Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

Welcome to visitors from the www.city-data.com forum! If you want to see more grand strand area memories and pictures, click this link. There are posts on The Pavilion, Waccamaw Pottery and a number of other Grand Strand institutions -- Ted

[22 Jan 2010]

[12 Aug 2010]

Oliver's Lodge (pronounced as one word Oliverslodge) is the first seafood restaurant I can recall eating at.

Now, if you've read this blog for a while, you'll know I don't like seafood and never have. Nonetheless, as a kid I was always eager to go whenever we were at the beach. At that time (the late 1960s), they served a lunch menu until 5pm, and that menu had spaghetti, something I would always eat, so my folks usually tried to arrange for us to arrive just before 5 so I could have my spaghetti and the grownups could have "supper". The timing was usually touch-and-go since the place drew tremendous crowds, and getting there before 5 was no guarantee of being seated before 6.

Waiting for anything with kids is always dicey, and if there were cousins as well as my sister and me, things could very easily get out of hand, but the location worked towards letting kids "free range". As you can see from some of the pictures, Oliver's sits on a large lot fronting on Murrells Inlet itself. There were several huge trees (which are still there) and a derelict john-boat or two (now gone) as well as a dock going out into the marsh where the fresh fish were brought in each day during the time when the place was a working lodging house. In addition, the lot next door was a church which was generally vacant on weekday afternoons, so there was plenty of room to race around, and plenty of things to fool with. Best of all, the lodge's big back porch always had a low-country "joggling" board -- a long flexible plank suspended between two rocker-edged saw-horses. You could get a crowd of cousins on that going back and forth and up and down until the grownups would eventually get alarmed and tell us to take it easy.

My memory is that when we first started going, dining was mostly on the back porch which was, at that time, screened, but not air-conditioned. Aside from my spaghetti (or baked-potato or whatever I ended up having ot get if we missed the 5pm deadline), the food was basic Calabash Style fried seafood with piping hot delicious hush-puppies.

The building was always a bit ramshackle. I don't know when it stopped being a boarding house and went to restaurant only operation, but the big upstairs area was largely unused in my memory. When we started going, there was still a customer restroom available upstairs, and I always liked going up there and looking around -- by the 1970s I believe the upstairs was wholly closed to customer access.

Also in the 1970s, the owners tacked up plastic sheeting over the screen porch. And I do mean "plastic" and not plexiglass or anything solid. Whenever anyone would open a door or the air conditioning kicked in, the sheeting up over all the walls would billow in and out.

It seems to me that as the 70s went on, we went to Oliver's less and less. It's not that anyone stopped liking it, but more that other options became available as the coast commercialized. The last time I recall going with a large party of cousins was probably in the late 1970s just as my generation was heading to college. We ate inside rather than on the porch, and my cousin Mike stuck his nose in a big sawfish nose hung on the wall -- a picture that I'm sure will surface eventually. I think we also played name-that-drink charades with the bar menu.

After that, I believe the next time I ate there was the last. I think it was the early 1990s, and I was either alone or with a very small party. We (or I) was on the back porch, and I noticed that the plastic sheeting had been replaced with plexiglass. The menu was also radically different, and it was evident that Oliver's had undergone a change in ownership. The defining moment for me was when they brought out the huspuppies and I found they were served with raspberry butter. That might be good, but it wasn't Oliver's.

After that, and after I started spending a lot more time at the beach I thought of going back a number of times but somehow never got around to it. Last winter I actually made the effort, but it never worked out. I would find that it wasn't open weekdays during the off season, or that it was only open for lunch, or not open Mondays or -- that it was apparently never open.

That last was a conclusion I flirted with, but never quite committed to. After all the website was still up [try this archived version once that link goes dead] , I could see the tables set through the window, and there was no note on the door..

Finally I went back on 12 August this year, and this time it was obvious that the place was closed: There was a big bar across the front doors, Coke had put a sticker claiming the fountains inside and the place was seriously overgrown. All these photos except 2, 3, 4 & 5 come from that visit.

So when did the place actually close for the last time? That's hard to say, but look at photos 2, 3, 4 & 5. These were taken on 22 Jan 2010. In particular, look at the place settings on the back porch table. Although a chair has been moved, it is clear to me that the napkins, plates and silverware in the 22 Jan photos are exactly the same as in the 12 Aug photos. So, sometime before 22 Jan, the bus staff laid out all the place settings -- and never came back.

As I was taking these photos on 12 Aug, two different cars pulled into the lot looking to eat, and both parties took their own pictures and shared stories of eating there as kids as well.

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The climate of Columbia is such that its inhabitants have to live elsewhere

Time for Summer Vacation Phase-II, folks. I'll try to keep the spam in check and may respond to comments, but don't expect any new posts for the next three weeks or so.

This mysterious billboard is on the South side of US-501 in betwen Galivants Ferry & Marion. If I'm reading google maps right, it would be at the intersection of US-501 and SC-41. At any rate, it's before you get to Sparky's Fireworks. The sign has been up for at least two years, and was always a bit mysterious to me.

For one thing, there is no indication of what it's for. I mean, sure it says "Web Site of The Year", but that's not really an explanation. Is there a contest? Web site of the year according to whom? Why would anyone driving through the most rural and un-webby parts of South Carolina care? What's more, it's not pithy. Invariably by the time I got home, I never could remember exactly what it was: Um, bestwebsite.com? Yearsbestsite.com? Finally I took this picture to help me remember to check it out.

The first time I did -- it didn't help. I duly went to the site, but it was obviously the text provided by the hosting company. Stuff like

Insert description of your site here.

Insert URL of your logo

Write a few paragraphs describing your products and services. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Phasellus ligula lorem, consectetur ut mattis eget, varius at justo. Aliquam sodales gravida arcu. Etiam a viverra metus. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos himenaeos. Nunc tincidunt nunc nec augue volutpat eget venenatis lacus pharetra. Donec mollis, leo auctor molestie placerat, eros ante tristique lectus, in accumsan enim nibh quis purus. Curabitur eget enim quis ligula fermentum faucibus eget tempus tellus. Etiam dignissim, augue non tristique fringilla, urna nibh viverra felis, vitae commodo eros urna et ante. In et odio erat. Nunc consectetur volutpat sagittis. Ut eu elit nisi. Nam accumsan sapien pulvinar elit pretium egestas sit amet nec elit. Phasellus mattis dapibus accumsan. Suspendisse egestas, justo ut imperdiet vehicula, dui eros tempus lorem, vel molestie dolor tortor vel dui. Vestibulum odio metus, tempus vel auctor sed, commodo nec leo. In sit amet magna et mi hendrerit vehicula vel et neque.

(OK, I used the Lorem Ipsum generator for that last paragraph..)

Anyway, I never got around to doing a post on it then, and now there is something of an explanation, if not a great one. Apparently someone is now using it to sell generic domain names, and push various small coastal oriented sites. It kind of has the feeling of an I might as well do something with it sort of project.

OK, indulge me on this one!

Al Stewart's 1976 Year of The Cat, is one of the best albums of the 1970s. It's not always the case that very popular albums are good, and it's even less often that very good albums are popular, but in this case, Year of the Cat was definitely both. Stewart seems to have always thought of himself as more of a "folkie" than a rock star, so pairing him with producer Alan Parsons was something of a stretch, but in retrospect, it seems impossible to imagine anything else.

There's not really a weak song on the album, and "Year of the Cat", classic though it is, isn't even the best track, an honor won by the haunting "Flying Sorcery". I used to play "If it Doesn't Come Naturally, Leave It", as an audio argument against a particularly ill-starred project which was stomping us into the ground, and as I get older "On the Border" with its

In the village where I grew up, nothing seems the same, though you never see the change from day to day..

lyric seems more and more apt.

So anyway, I was very happy to see that Stewart was coming to Newberry last week. The Opera House is very easy to find from I-26, and seems to be run entirely by pleasant, retired women. It's quite a small venue, and Stewart brought only one other person on stage with him, guitar player (and Phd..) Dave Nachmanoff. Now, why Al Stewart, with one of the best known albums of the rock era is playing small town South Carolina with a one man band, I can't say. I'd like to think that it's because he's really more into the "folk" thing than the over-the-top "rock tour" thing, but you sometimes hear about how famous people were locked into bad record contracts, had expensive divorces or crooked managers, so who knows. The key thing is that he was in good voice and seemed happy to be in Newberry. The set list was pretty eclectic, and while he did hit a number of "Year of the Cat" tracks, he opted out of most of his other radio hits, so I heard a good number of songs that were new to me.

Afterwards both Stewart and Nachmanoff sat in the lobby chatting and signing autographs. It was quite an enjoyable and low key evening, and I could still hear the next day, and my sinuses weren't clogged up with smoke..

Well, I suppose it's a bit of a cheat to do a closing for an event that will repeat this weekend, but hey, it's a closing for the 11 December viewing date only.

If you can make it to the coast this weekend (17th, 18th or 19th) the show is well worth your time. The gardens are lit as you see, and there are singers, bagpipers, food and drink.

I took my tripod with me this year, set the aperture to f2.0, the ISO to 80 and let the camera set whatever exposure it liked. Often it worked quite well, other times not so much (these are some of the ones I think did OK). The long exposures mean you can see blurs for people walking by in some pictures. It was supposed to be much warmer on the 12th than the 11th, but it was also supposed to rain, so I went out on the colder night. It wasn't too bad except when I was trying to feel the little buttons on the camera and could not find them at all in some cases!

It's all pictures after the jump.

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This old-style walk-up soft-serve parlor was in Bishopville, on the north side of town near the high school stadium. I would pass by it several times a year on the way to family events, and always meant to stop some time or other, but the way it always worked out is that I was not alone, running late, or both.

I first noticed that it seemed to be closed on my way to Thanksgiving 2008, and finally got around to taking some pictures in March of 2009. It was a beautiful sunny day, and I had no qualms about heading out on I-20 with a camera and some good music. According to their sign, the place had been there more than 50 years, which I have to say is a pretyt good run.

Going by this last month for Thanksgiving, I saw that now all the signage is down, and the building is just sitting there empty with no indication of what it was.

UPDATE: Looks like there's a Facebook Group..

UPDATE 23 December 2011 -- Well, as these 24 November 2011 (Thanksgiving) pix show, the building is gone now.

UPDATE 24 December 2011 -- Oops! Building is still there, but boarded up. The pix were of a lot with a gas station destroyed by Hugo, so I've taken them out. I'll try to get the real thing next time I'm over there. (Didn't have my camera ready today..)

I've been spending some time on the coast recently (Brookgreen Gardens had a nice little fall festival this weekend), and noticed this closing while driving by the terminally-ailing Inlet Square Mall where US-17 Business and US-17 Bypass come together at Murrells Inlet.

Tracking Grand Strand closings would be a full time job as the area has incredible churn, but I can't resist listing some here from time to time. Just two thoughts:

a) The economy must really be bad if Hooters can't sell what's on their menu.

and

b) They have a pre-printed company-logo sign (with slogan) for store closings?

UPDATE 29 August 2011 -- It's now The Carolina Tavern:

UPDATE 24 June 2024 -- Adding map icon. Updating address from 825 Mall Drive to 852 Mall drive. Updating tags