Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

Jackson Camera. At their height, they had stores all over Columbia. I can recall locations at Richland Mall (on the backside of the open-air corridor), Main Street, Five Points and Dutch Square.

The location I always visited was at Richland Mall. As a kid, I had gotten into developing and printing pictures. I can't remember exactly how, but I had already started fooling around with it when I "inherited" a bunch of (mostly hand-made) equipment from someone moving out of town to a smaller place. Originally I had no enlarger so I favored bigger-frame negatives like (the even-then archaic) 616 and slightly smaller 620 and 127 film sizes which made accptable contact prints. I'm afraid I pretty much ruined the finish on the kitchen counters with sloshing developer, stop-bath and "hypo" all over them -- the stains are there to this day. And really, there was no way to make the kitchen dark enough to be a "real" darkroom during the day (not surprisingly, my mother needed it to cook at night..), so my prints and negatives were always fuzzy, but I never hesitated to try again, and to ask for more advice down at Jackson Camera.

I'm sure the guy who was usually there, would look up, see me coming across the corridor and think Oh Lord, here we go again, but he and all the staff were always very patient and informative despite the fact that I took up way more of their time than my meager purchases of contact paper and chemicals would warrant. By middle school, I had more or less fallen out of the habit (and in high school, the darkroom had its own stock of chemicals and paper), so my visits to Jackson almost ceased.

Even as I moved out of town in 1985 though, the photo market was changing drastically. While the picture drop-off business had always (in my memory) been a chain dominated affair, in the 80s, national chains moved into the camera shop and specialty photo-finishing market. Wolf and Ritz were the big players, and when Ritz bought Wolf, they were the 500 pound gorilla that sleeps where it wants. Jackson kept on for years, but gradually closed more of their stores. The one pictured here is at the corner of Beltline Boulevard and Forest Drive, and is where, I believe, their Richland Mall shop moved when Richland Mall went to Richland "Fashion" Mall, driving out a number of stalwarts like Jackson Camera and The Happy Bookseller. Jackson finally sold out to Ritz a few years ago, and this location operated as a Ritz for a while, but with another Ritz just a few blocks away down Beltline, it didn't really make any sense to keep this one open.

Interestingly, as I went to take this shot, I saw that the follow-on business, some sort of beauty store is also closing up shop.

UPDATE 21 May 2010 -- Here's an ad from The State for 19 Feb 1979:

Also, I've added all the addresses from the ad to the post title.

UPDATE 3 December 2010 -- Here are two great shots of the Harden Street Store by Hunter Desportes on Flickr:

outside

inside

UPDATE 24 February 2013: I have added two pictures to the top of this post, above the one (of the beauty store) that the text of the post talks about. They come from commenter Thomas and were taken of the Main Street location in 1997. I love that huge marquee.. Thanks!

UPDATE 23 February 2014 -- The Forest Drive store is now Troy's Cutting Edge barber shop:

UPDATE 20 May 2018 -- Here is a picture of the Greenlawn location, which ended up getting its own post because I totally forgot Jackson had a Greenlawn location:

I'm not entirely sure of the details, but when I was growing up, my parents had two different banks. I suppose they had each had accounts before getting married, and decided to keep them, or perhaps there were different banks for checking and for savings (the family definitely had passbook accounts at Standard Savings & Loan). At any rate, First Citizens at Forest Lake seemed to be the one my mother stopped at most often to cash checks when in the car with us kids.

From time to time, she would go inside (and perforce drag us with her), but usually she would go through the drive-through, which we always looked forward to since the teller would usually pass out a sucker to each of us along with my mother's cash.

This particular branch of First Citizens was a bit unusual in that the drive-throughs were staffed seperately from the main building. As you can see, there was a little outbuilding by the drive-through lanes. I doubt very much that it was plumbed; I imagine the tellers had to make a trip back to the main building when nature called. Of course in those days bankers' hours were short enough that it probably wasn't a big issue.

