Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

Well, this developed rather suddenly today. Commenter skysguy reported this early in the morning, and commenter Mr. Bo supplied this official link this evening: Belk's in Dutch Square is closing.

The chain is pitching it as doubling down on their Columbiana location, especially after getting extra space in the former Sears. However, they have had extra space in the Dutch Square store for *years*, and I believe if they had thought that store was viable, they could have re-opened the closed off spooky third floor (empty now except the hair salon and mens' room):

This closing pretty much puts the fork in the "mall" part of Dutch Square, and I would not be at all surprised to see the theater and Burlington closing their doors to the interior. (Office Depot already lacks interior access).

(Hat tip to commenter skysguy)

UPDATE 24 December 2014 -- All of the closing signage is up, and the store is half empty. If you want to buy some racks, step ladders, office chairs or nude mannequins, now's your chance. I'm not surprised fixtures aren't returnable, but I did find it a bit curious that regular merchandise is not returnable either, given we still have two local Belk's.

19 December 2014:

UPDATE 4 February 2015 -- The closure is complete:

UPDATE 10 September 2015 -- Interestingly, the building still isn't quite cleaned out:

UPDATE 7 November 2015 -- Here's a closing ad in The State:

UPDATE 10 April 2019 -- As mentioned in the comments, this is now a Planet Fitness:

Also adding map icon,updating tags and changing Belks to Belk in the post title.

I noticed this summer that the self-service car wash more or less across from the old Blockbuster is up for sale. I have not been by for a month or so, but at the time it appeared the place would stay in operation until sold.

I don't find much information about the place online, but back in 2003, the USC football team did a charity event there.

UPDATE 23 April 2019 -- Well, this place apparently did not sell for a long time, and stayed open for years after this post. Commenter Andrew reports it has now been torn down, which does not surprise me, as the last time I drove by it was cordoned off with tape barricades and something was apparently about to happen. I took some drive-by shots, which aren't great, but so it goes:

UPDATE 15 March 2022 -- The place has now been razed:

UPDATE 23 March 2023 -- Something is being built on the lot:

UPDATE 29 January 2024 -- Now Cars & Beyond:

(Also took the "for sale" note out of post title).

It's always good when a place has time to plan and leave a thank-you to the customers before closing shop, as Tavern On Greene has done. Of course the phrasing does lend itself to certain very old punchlines, but it's a nice touch.

This place is slightly up the hill from Papa Jazz and just below Blue Cactus. It's a part of Greene Street without much parking, as I noted when I had to park a block away to take these pictures. Of course if you're walking into Five Points from campus it's one of the first spots you hit, so perhaps that evens out.

(Hat tip to commenter Midnight Rambler)

This laundromat was in the Family Dollar plaza on Decker. I've been to several of the coin laundries on Decker over the years when either the washer or dryer was on the blink. My favorite is the one in front of the old Target which has very active family management -- there was always someone sweeping, mopping or otherwise keeping the place tidy, and once the woman in charge was taken aback by my incompetence at shirt folding and showed me how to do it right (it didn't take, I'm afraid). This one I never made it to.

The marquee name of Coin Laundry seems to be more a description than an official name, so I'm not exactly sure when it closed, but I'm guessing within the last few years.

Well, I don't really need much of an excuse to visit Fernandina Beach, one of my favorite places, so when my sister noticed that there was an Amelia Island comics, steampunk, gaming and anime convention, , I decided to check it out.

Compared to the Charlotte Heroes Convention, Ameliacon was quite small. There was one exhibit hall, in the park on Atlantic Avenue which houses the municipal swimming pool, with gaming and presentation events in the town womens' center behind the park. It seemed to me also that the convention focus was definitely more on gaming, costuming and cosplay than on comic books, though there were some authors and artists there.

I certainly felt out of the loop on some issues! Magna/Anime character design generally hurts my eyes, so I was pretty clueless about one of the properties that seemed to be a very big thing Attack on Titan. There were a number of costumers basing their characters on that. I was also completely in the dark about what is apparently a very popular podcast Welcome to Night Vale, something the contest winning cosplayers based their presentation on.

I missed the morning presentation on Steampunk, having somehow convinced myself that it was in the afternoon, but did catch an interesting presentation by Joshua Johnson on doing video special effects on, basically, zero budget.

The audio for the presentations was the most problematic facet of the convention. I got the impression from listening to one of the organizers talk during the costume contest that someone had promised the convention a PA system and then left them totally in the lurch. I could follow ok during the effects presentaion, and parts of the Marvel/DC artist's presentation, but I gave up during the Homestruck panel where the panel were all using their indoor voices, and where I was only sitting in to try to figure out what Homestruck actually was anyway.

The costumers were out full force in the exhibit hall, and then at the closing costume/cosplay contest.

During the costume contest, it was announced that the convention would be shifting out of the fall and into February, so there will be no Ameliacon 2015. The next will be Ameliacon 2016 though they did announce a sequence of local get-togethers in advance of that. I certainly enjoyed myself -- I don't know that I would have driven that far for a convention of that size in a place I didn't have other motives to visit, but in the event, it was a nice trip.

Read the rest of this entry »

And the importance of not putting them all in one basket.

You can sort of see Lane Bryant in operation at the Shoppes At Woodhill if you click-through and peer behind the trees in the first shot.

Judging from the 2014 phonebook, where they still list this location, this shop must have departed in the first part of the year. I've been over there several times to eat at Ci-Ci's, but I just can't remember as my eyes automatically skip over clothing stores. I was a bit surprised to see that this wing of the plaza has a Pelham Drive address, I would have expected all the buildings to piggyback off the Garners Ferry number used by the Panera wing.

Provisions opened in September 2013 and was a bulk food and spices store that also carried locally grown or produced foods. I admit that when it opened, I read the articles and couldn't see it lasting for long as it sought to serve a market I didn't believe existed. Of course I would have been happy to be wrong, but in the event they seem to have closed down sometime in the spring of 2014 -- I can verify that they were still open in February.

Five Rivers Market a small SC chain will be opening in the spot soon if they have not yet done so.

What with the recent talk here about Family Dollar closings and the ongoing buyout war over the chain, this store in Greelyville caught my eye as I was going to the beach back in July, and then again with the building vacant as I was going for Labor Day.

I don't know a lot about Greelyville except that one of my childhood babysitters was from there and that I have been driving through it for years. From the 60 through the 80s, the local high school always had some sort of clever message on their roadside marquee-board, but they seem to have gone generic lately. During the same time period, one of the local gas stations had cylindrical above ground gas storage tanks painted to resemble soft drink cans. The place was also home to one of the unfortunate sailors who lost his life in the huge gun explosion on the USS Stark in 1987, and is memorialized on a roadside plaque. There is also the marvelously named "Pearl Whack Park" on US-521 just before the tracks.

And on 29 August 2014, I saw one of the best rainbows ever driving through the area, unfortunately with nowhere to pull off and get a really scenic framing for a shot.