Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

The whole area on Garners Ferry near where this Pizza Hut sat has been reworked so much over the years that it's hard to say exactly where the restaurant actually was, but I think it's not far off the mark to say it was about where Ruby Tuesday now is.

I don't know what the ownership structure of Columbia Pizza Huts in the 70s & 80s was, but as far as I could tell, they were almost all about the same, with no real standouts or bad stores. (I believe PH was in general better back then -- I don't care too much for it today). I say almost because this store was something of an outlier.

I remember that my sister and I stopped there once in the late 70s, and after our pizza came we ate for a few minutes before, independantly, coming to the conclusion that while the crust was fine, the cheese properly melted, and the toppings we had ordered had been duly applied -- there was no sauce anywhere on the pizza. I believe we raised it as an issue to the manager, but decided to take a discount on the check rather than wait for a new pizza to be prepared.

I didn't think much of the incident though obviously it did not move that PH to the top my "where to eat pizza" list. Still about five years later, I found myself in the area when it was time to eat and decided to stop by again. As I'm sure you already suspect, my pie was once again served sauceless. Now, the old saying is

Once is happenstance
Twice is coincidence and
Three times is enemy action.

and I didn't try a third time, so I can't rule out coincidence, but I can't help suspect that there was a management policy to cut costs by shorting the sauce. After all it's the least noticable bit of the pizza, being normally mostly hidden under the cheese anyway.

I can't remember exactly what happened to the place. Either it burned down (I know the one of Forest Drive did, so I may be conflating with that) or was torn down during one of the plaza remodels. At any rate, it was never rebuilt, and I can't say I'm too heartbroken about it.

UPDATE 5 March 2011: Changed the post title to use "Devine Street" rather than "Garners Ferry Road". I thought the name changed at Fort Jackson Boulevard, but actually Devine Street goes all the way to Wildcat Road.

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

This currently vacant storefront on Parklane in between Sounds Familiar and Monterrey has been a number of things over the years including a military recruitment office, but I recall it most as a comic book store. This would have been at the height of the comics boom of the 1980s where there were actually two comic shops on this side of town: This one and one (whose name I also can't recall) over on Forest Drive near Percival.

Really neither one was my cup of tea. I was pretty much a Silver City regular (when it was in its original location). I thought the one on Forest Drive catered too much to second and third tier publishers (like AC and Pacific), and I thought this one was lacking in selection, and a bit inept.

Comic stores are notorious for being run by fans who have an in-depth knowledge of comics but little retailing sense. I never really talked comics to the staff here, so I don't know if the first part is true, but there were various things that made me think the second part was. The one I remember in particular was that, at a time when comic book shops across the country were getting busted on obscenity charges (due mainly to prosecutors and bluenoses who operated on the theory: Comic boooks are only for kids. Your comic books have nudity, therefore you must be selling comic books with nudity to kids), they had comics with nudity shelved at kid eye-level. When I pointed out that this might not be a great idea, they immediately saw my point, but it was something which had apparently never occured to them..

I'm pretty sure they never had any legal trouble, but like most of the stores in town, they ended up not surviving the comic book bust that followed the black-and-white glut and the variant cover speculation boom.

Now I may be misremembering this, but I think that this vacant storefront on Sunset Drive between SC-277 and North Main Street was Wal-Mart's first attempt at a warehouse-store. Wal-Mart was not really on my radar at the time, and the details are very fuzzy in my mind, but I just recall hearing that this store required you to buy a membership and that they had huge lots of everything. Wal-Mart later refined the concept into Sam's Club, but I don't think this building was ever a Sam's Club per se. I'm not sure why though I would speculate that the location is not ideal.

Though they are apparently trying to sell it, Wal-Mart still owns the property. Occasionaly I would see Wal-Mart 18 wheelers idled there, and from the signage, the chain used (or uses) the place to sell used store fixtures. I wonder how recent the DHEC "A" rating on the door is?

UPDATE 15 March 2011: It's clear now that this was, in fact (contrary to my recollection), a Sam's Club, so I have updated the post title. Also there's some discussion of closing dates in the comments. 1998 seems likely to me.

UPDATE 20 January 2012: Finally added Beltline Drive-In to the post title.

I read somewhere that as World War II drew to a close, businesses took internal bets as whether that meant "back to the Depression" or "victory boom". Montgomery Ward decided on "Depression" and adopted a cautious, defensive strategy. Sears Roebuck bet on "boom" and started a post-war expansion strategy.

I don't know this for a fact, but it seems to me that the old Sears on Harden Street must be a "boom" store. Even though Main Street was still the big shopping destination, Sears bet on suburbia and ample free parking to cater to the fact that every family in their market (the middle class) now had a car.

This store was still going strong when I was a kid, and was huge. I believe that it encompassed the entire strip mall that now stands there (with the possible exception of the Offce Depot). I guess we went there most often shopping for clothes, but since that was an activity that I purely hated, I would always wander off in the hardware and camera sections.

In fact, I got my first camera at that store. I think I still have it in a storage box from two moves ago, though I can't put my hands on it right now. It was an off-brand, cheap one, and I think I actually used my own money to get it. I remember that it used "127" film, and that I had carefully checked (I was obsessive about some things) that it would take slides that could be projected on my aunt & uncle's projector though in the event I never took a single slide on it. Come to that, I don't think I ever took a roll of color film either -- those were different days! I also got my first (well, only, come to that) enlarger there. It was a cheap plastic contraption that had a pretty crummy lens and haphazard focus, but it was a $20 way to make prints bigger than "contact" size (a 127 negative was bigger than a 35mm one but not as big as a 120 one, so contact prints were really too small -- now 616 film made nice contact prints!).

Of course for kids, the biggest thing Sears had going for it was The Wishbook. This was their Christmas toy catalog, which we would be sure to leave lying about the house opened to strategic pages all during the holiday season. The selection and prices were also good for several months into the new year, which led us to possibly the stupidest thing we ever bought.

We had some sort of club, which I believe we called the YPS club (S-P-Y backwards..) dedicated to solving the (nonexistent) mysteries of our neighborhood, and for some reason, even though the club only lasted a few weeks, never had any meetings or even any missions, we decided we must have a typewriter to take the club's (nonexistent) meeting minutes. My parents had a typewriter, but they (wisely) considered it too delicate for our hands so we searched The Wishbook minutely and found a toy typewriter which would actually type for a surprisingly good price.

Our parents looked at the picture and description and tried to talk us out of it and to explain how the machine actually worked, but we were fixated and would have none of it. In the end they threw up their hands in a "ok, but let this be a lesson for you" manner and ordered it. I was so excited when it came in, and we went down to Sears to pick it up. The excitement lasted about half the way home until I got the thing unboxed and figured out how it worked. The "keyboard" which had looked so impressive in the picture (though not to adult eyes) was actually one piece of metal with pictures of seperate keys painted on it. So to "type" you dialed a Dymo-Embosser-type head to the right letter and mashed the "keyboard" which would imprint a capital letter on your paper. I suppose you could get 1-WPM on it if you were good..

Another thing I remember in particular about that store is that they had an automatic foot-sizing machine in the shoe department. No, this was too late for the infamous X-Ray foot sizers, but it was till pretty neat. You took off your shoe, put your foot in a rectangular box, and the walls would close in on it like a James Bond death-trap until they hit your foot on all sides. I used to stick my foot in it even when I had no intention of getting shoes.

Sears missed the first wave of suburban shopping malls in Columbia (ie: Dutch Square), but decided that they were the future and became (and remained) an anchor store in the new "Columbia Mall" being built in Dentsville. When that store was ready to occupy, they closed down the Harden Street location, and for many years that new mall store was the only Sears in town. I think the old store was vacant several years then was redeveloped into the current strip (with several face-lifts and a total rebuild of Food Lion after a fire). I'm not sure if any of the original Sears building is still present -- I rather doubt it.

Sears had a good post-war. Starting more or less at parity with Montgomery Ward, it saw MW out the door as its bets paid off and theirs didn't. By that time however, it was clear that Sears had missed the next bet and had no idea how to cope with Wal-Mart or even Target. It will be interesting to see how they come out of the current recession, or if perhaps the "new" store will have to be redeveloped too.

UPDATE 21 June 2011: Added a picture (at top) of the old Sears building from a vintage Chamber of Commerce promotional book.

UPDATE 29 February 2020: Add tags, full street address, map icon. (I used the '1001 Harden' address of the current Food Lion).

I'm not totally sure this is the storefront I want, but I think I remember that angled main entrance, and if it wasn't this building, it was somewhere nearby, but anyway when I was small, there was a pet store here.