I think the lane that was on the side of the building facing Trenholm was a drive-through as well and would have been staffed from the main building, but if I recall correctly, it was harder to get in and out of (and it may have been simply a night depository lane rather than a real teller window).

My memory on timings is always very suspect, but I think this branch closed before the main part of Forest Lake Shopping Center (with Campbell's Drugs etc) was torn down and a new First Citizens was built there, so that there was a period whn First Citizens didn't have a branch in the neighborhood.

I'm a little hazy on what happened after the bank left. I think there were a few tenants in the building before the current arrangements gelled, but I'm not sure. At any rate, I think the current clients have been there for at least the last ten years: A gallery and frame shop in the "main" building, and a garden shop in the outbuilding, teller lanes and the rest of the exterior.

I was a little surprised that the garden shop made it, as I would have guessed that that space was really to constricted to work with, but they have really prospered. I suppose the closure of Forest Lake Garden Center around where the Lazy Boy store now is opened up the area for a new store. I've been to the garden shop a few times (this spring for a pair of gloves, last year for some mint plants), but I've never been in the gallery. I like art galleries, but I always have the feeling that if one is small enough that I'll be the only person in there other than the proprietor, I'll feel like I need to buy something..

Oh, and that Flood Hazard Area sign?

They weren't kidding:

UPDATE 19 October 2013 -- Just found out the original name of this place was Commercial Bank & Trust so I have added that to the post title. Here's a picture of it in operation from 1964.

UPDATE 30 September 2016 -- The main bank building (except for the vault) was razed on 28-29 September 2016. See pictures here.

UPDATE 20 October 2022: Fixing street address, updating tags and adding map icon.

I'm pretty sure this place went under before the housing crash, so I guess there was something else going on there. A lot of places go out of business rather quietly, with just some sale signs, but High Point went all-out, with frentic sign-wavers up and down Forest Drive, a tactic that seems rather strange to me. After all, you either need furniture or you don't. It's not really an impulse buy in most cases. Of course I could be wrong since I'm a) not married and b) inherited most of my furniture in the first place.

At any rate, things seem to be happening on this stretch of Forest, so it will be interesting to see how long the place continues to stay vacant.

UPDATE 2 September 2009: It's now a Strobler Home Furnishings store.

UPDATE 8 January 2010: Added full street address to post title.

UPDATE 6 April 2011 -- It seems this store was a Heilig-Meyers before it was High Point. Helig-Meyers went under and closed all their stores in 2001. Here is their Bellsouth ad from the Feb 1997 phonebook:

The Dutch Square White's from the Bush River Road side:

The Dutch Square White's from the theater side:

The Dutch Square White's from the Dutch Square Boulevard side:

White's in the original Richland Mall:

The (second) Richland Mall White's from the Beltline Boulevard side:

The downstairs interior entrance to the Richland Mall White's from the "Parisian" side:

The upstairs interior entrance to the Richland Mall White's from the Barnes & Noble side:

White's as J. B. White was known to us was the department store we most often shopped at when I was small. This may have been due as much to the location as anthing else as White's was in nearby Richland Mall, both closer and easier to park at than Main Street. Whatever the reason, White's was always on the docket when it became time to "buy clothes". Mind you, when I was a boy, I hated "buying clothes" with a white-hot passion, and must have been a real trial for my mother to shop for; even now, I tend to buy 5 of the same pairs of pants or 10 of the same shirts if I know they fit so I won't have to do it again any time soon.

Despite hating clothes shopping, I liked White's. I think part of the reason was that the store, at least at Richland Mall, seemed rather mysterious to me. If I recall the layout correctly, there were doors on all four sides of the store (3 into the parking lot, and one into the mall's open air corridors) and the centrally placed escalators made it impossible to see from one side of the store to the other, so it was easy (for a kid) to become confused about exactly where you were. The escalators were somewhat mysterious and exciting in themselves. By today's standards they were very narrow, so you could stiff-arm your self up off your feet between the two rails and pretend that you were on some sort of space conveyor-belt, and when you got to the top, you had to walk around to the other side to come back down, so it was kind of confusing as well. The most mysterious aspect of the store though was the PA. In those days, I suppose there would not have been a phone at every service desk, and important announcements were communicated to the staff in code. And not just innocuous phrases that the customers would miss, but real numeric spy code! And the code would always be over-ennunciated by a melodious female voice: Fiiiiive-NiiiEeen, Fiiive-NiiiEeen!. It was sort of like I imagined announcements on Trantor would be.

