Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

Today's picture comes from reader Thomas who says:

Here is a pic of the old S&S on Gervais. I took it in 97 when I was USC and they announced it was closing and would be torn down.

I can only recall eating at this S & S once. If I remember correctly, we took my aunt from Florida there for some reason -- perhaps after shopping downtown. What always impressed me about cafeterias as a kid was how different the rice was from what we got at home or family gatherings. Family rice was very sticky and fluffy. Cafeteria rice, on the other hand, was a dish of discrete rice grains which did not stick together at all. I suspect now that cafeteria rice is parboiled or converted as Uncle Ben might say. Why anyone would prefer it that way I can't say, but it would make it easier to clean the dishes at a commercial establishment, I suppose.

S & S still has an operation at Richland Mall, where it replaced the old Morrison's cafeteria, which in turn replaced the older Redwood cafeteria (which was the cafeteria we mostly went to when I was a kid). For some reason, there is a Japanese facebook page devoted to the Richland Mall operation, though I can only make it come up in English if I use the google cached version.

Thanks Thomas!

I noticed a few months ago that this little building on Two Notch Road, at the bottom of the hill between Pinestraw Road and Pine Belt Road, was now a Nationwide Insurance office. I see this month that they are moving to another location on Two Notch, leaving the building vacant again.

Insurance is usually a pretty staid business (unless you are AIG..), but this location has a somewhat racier past. In particular, back in 1987, you might have found the address listed under Escort Services:

The next iteration was a perfectly normal used car lot, except I always found the name, still on the shed out behind the main building, just a bit ironic:

UPDATE 20 December 2011 -- The Tonya D. Parks Nationwide has now moved into this place, following the other Nationwide office:

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.

Lionel Playworld was, I believe, the first anchor tenant for the ill-fated strip-mall at the corner of Decker and Trenholm Extension (though I am not sure the extension was finished at the time it opened). The place keeps coming up in the comments to the Columbia Mall Toys-R-Us post, so I thought I would give it its own post.

My understanding is that the chain was owned by the same company that made the iconic 3-rail 0-27 guage model trains, and was a "big box" toy store, one of the first in the Columbia market. The place operated fairly quietly until the end when it earned a lot of bad will from the shopping public. I believe the way it unfolded was that the decision to close the store was made in the fall, but not announced. They operated through Christmas Eve, and then closed without warning, leaving anyone with a Christmas gift to return or exchange high and dry -- it got quite a bit of local media attention at the time.

After Lionel the strip went into heavy decline, and the building sat empty for a number of years until Winn-Dixie opened there (in the left part of the building) with great fanfare. After Winn-Dixie pulled out of South Carolina, the building sat idle for several years again, until The Comedy House relocated there from the Saint Andrews Road area (after a gap). From the signage, a bingo operation also now uses the location.

UPDATE 8 Mar 2009 -- More pictures:

I wanted to get a front shot of this building, but as you can see, traffic was pretty bad on Broad River Road at the time; perhaps I'll get one later. At any rate, this place, now a TitleMax loan operation was once a Steve's #1 Sub Contractor sandwich shop. Google suggests that there are still several branches of the chain in town, but not in places that I normally go -- this is the only one I can recall seeing. In the event, I never made it there, because it's a long way to go for a sandwich.

That said, what I really want to see in Columbia is something like Dagwood's Sports Bar & Deli in Surfside Beach. They have nice booths, table-service, honking-big glasses, which they keep filled, and a great you-name-the-ingredients sandwich building option with sandwiches that come on an excellent in-store fresh baked sub-roll. I've tried a number of sandwich operations in Columbia without finding its equal. I was not impressed at all with Duke's, Which-Wich is very industrial, with fountain-tea, most of the per-se "sub" shops have uncomfortable seating, Panera has odd sandwich choices, as does McAlister's and Groucho's has so-so bread. I think Very's on Two Notch comes the closest. Any suggestions?

I wrote about J. B. White (White's) before, so I don't have much about that to add here. Actually, I don't have much to say about the distribution center either -- it wasn't a place a consumer would ever go inside, but I just wanted to note that it was here, out on Sunset Boulevard just a bit to the south of the I-20 intersection.

I see that a company called Span is using it now, though they don't seem to be doing much trucking in and out of there (granted it was a Sunday when I took these), and appear to be trying to sell the place (or perhaps they are simply leasing it until the owner can sell).