I generally can't go in pet stores now, they make me too sad, but when I was a kid, I didn't think about the "big picture" and was just fascinated by all the animals. Pet stores were all over. There was one with puppies in Columbia Mall, one at Trenholm Plaza and even Woolworth's had fish, turtles and gerbils. If I recall correctly, the one on Devine had lots of fish, but the real reason we liked to walk down there after piano lessons at Haven's Music was because of the bird.

I'm not sure what kind of bird it was now, but it sat on a high perch just inside the front door, and could talk. Sometimes it would volunteer something as you walked into the shop, at other times you had to prompt it, which you could do by saying "Pretty boy, pretty boy" in a sing-song cadance. Generally after you had done this a few times, it would perk up and say "Awk! Pretty Boy! Pretty Boy!" back at you.

I don't believe the bird was for sale, I had the impression that he was the personal pet of the shop owner. From time to time I've wondered what happened to him. Given how long some birds live, he could still be "pretty boy"-ing up a storm somewhere in the midlands..

UPDATE: Commenter Dennis supplies the name of the place as "The Aquarium and Pet Shop II", so I'm updating the title of this post to reflect that.

UPDATE 31 March 2009: Added the 1970 Southern Bell Yellow Page ad (which does not have the "II" suffix on the name).

This post comes from reader Dennis. I know of the building, but that area wasn't really in our orbit growing up, and I don't think we ever stopped at Ailes':

I took these photos today. Not really a timely "Closing," just some nostalgic rambling.

This building at 3123 Beltline was Roche Brothers last summer, and is now Taste of Jamaica, but it will always be Ailes' Market to me. I lived about two blocks away from about 1967 to 1979, from ages 10 to 22, and Mr. Ailes lived right around the corner from us. My mother didn't drive, and didn't have a car even if she could have, so I was almost daily sent to Ailes' to get something or another. I didn't mind at all. It was a chance to get out of the house, and Ailes' had a wonderful candy aisle. It was understood that when I went on a errand there, some of the change would get spent on candy. We also did a lot of wash at the laundromat that was directly across Beltline; same building that is now a sad looking office center. That laundromat was dim and dirty, loud and hot (no A.C.) but only a block from the house.

Ailes' was a typical general store/gas station of the time, before giant national conglomerates put a Fast Fare or a Pantry (like the one to the left of it now) on every corner. Also before I-77 was even thought of, so a LOT of big semi-trucks rattled down Beltline day and night. Mr. Ailes alone decided what he would sell, and he had a little bit of everything. Rat traps to onions. Velveeta to plastic model kits. Spark plugs to tampons. Of interest to a kid like me, in addition to the candy, was the fireworks he had, the excellent comic book rack, the baked snacks like Little Debbie's and Mickey's and Sweet Sixteen donuts that were always fresh and delicious, not like the awful mess you often get today.

Mr. Ailes held court at the front, on the left as you came in, on a wooden bar stool behind his cash register. He had an anti-burglary shotgun prominently displayed on the wall behind him, right next to that sign about "We made a deal with the bank - they don't sell beer and we don't cash checks." There was also a board of shame displaying checks written to the store that had bounced, and of course the faded Polaroids of regular customers holding fish they had caught using his worms.

On the other side of the counter, also on wooden bar stools, were three or four men who were either unemployed or retired or had the greatest unsupervised jobs in the world, because they were always there, chain smoking and drinking beer. I guess one of them was his gas attendant. On the counter was the requisite gallon jar of homemade pickled eggs and a clipboard with a college football parlay card on it. One dollar per square. Also on the counter was this big can-opening device that pierced two perfect triangles in steel beer cans (I know -- I'm old.) The beer came out of one of three big, old, heavy coolers with solid steel lids. If you opened one and "shopped" too long you'd get yelled at to close it. In addition to popsicles and the menfolks' PBR and Old Milwaukee, they had ICE cold Coke, Pepsi, Mountain Dew (in the green glass bottle with the hillbilly moonshiner on it), Nehi, Fanta, Patio, and Crush.

Next to his seated entourage Mr. Ailes had three or four old fashioned pinball machines -- not fun games with flippers, but just a bunch of holes for the balls to fall into. If you won you got 5¢ (or was it a penny?) per point right out of the cash register. I never understood it and it was clear that they were for adults only.