Aside from clothes (which as I said, I hated), the merchandise at White's was a mixed bag. As I recall, they had no heavy electronics or appliances, but they did have cookware and small kitchen appliances upstairs. I liked that because it was "sort of" like hardware. They also had a small book department upstairs which I guess had bestsellers, but more importantly to me, remainders. I remember specifically finding the last Tom Swift, Jr. book there. Unfortunately, The Galaxy Ghosts had apparently been written by an entirely different team than the rest of the series, violated continuity and the characters, and wasn't very good.

If I haven't said anything about the Dutch Square store yet, that's partly because we went there less often, and partly because it was about the same, but less interesting. By the time it was built, the chain had dropped the code-talk, and its escalators were the modern width and harder to play on. (For that matter, by that time, I would have been getting self conscious about doing stuff like that). Its building is still standing however. The original Richland Mall store was razed during the ill-fated conversion to an enclosed Richland Fashion Mall, and a new one was built in the middle of the oddly shaped new space. Some time after the chain was sold in 1998, both the Richland Mall store and the Dutch Square store became "Belk's" locations. I was a bit disgruntled because as an adult I had come to rely on White's as a source for clothes that I considered looked "OK", and Belk's had a slightly different mix (no Arrow shirts, in particular).

As a side note, since we didn't travel much growing up, and I never saw a White's in the places we did go, I always assumed it was a Columbia chain like Tapp's, but when I started working in Augusta in the mid 90s, there were several there (which became, if I recall correctly, Dillard's instead of Belks).

UPDATE 20 Aug 08: The White's store at Richland mall was not torn down, and is in fact the same building housing the current Belk's and still has the skinny escalators. I think memory played me false because Whites was at the end of the original mall, and I was mentally assuming that the current end of the mall (Black Lion) was the same geographic spot.

UPDATE 14 March 2011: Updated closing date in the post title to 20 September 1998 based on commenter Andrew's research.

UPDATE 17 May 2011 -- I've mentioned it in the comments, but the closed off (except for salon and restrooms) third floor of the Dutch Square building is sort of spooky:

UPDATE 21 June 2011: Added a vintage shot of White's in old Richland Mall from a Chamber of Commerce promotional book.

The only time I ever ate at a Steak & Ale was in Tampa Florida in the late 1980s. We were setting up a new office in Tampa at the time, and I had been seconded from the Fayetteville office to work on the software infrastructure down there. In the event, I ended up spending quite a bit of time in Tampa, but never really got to see much of the city because we were working such late hours.

At any rate, most of the team working on the office startup would eat together every night, and one night I was dead tired and just wanted something simple and to go to bed. I recalled seeing what I took to be a Western Sizzling type steakhouse down the road, so during the usual "where do you want to go/I dunno, where do *you* want to go" scrimmage, I just piped up and said: "Steak and Ale". I figured there would be burgers and a salad bar and apparently beer so the guys who wanted a drink could get one. Well, it turned out to be a little fancier than a Western Sizzling. In fact it turned out to be a lot fancier, and I found to my regret that I couldn't get a burger at all. (In those rare situations, I can usually get a baked potato & French Onion soup -- my "too fancy" fallbacks).

I never went back to that Steak & Ale, and it fostered no desire in me to go to the one in Columbia. Nonetheless, it had always seemed something of an institution to me, and I was quite surprised when they closed up shop a few years ago. After they left, there was a very short-lived operation called Buster's Bistro (which I also never visited) in the building, and now the place is split between some kind of furniture shop and some sort of athletic shop.

It looks like the chain is still around, but the closest one is in Greenville.

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

UPDATE 13 Oct 2010: Added yellow pages ad from the 1975-1976 Southern Bell phonebook.