From what I understand, Eckerd was long an arm of J. C. Penny, which was looking to dump the thing for years before it was able to. That notwithstanding, Eckerd went on a building spree in Columbia a few years before the chain was finally taken over by Rite-Aid.

This included building a number of new stores which went under even before the take-over was in the works, and this building, at 1720 Taylor Street (between the train tracks and the old Big-T) was one of them. My memory is that it closed down almost as soon as it opened, though that may be something of an exaggeration. I'm not sure if it was caught in the chain's problems, or just not a viable location. Dollar General proves retail can work in that spot, but Eckerd's was a bit pricier.

UPDATE 15 May 2011: Changed closing date in post title to April 2000 based on commenter Andrew's research.

UPDATE 10 August 2020: Add map icon, update tags

The picture isn't very good because the sun was against me, but Jack's was a local shoe store on Sunnyside Drive (which is a side street off of Forest Drive, just past Richland Mall heading towards town). The site is now either Miyo's or Leapin' Lizards -- I can't recall exactly which space it was. Growing up, we shopped for shoes in a number of places, including Gerber's at Trenholm Plaza and the shoe departments at Sears and other department stores, but I think Jack's is where we most often ended up.

I remember in particular, that Jack's was the place I got my first pair of Sebago Docksides, a shoe so comfortable that I have worn them ever since and that would be over 30 years now. In fact, that was about the only place in town I could find them. Now I either have to get them in Charleston, or order them from amazon.com (which is OK since my feet stay the same size now).

Hops is a brew-pub chain which underwent a near death experience in the early 2000s. The chain was bought by the same owners who took over another near-to-dead chain, Don Pablo's, but both Columbia locations closed, and in fact, I don't believe there are any Hops left in South Carolina.

Curiously enough, though I ate at this Hops a number of times, I never did try the beer. My father, sister and I used to stop for Sunday lunch from time to time, and I recall the food as pretty good. They had the standard list of burgers as well as chicken and pasta, but their "branding" item (aside from beer, of course) was the croissant. They would bring out a plate of criossants almost as soon as you sat down, and though I don't know what a Frenchman would make of them, they were warm from the oven and drizzled with frosting and I found them quite good.

I always meant to try the beer some time, but beer doesn't really fit into my meal routine. I like un-sweet ice tea with my food (lots of it actually), not beer (nor soft drinks for that matter though I did notice that they actually had in-house brewed root-beer as well as regular beer).

I think cold closings are more the rule for restaurants than the exception. For every one where the owner announces that he's retiring and gives you notice to come in before its too late, there are ten where you show up one day and the place is empty. That's how it was for Hops.

The place was empty for a while, then Hooters moved in, and as far as I can tell, is doing a good business (though that's what I thought about Hops as well).

I've written about Sounds Familiar before, as the chain has been contracting ever since the digital age started. This particular store, in Myrtle Beach a couple of miles above Myrtle Square Mall, was my favorite location. It was not as large as the Rosewood or Parklane stores, but for some reason, the selection seemed to skew slightly more to stuff that caught my eye than other SF locations. For one thing, this store seemed to be the boldest in the chain as far as stocking "import" CDs went. I know I bought a number of Beach Boys / Brian Wilson "imports" there over the years including the imfamous Pet Sounds stereo sampler. Also, as might be expected for the Myrtle Beach store, they had a very good selection of "beach music" (which has no connection to The Beach Boys [other than a Carl Wilson solo song "What You Do To Me" having a brief run on the beach music charts]). In fact the whole chain had excellent beach music sections due to owning the Ripete record label, but beach music in the Myrtle Beach store was always stocked in depth.

One of my favorite touches at this store encapsulates both why I liked the place, and why the chain eventually failed -- someone had taped a faded cartoon to the cash register there. It probably came from a record-store trade magazine originally, and had a customer asking a record-store counter clerk Can you special order this out of print record for me? with the clerk responding Yes! And I can raise the dead as well.

I liked the attitude that pasted up that cartoon -- willing to poke a bit of fun at customers without the fear that someone's nose would be put out of joint. But the fact was that by several years before the store closed, any customer could special order an out of print CD from Amazon or elsewhere, and the record-store business model just didn't make sense anymore.