Speaking of adults only, while I was in the right front corner reading comics, and MAD, and Cracked, and Sick, and later National Lampoon, (He didn't care how long I loitered in the store) I soon discovered a section of the trashiest, sleaziest black & white smut magazines imaginable, which he would yell at me not to look at, but of course many times I did anyway. Warped for life.

In the back left corner was a snack bar that had decent fries, burgers and dogs, cooked up by a nice little old man with the sweats and the shakes who was clearly a struggling alcoholic. We went there on hot summer days after swimming across the street at the Bradley Terrace Pool (Restricted -- Whites only) which was where that small nursing home is now. I remember seeing my first microwave oven at that snack bar.

If you went outside to the right there was a pretty nice two chair barbershop way in the back corner of the building (see the door in the photo?). The building next door was Diamond Xanthakis' liquor store, or a "red dot" store to us.

A Hess station was built on the other side of the store, overnight it seemed, and as you might expect it killed Ailes' gas sales and he got rid of his two pumps. Not sure what year Mr. Ailes sold the store. It struggled on for a long time as a out of date convenience store.

Thanks, Dennis -- Ted

This building, at the entrance to Trenholm Park and now apparently a hair salon called Hair Works once housed a small independant convenience store. I am nearly sure it was called Campbell's, and I think it was the place to go for kids wanting a snack coming in or out of the park. It had all the standard soft drink, pork rind and motor oil options as well as magazines you wouldn't take home to mom, but there were no gas pumps.

I am guessing that it pre-dated the nearby Covenant Road Piggly Wiggly since otherwise it's hard to see what market it served, especially since (unless I'm recalling wrongly) it wasn't open particularly late at night. I imagine that the decline of kids coming and going unescorted as childhood as we knew it disappeared didn't help, but the final blow had to have been the opening of a chain store across the street (now a BP) with all the same stuff, chain purchasing power and gas pumps.

The French Quarter Deli was the replacement restaurant at the original location of The Keg O'Nails Deli. I'm still not entirely sure I understand the sequence of events that led to the Keg moving and The French Quarter being established, but it was a big brou-ha-ha and made the paper several times back in the day. You can read some comments at the Keg O'Nails closiing made by people who know more about it than I do.

At any rate, while I did finally get around to eating at the Keg after it moved, I never did get to try The French Quarter before it closed. I'm not sure why it closed either. It is in an odd little section of Rosewood, rather removed from where you would expect a restaurant. I know I would hesitate to fire up a cook stove next to Jim Casey's!

These two green spaces, one beside the Russell House on the east side of the Thomas Cooper Library reflection pool, and the other on the west side of the pool were once USC parking lots. It was almost impossible to find a spot in either lot, but if you could, it was your best shot for actually being able to park "near" to the library.

The parking situation at USC has always been fluid, and it is not unusual for a lot to vanish, but it is unusual for said lot not to be replaced with a building. There used to be a parking lots behind and in front of the Welsh building, for example, but they have all now been built over.

I believe the lot by the Russell House vanished first, perhaps at the time Green Street was closed. I think the west lot lasted a good bit past that. At any rate, if you have checkout privileges at the library, you're going to be be toting those books a couple blocks in most cases!

Electrolux makes a good vacuum. Or at least they did make a good one -- I can't speak to their current models since the 35 year old one I inherited from my mother still works fine.

In fact, the only problem the basic unit ever had that I can recall is that at some point in the late 60s, I think, one of the wheels broke off. I don't recall the circumstances, but I would be surprised if I or my sister weren't involved somehow. My mother was very reluctant to try and have it fixed because she didn't want to be without her vacuum while it was shipped back to Sweden or whatever, and because she figured it would be expensive as well as time-consuming. We must have dragged that vacuum around limping on its three wheels for seven or eight years. Sometime in the 70s, I finally convinced her to take it to the shop. As I recall, once we got it there, the guy set it on the counter, went "hmm", pulled a wheel out of a bin, snapped it on and said that will be $5. We were in and out in ten minutes. I guess there's some sort of life-lesson there.

The Electrolux store was on Devine Street in the space now occupied by a wig shop. They closed sometime in the 70s and the current store is out on Broad River Road at St. Andrews. I don't know if it is the same operation or completely separate, but the one time I went in, it seemed to have a really different attitude -- I just wanted to buy some bags, and I felt like the salesman wasn't going to let me out of there without buying a new unit!

UPDATE 24 March 2011: Added full street address to post title.