UPDATE 16 June 2022: Adding tags and map icon.

I had heard that Gold's Gym was coming to Forest Drive, and wondered what effect it would have on Columbia Athletic Club.

It appears from this story that the owner decided, having been handed a pig, that he'd better put some lipstick on it and do a Kent Brockman "And I, for one, welcome our new Gold's overlords". Actually, I agree. Realistically there's no way they could compete in the long-term with Gold's and this is a win-win by giving Gold's an early entry into the neighboorhood and giving a leg-up to current members and employees. Of course, since I've never set foot in a gym, it's all pretty academic as far as I'm concerned...

Presumably, this means that Woodfield's Barber & Beauty will have to relocate even after dodging the bullet of having the plaza featuring their sign demolished.

UPDATE 30 January 2010: Well, Gold's Gym moved in and out, now open in their new digs at the old Forest Drive Church. The building is vacant and for sale now. I took the opportunity of the empty parking lot to get a good number of additional pictures, including some over the back wall -- this is the first time I have ever seen the pool there. It appears that one of the second story picture windows is out for some reason.

UPDATE 5 April 2012 -- I thought I would get some more pictures before work on the conversion for Trader Joe's commences:

UPDATE 1 June 2012: Trader Joe's is coming, see the comments for details. Meanwhile, asbestos removal and interior demolition have started:

6 June 2012:

17 June 2012:

UPDATE 26 June 2012 -- Work progresses in these 24 June pix. Half of the silhouettes look like reverse atomic shadows now:

UPDATE 18 July 2012 -- Really, I don't see why they didn't knock the whole building down. Apparently they are using absolutely none of it other than the walls themselves. Given that none of the rest matched what they want, it's hard to believe the walls just happened to be 100% perfect! The pool persists as a water filled hole in the ground for now (pix 15 July 2012):

26 August 2012:

23 September 2012:

21 October 2012:

The pool:

UPDATE 30 October 2012 -- The Trader Joe's sign went up today:

1 December 2012:

5 January 2013:

20 January 2013:

29 January 2013:

17 February 2013:

17 March 2013:

UPDATE 6 January 2013: Added 6 June 2012 photoset.

UPDATE 6 March 2013: Added a bunch of photosets.

UPDATE 23 March 2013 -- And Trader Joe's is open:

Photosets:

Photoset 6 June 2012

Photoset 7 June 2012

Photoset 12 June 2012

Photoset 17 June 2012

Photoset 24 June 2012

Photoset 2 July 2012

Photoset 15 July 2012

Photoset 26 August 2012

Photoset 9 September 2012

Photoset 23 September 2012

Photoset 21 Octover 2012

Photoset 30 October 2012

Photoset 1 December 2012

Photoset 5 January 2013

Photoset 20 January 2013

Photoset 29 January 2013

Photoset 3 February 2013

Photoset 17 February 2013

When I first saw Coldstone closed last week, I wasn't going to make a post on it because it seemed clearly temporary, but I was puzzled when the down-time stretched into this week. What kind of high-tech equipment does an ice-cream store have that can't be fixed by a commercial refrigeration repairman in a few hours?

I hope it is temporary, but this is similar to the way the Bruster's closing started. Coldstone is pretty good too, though they make it very embarassing for both the customer and the staff to tip there.

Update 10 June 08:

Well, it's pretty much as I feared. The "equipment problem" signs were disingenuous as closing signs often are. Based on what I see inside the store now, it's gone.

This is the second upscale creamery that Forest Acres has lost recently. Luckily there's still old reliable Baskin Robbins up the street and Zesto's chocolate dipped soft cones (umm!) across from Richland Mall..

UPDATE 21 April 2010: Added full street address to post title.

What does it mean to say a park is "closed"? Well, the land could be sold and built, there could be a fence to keep people out, or as in the case of Forest Lake Park, it could just have been abandoned by its owners, whoever they were.

Forest Lake Shopping Center is on the corner of Trenholm Road and Forest Drive, directly across Forest from Threnholm Plaza and has had its ups and downs. Originally, the center was anchored by Campbell's Drug Store which was directly on the corner. Down from Campbell's on the storefronts facing Forest were my longtime barbershop, a hardware store and a lot of shops I've completely forgotten. The hardware closed fairly early on (probably by 1970) and at some point a 7-11 moved into that row.

I don't remember much about the storefronts facing away from Forest except that there was a cloth shop at one time, and later some sort of clothing store where I was fitted for a suit once. Across the parking lot from Campbell's, was a small branch bank, denomination forgotten, where my mother often used the drive-through. Behind the bank was a creek, with a footbridge over it leading off into the adjoining neighboorhood.

The Campbell's block of stores was separated from another block by an access cut-through, and this other block was generally more important to us, as the main part of it (now Coplons) was a Colonial grocery store, my mother's favored place to buy groceries. I don't know exactly why this was, as even then, Columbia didn't lack for grocery stores, and there was an A&P right across the road in Trenholm Plaza. The thing I remember is that she was convinced that "Farm Charm" medium-sharp chedder was the only cheese worth buying (she convinced me as well) and "Farm Charm" was available only at Colonial or Big Star groceries. (There was a Big Star abuting the K-Mart on Fort Jackson Blvd). The block of stores with Colonial also held Forest Lake TV, where we had our sets repaired several times, and Sakura Japanese restaurant, which is still there, and must be the oldest Japanese restaurant in Columbia.

Colonial folded (I think) in the late 60s (leaving us to go over to Big Star for cheese..). I don't recall how long it was before Coplon's moved in, but I'm pretty sure it was there before they knocked down the whole Campbell's side of the shopping center (dispossessing my barbers) and put in the new First Citizens and Talbots there. The branch bank had closed by then, and its space is now taken over by a gallery/frame-shop with the outbuildings being sucessfully run by an enterprising garden store.

What does this have to do with the park? Well, my impression always was that the park was run by Colonial as a place for kids to go play while their mothers' shopped. (Yes, in those days, as long as it wasn't across a major road, you could send the kids out of sight to play!). When Colonial went under, the park stopped being maintained. Every now and then, there might be a minor repair, which I imagine the (mostly hard-luck by now) shops being dunned for, but in general there was nothing. The last major thing to happen was the carting off of the swingset, which had been swing-less for years.

Today, there are 3 fixtures. Here are two, the bench and the monkey bars:

Here's a closer look at the monkey bars:

I have a particularly vivid memory of these. Once, when my mother was shopping at Colonial, and my sister & I were playing in the park, I had one of those ideas that seems good at the time and decided that I could probably hang by my knees off of the bars across the top. As it turned out, I could. What I couldn't do, being little more athletic then than now, was get down again. After several increasingly anxious minutes of contemplating a drop onto the ground or the other bars, I sent my sister into Colonial to get my mother, who (the situation probably having been conveyed to her in a garbled manner to sound more alarming than it was) abandoned her cart and came racing around the corner. In the event, I had just figured out how to get down anyway...

Gills Creek forms the backdrop for the park, and I'm a bit surprised that no restaurant on either side of the creek has ever had a creek deck. It's rather peaceful and pleasant:

Here's Gills Creek on the other side of the bridge from the park:

Eightmile Branch forms the back boundry of Forest Lake Shopping Center and here's where it runs into Gills Creek:

Here is the park's third fixture, a merry-go-round:

Of course there is a drawback to having a park (or shopping center for that matter) bordered by creeks: Creeks rise.

Sometime back in the 90s, we had a 100 year flood in Forest Acres. At that point, a lot of Gamewell Drive was under water with parts of Sylvan Drive innundated as well. Given its position at the confluence of Eightmile Branch & Gills Creek, a good bit of Forest Lake Shopping Center was under water (most of the Garden Center area) as was all of the park. One of the local stations, I believe it was WLTX, had a crew in the parking lot shooting footage of the flood. I had to tell them they were looking at a park (I think I got on TV, but I can't recall for sure). At that point, the merry-go-round was completely invisible under at least six inches of water. For some reason, I was walking around in my flip-flops, having parked my car a good ways off. I considered wading out to the merry-go-round to ride a turn around on it to give them a good visual, but decided I wasn't going to risk my feet on who knows what washed up detritus without something more substantial shielding them. I know I took some flood pictures myself, if I ever find them again, I'll get them digitized and post a few.

Anyway, if you want to sit on a bench, climb the monkey-bars, or take a spin on the merry-go-round Forest Lake Park is still there for now..

UPDATE 15 May 2010 -- Here's a pointless quicktime video of the merry-go-round in motion from 26 Aug 2009

And here's Forest Lake Park in the snow from 13 Feb 2010:

UPDATE 10 Feb 2011 -- In April 2010, someone cut down a honking big pine tree, and put the segments around the merry-go-round:

UPDATE 4 April 2013: Tragedy!

I'm guessing that with the continuing renovations at the old Dobbs House/Forest Lake Spirits/Carolina Paws building, somebody noticed the park and the merry-go-round and decided it was a huge liability issue. At any rate, both remaining park fixtures, the merry-go-round and an old park bench have been torn out and the park is now just an empty lot except for the ring of buried bricks around where the merry-go-round used to be:

Here's two shots from my first and only TV interview at the park on 1 March 2011:

UPDATE 25 June 2017 -- Changed the merry-go-round video to a youtube embed rather than a hosted .mov file.

It seems to me there have always been fabric stores on this part of Forest Drive. Even with Rogers Brothers move to Divine, there's still Forest Lake Fabrics across the street near the former Frans. I do think there are fewer in general nowdays though. I suspect people (and to be non politically correct, women mostly) who can sew are a declining breed. When I was little, a fabric store was about the lowest place on the food chain of "stores my mother drags me to". Maybe paint stores with their endless color chips were lower. I haven't been in a fabric store in years, so I don't know if this is still true, but at the time, all the dyes on the fabrics were somewhat volatile so that your eyes would start to tear up almost immediately as you walked in. I don't know how people worked there; I guess they developed immunity. About the only thing to do while my mother looked at bolt after bolt of fabric, was to play under the tables, which for some reason generally seemed to all have a raised platform under the table top. In the cases where the table also had a skirt, you could go under the skirt and sit on the platform and pretend that you were in a little fort. There were generally also a number of yardsticks to play around with, but in the end there was still only so much you could do to keep away the thought that you were in a store with NOTHING BUT CLOTH and that your eyes were watering.

The move of Rogers Brothers adds to the recent loss of Tuesday Morning and leaves Trenholm Plaza with two vacancies. In general the place has either been lucky or well managed over the years, and vacancies have always been made good (even after the fires at Ponderosa and Fresh Market. I hope that continues to be the case.

UPDATE 27 July 2010: Rogers Brothers has now closed after their move.

Well, something is going on at Forest Lake Exxon.

I suppose they could just be upgrading the pumps, but then why take down the gas prices from the sign? And usually in an upgrade like that, they try to do it in stages so that there's never a day when they are completely unable to serve customers.

I looked in the window of the convenience store part of the station, and all the food is still in the coolers, and all the tools are still in the car bays, so I'm unsure what's going on. It would be a shame if this place closed as it is one of the last gas stations around which can actually fix anything. I took a slow leak to them a year or so ago, and they had me patched and out of there in under 15 minutes.

I'll check again when I get back in town and see how it turned out.

UPDATE: Commenter Cha Cha says that a "Five Guys" will replace the Exxon.

UPDATE 30 May 2008:

It's official now:

UPDATE 30 June 2008:

They've stripped the Exxon trim from the "patio" roof and have started work inside:

UPDATE 3 Oct 2008 (with pix from 20 Sep 2008):

Still coming along, and looking pretty good.

UPDATE 17 Nov 08:

Well, 5 Guys is now open:

UPDATE 19 December 2017: Add full street address and tags

UPDATE 1 May 2023: Adding map icon.