Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

For some reason, as we saw here, and here and here, Columbia isn't real friendly for creameries whose name isn't Baskin Robbins. I don't know why this is, but I would say that this Ben & Jerry's location on Devine Stret lasted fewer than five years.

I find there's a certain Zen purity to ice creams like Bryer's Coffee (ingredients: Cream, Coffee, Sugar) and that going much more "upscale" than that yields diminishing returns. I certainly like Ben & Jerry's ice cream -- it just doesn't seem to have the magic qualities for me that some ascribe to it. It was nice having an ice cream store in the area for its own sake though. I'm probably missing something, but with the passing of this store, I can't think of any in the Devine corridor or Five Points. I know there's a Sandy's near the college, and a Coldstone or Marble Slab in the Vista, but that's really another market area.

UPDATE 20 January 2012 -- Looks like Ben & Jerry's was the middle store (2901-B) in this three storefront building, not the end store (2901-C). Here's a better picture of their actual location (which became Hardcore Tennis:

(Also added the full street addres to the post title).

The Sub Cabin was an interesting little restaurant off of Sunset Boulevard in West Columbia. The place was actually on a side street about a block off the main road and was built as a log cabin. If my memory is correct, it must have been built in at least two phases, because the front half of the building faced a wall that looked exterior and had windows as if it had originally been a porch.

The atmosphere was very casual, and the menu was fairly basic with sandwiches and burgers predominating (I suspect there was chicken as well, but that never registers with me). There were a few unusual touches however. First, each table had a Heinz Malt Vinegar bottle amongst the condiments so you could vinegar-ize your fries like at the State Fair, and second, the hamburger patties were unusual. Almost invariably hamburger patties are round or square, but at The Sub Cabin they were rectangular so they would fit in sub buns. I can't think of anywhere else in Columbia that does that.

At some point in the 90s, the church which was gradually taking over the failed plaza which abuted The Sub Cabin underwent a major growth spurt and bought The Sub Cabin's lot, eventually tearing the building down. As far as I know, the owner never relocated anywhere else -- perhaps it was time to retire. Given that the place was on the opposite side of town I didn't get there that often, but it was a quirky little joint and I miss it from time-to-time.

The Forest Acres area used to have several Pizza Huts. There was one on Forest Drive more or less across the street from where Golden Corral is now. There was one on Garners Ferry about where Ruby Tuesday is now, and then there was this one on Beltline in between D's Wings and the Japanese steakhouse.

I was noticing that Casa Linda looks a bit like an old-style Pizza Hut (though with some additions) and that this building is one of the newer style Pizza Huts, so it's possible that they moved here from the Casa Linda building. However, I have no recollection of any such thing, so that's just speculation.

At any rate, this Pizza Hut was part of my ongoing disenchantment with the chain, becase the service was consistently... not good. In fact this store had an innovation I had not seen before, and have not seen since: A Neon Help Wanted sign.

Honestly, do you want your customers to notice that your help turns over so often that you have a built-in, lighted, Help Wanted sign? Much better to just continue to tape a paper one in the window every week. That will go below most people's radar.

After this place went under as a Pizza Hut it became a Rising High. This was sort of interesting because it was one of the most protracted re-purposings I can recall. My memory is that the Coming Soon Rising High! sign went up at least a full year before they got around to opening, with the actual work seeming to happen on a very off-and-on basis. I suspect that opening this store while also trying to cope with the road-work on Harden Street was what drove Rising High under. At any rate, this store didn't last long.

I think there may have been another operation between Rising High and the current tenant, Shane's, but if so I can't now recall what it was.

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

When I was growing up, going to get the Christmas tree was always a big event. We would all pile into the car and head for Trenholm Plaza and the Optimist Tree Lot.

The lot was set up yearly on the back side of the plaza (at the entrance which now has the traffic light) between the plaza proper and what I remember as then being woods, though I could be wrong about that. We would always get there after dark, and the place would be kind of a minature forest of Christmas trees standing in holes in the ground with white Christmas lights strung around the whole affair and there would always be a barrell with something burning inside around which the lot hands would warm themselves in between customers.

The trip would always play out as something of a contest between we kids, who wanted the biggest tree imaginable, and our parents who wanted a reasonably priced tree, and one, moreover, which would fit in or on the car for the trip back (we always had sedans or coupes growing up -- no station wagons). In the end, of course, our parents would get the tree they wanted while convincing us that it was the one we had picked out. The lot hands would always have plenty of twine on hand and would somehow get the tree secured for the 2 mile drive home. I believe we usually managed to get most of the tree in the trunk with the lid tied down rather than closed and several feet of tree hanging off the bumper -- I can't remember actually having the tree tied to the top of the car.

In the 80s, the lot beside Trenholm Plaza was developed, or further developed, and the space available to set up the tree lot was no longer sufficient. At that time, the Optimists moved the lot down Trenholm to its current location (pictured) by the Children's Home and the Methodist Church. In recent years, the garden center in the old First Citizen's Bank location in Forest Lake Shopping Center has added Christmas trees in season, so there is still a lot in the general area, but it's not the same.

This small multiplex was located in the Spring Valley Commons strip mall on Two Notch Road. I believe the complex has a strong grocery anchor, but the rest of the place has been pretty transient.

I can only recall seeing one movie at this venue, the baseball comedy Major League in 1989. Through an odd sequence of events, involving a teenager, my father had become the semi-involuntary weekend host of a USC Japanese exchange student who spoke no English. (I wonder from time to time how that whole "go to college in a country where you don't speak the language" thing worked out for him). At something of a loss as to how to entertain the guy, my father recruited my sister and me to take him to a movie. As it turned out, the movie had a Japanese grounds-keeper character who spoke only Japanese, so at least the kid was able to understand a few words of the movie.

The theater itself was fine, not memorable in any way, but certainly OK. It was a pretty volatile time in the cinema market though, and I don't believe the place made it more than a few years into the 90s. The space is now one of the ubiquitous "self storage" operations.

UPDATE 23 October 2012: Add full street address and tags.

I wrote recently how Peaches often crossed my mind at Christmas, but there was another place in town which had an even stronger holiday association for me. Probably because my mother was a gardner, I spent my share of time at Taylor's Garden Center growing up.

The buildings and yard space have been torn down, but Taylor's Garden Center occupied the pace now held by Forest Lake Fabrics, next to Frans and Forest Lake Park. Like Gaul, the place was divided into three parts. In the front, on the right, was the salesroom. This room was filled with all the paraphernalia of gardening: hoses, nozzles, sprayers, stakes, gloves, clippers, chemicals, you name it. I liked it because it was almost like a hardware store, and all the chemicals gave it a unique smell. I believe that if you had taken me in blindfolded, I still would have been able to identify where I was.

Also in front, but on the left was sort of an auxiliary, room. I think this was more seasonal, and most of the year I recall it having lawn statues, paving stones, fountains and the like.

Behind this room, and also on the left side was the greenhouse. This was where all the actual plants were, and had its own distinctive, loamy smell. You could go out there, and with the warmth, the smell, the sound of the fans running, the sounds of the plastic sheeting walls bowing in and out in the breeze and the rows of green plants, it was like stepping into some other world. Perhaps the "plant ship" from the film Silent Running. We kids liked to wander around out there while our mother was picking things out in the front room.

But here's the best thing about the place. The auxiliary room that I called seasonal? Well winter is a season, and one where a garden center isn't going to have a lot of business -- So each winter they set up a Festival of Christmas Trees there. Now they may have sold live trees, I don't recall (we always got ours at the Optimist lot), but the festival was all artificial trees, and very fancy ones. I can particularly recall trees which had a little pump system which recycled poppy-seed sized grains of "snow" from a catchment basin at the base of the tree to a nozzle at the top, providing a constant "snowfall" over the tree. And of course there were trees with all manner of fancy lights, trees that turned round and round, and even trees that made their own music.

I suppose they did sell some of them each year, but really it was more like an area attraction, to come to the Garden Center and see the trees.

I'm a little fuzzy on why the Garden Center closed. It wasn't part of any chain, so it might just have been a matter of the proprietors wanting to retire, or it could have been the rise of Wal-Mart (though the Forest Drive store was till in the future) or the superstores like Home Depot & Lowes. I think I was already living out of town when it happened. I recall reading an appreciation piece in The State, then the place closed and the building was torn down. I guess you could say they took over from the nursery that was on Trenholm Road behind the Gulf station, and now Forest Lake Gardens has kind of taken over from them. But it doesn't smell the same.

UPDATE 27 Mar 09: Finally fixed the title of this post, changing to to Taylor's Garden Center from the (incorrect) Forest Lake Garden Center.

UPDATE 1 October 2009: Finished changing all the Forest Lake Garden Center references to Taylor's Garden Center. Don't know why I didn't catch them earlier.

This building more or less on the corner of Trehnolm Road and Beltline Boulevard, was for years, I believe, a florist. Then the "espresso craze" hit the country.

Remember how in the awful 1991 Bruce Willis movie Hudson Hawk Willis had to keep explaining to everyone what a Cappuccino was? Well, shortly thereafter, all of America knew, and coffee houses were something of a hot market item. I believe it was about this time that Cool Beans started on College Street (under another name), as well as Ibby's in Myrtle Beach, a place on King Street in Charleston whose name I'm blanking on and several others started. Most of this first wave of independant coffee houses located in shabby buildings and affected a very casual and laid back demeanor and their attitude was very much "we are real coffee houses, and you should get used to us and continue to support us because Starbucks is coming". However, I think that was something of a put on, like having a "real" Irish pub in a South Eastern city. The whole coffee-house "culture" was really indigenous to other parts of the country, and the local places weren't anymore "real" than Starbucks, though the survivors have become so over time.

Aside from the "culture" there was simply a matter of competence. Brewing the espresso seems fairly straight-forward, but it is very easy to burn the milk for items like cappuccinos or lattes after which they become completely undrinkable. Books-a-Million still gets this wrong about two times out of ten, while I've never had it happen at Starbucks.

All of which is a lead-up for saying that sometime in the 90s, the florist shop closed and a coffee house went into the building. I'm afraid to say that I stopped once, got a completely undrinkable latte and never went back. They may have gotten better after that, but with the lot being rather hard to get in and out of, and with first Books-A-Million locating at Trenholm Plaza and then Barnes & Noble at Richland Mall, they were gone even before any Starbucks opened in Columbia.

The place is now a cat hospital. And that can keep you awake too.

Cornell Arms is a venerable apartment building on the corner of Pendelton & Sumter Streets right across from The Horseshoe. In addition to the apartments in the "high rise" section of the building, there has always been retail space on the ground floor. In times past, the space which now houses Tio's Mexican Restaurant has hosted McDonald's and The Lizard's Thicket.

The corner space which is now apparently a cafe & catering operation has also had a number of tenants. The most durable was probably a drugstore which was there for most of my childhood if I am recalling correctly. However the one which most interested me was a bagel operation which started in the 90s when what my father called The Bagel Craze finally hit Columbia. (This was the era which also saw Manhatten Bagel start in Trenholm Plaza). Anyway, after the bagel place that is now Greek Boys closed, the Cornell Arms bagelery was my choice for my bi-annual after-dentist bagel. At the time I was still living in Aiken, so when I had a dentist appointment scheduled, I would spend the night in Columbia, have my checkup and then drive to work in Augusta. I've never had any dental problems, but having my gums poked with small sharp objects always makes me feel I deserve some sort of reward, and so a bagel it is. Going back to Trenholm Plaza was too far the wrong way, but this place was close enough. I'm not sure what happened to it. Perhaps bagels became so common that students can get passable ones on campus. Perhaps it was the lack of parking. Maybe somebody picked the lox...

UPDATE 8 Jan 09: Turns out this place is still the same operation and still has bagels, they just changed the name and focus. (check the comments). Glad to hear it!

UPDATE 12 April 2010: Added full street address to post title.

OK, this one makes me doubt my memories. (I'm sure more of these closings should do that..)

This is the store where I bought my sister a vacuum cleaner back in the 1980s. I can't remember what kind it was -- some sort of off-brand canister model that seemed fairly solid, I think. It lasted more than ten years for her, and if that's not Electrolux longevity, it's not bad.

The thing is that I was dead certain the place was called Intersection Vacuum Center, which made sense because it was located at Intersection Center. However, clearly at the time this place moved to Lake Murray Boulevard (where it still is), it was called Vacuum Mart. Further, there is an Intersection Vacuum Center in Columbia, but it's apparently on Two Notch near Columbia Mall.

The only sequence of events that would make my recollection correct is if this building was Intersection Vacuum Center which at some point moved out and was replaced by another vacuum store. Anyone have a better memory about this?

UPDATE 16 May 2010: Added full street address, tags.

UPDATE 22 January 2020: Add map icon, update tags.

I don't know much about Gilligan's, which was beside the old Sears building and behind the old Punch Line on an odd little isolated segment of Senate Street. It keeps coming up in comments as a place fondly remembered though. I know they had sort of a big "sandbox" in front of the rather decrepit-looking building with a volleyball net set up, and "incentivies" to get folks there. Commenter Dennis notes:

Gilligan’s, A.K.A. Ribby’s, was a brilliant idea by Tim Peterson, but he could not get people there. He asked me once why the great BBQ joints never seem to sell beer (he did) and I’m still trying to figure that out. You’d think that alone would draw a crowd. Not to mention girls in bikinis playing volleyball on the sand, which he arranged to have happen from time to time.

When I took these pictures, I noticed a guy working on the roof (and who was giving me the evil-eye, so I didn't take many shots or get any closer), and commenter John says

I notice the outside has been painted garnet and black and there is a building permit on theoutside that has been issued to the Orion Corporation for the purpose of fixing flood damage.

Is my old hangout about to reopen?

Perhaps we'll see soon.

UPDATE 24 July 2010 -- It's now open as The Cock Lounge: