants arrived and split the building. I've bought brandy & rum for cooking from the liquor store, but I don't know anything about the other two outfits. At any rate, none of them have Black Bottom Pie..

UPDATE 30 Jan 09:

Here's the old Harden Street location (mentioned in the comments). It's now El Burrito.

UPDATE 14 July 2012: Added the full street address for the Forest Drive location, and added the "Dobbs House" name to the post title. Also added some tags.

UPDATE 11 October 2013: Here is a great picture of one of the incarnations of this location. Thanks to commenter Dennis for ferreting this out!

Although I originally designated Tuesday as my "pizza night" to conform with the practice of the local Pizza Hut when I was living in Fayetteville, I generally don't go to buffets anymore. I would rather wait and pay to have something exactly like I want rather than take what's out. That being the case, I've never been to this Stevie B's Pizza located in an outparcel strip at the Wal-Mart complex on Forest Drive.

Judging from their signage, their main marketing pitch (for supper, at least) was for after-game free-for-alls by kids' sports teams. That certainly seems like a viable market niche to me, especially with no Chuck E. Cheese on this side of town. In the event though, perhaps not. I may be wrong. This place may come back on October 29 as the closed for remodeling sign suggests, but closed for remodeling is a standard, hopeful, dodge of places that have actually gone under. Add to that the fact that this is a new building with Stevie B's being the first tenant, and that looking inside shows no actual remodeling being done, and I have my doubts, especially since their phone number has been disconnected.

UPDATE 3 Nov 2008:

I was wrong -- they're back. Good for them!

UPDATE 17 June 2009:

Gone again!

UPDATE 26 Aug 2009: Took the 'temporary' out of the post title -- they are gone for good this time.

UPDATE 25 March 2010: Added full street address to post title.

UPDATE 21 March 2011 -- It's now a Navy Federal Credit Union:

I changed my mind about getting on I-77 today, and turned onto Old Forest Drive at the Wal Mart meaning to hop over to Percival. As I did so, I noticed that Liquids Gentlemen's Club was closed.

I don't know what this building was originally (you can see where some windows have been bricked over), but when I was first aware of it, it was The Carriage House. I may be wrong, but I think this was the first (and for a good while only) strip club in Forest Acres, though the town boundries are kind of odd, so I'm not absolutely sure it is now, or was then in the city limits. The building abuts what was once a viable strip mall at the corner of Forest Drive & Percival Road and which had some sort of convience store, a barber shop and a few other stores which I have long forgotten. It also had a Putt-Putt course about which I posted earlier.

After The Carriage House folded, Liquids moved in (though there may have been a gap). Although the location isn't great, I suspect that it already being zoned for a strip club was a big factor. Either The State or The Free Times did a profile on the owner. I can't recall his name, but he was somehow connected with the Columbia Rap scene, either as a performer or a promoter. I don't know if that business took off and he dropped the club, if they were closed down for some violation or other, or if it just wasn't profitable. Whatever the case, Liquids has dried up.

UPDATE 2 June 2010: Added the full street address to the post title. Also did some googling and found out that the Liquids was granted a liquor license on 22 Feb 2006, but that it was revoked on 14 Feb 2007 for violations of the conditions under which is was issued -- I suspect that had a good deal to do with the club closing. Also, oddly, the first link states that the building was planned to be demolished in 2007 for a hospital, something I never heard of (and which obviously didn't happen).

UPDATE 13 Oct 2010 -- Apparently The Carriage House was a legit restaurant before it went topless. Here's an ad from the 1975-1976 Southern Bell directory:

UPDATE 11 Feb 2011 -- the place continues to deteriorate to the point that there is now a warning letter from the sherrif on the door:

UPDATE 4 April 2012 -- The building continues to degrade, but on some days it's prettier than on others:

UPDATE 1 March 2018 -- This building was razed long ago to build the back parking lot for the new Panera/Petco plaza, but here are some pictures from 16 July 2011: