Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

Here's a rather overgrown building on Fairfield Road to the north of I-20 that apparently has been a number of things over the years, but most recently housed three related service businesses.

UPDATE 27 September 2023: Update tags & add map icon.

I had thought these two separate stores when I took the pictures, but closer inspection leads me to believe that while they may have been operated as seperately licensed businesses for ABC reasons, they shared one door (the door on the right of the Party Store side appears to be blocked off).

Both were in the little plaza at the corner of Leesburg Road and Greenlawn Drive which also housed the former Leonardo's Screen Printing and still very much open Pizza Palace.

Tea was apparently a Vietnamese tea house with sandwiches and other fare. It was on that little strip of State Street near Meeting Street which has a whole row of storefronts, and was in between Rish Florist and the original Cafe Strudel location.

I don't have my phonebooks right now, but the last online reviews I see for the place are dated early 2011, so I'm guessing it closed that year.

I noticed a For Rent sign on this nice little building at Taylor & Henderson Streets a couple of weeks ago as I was driving downtown.

To me the place looks like a former house, but more like a 1950s house than the older homes you often see converted to offices downtown. If so, they were building residences in the area later than I would have expected.

At any rate, clients of the law firm shouldn't worry, they have moved just a bit up the block to this building at 1614 Taylor:

UPDATE 3 October 2012: Update the move date from "2012" to "circa 2007" based on the comments.

This small Indian market was the follow-on operation to Groucho's Deli in this Broad River Road storefront. It started sometime before November 2011 and I'm pretty sure I saw it still open in early September 2012.

This little building on Oak Street in the block between Gervais & Senate Streets caught my eye the other day. Although I must have seen it in operation many times riding downtown as a kid, I have absolutely no memory of it. As far as I can tell, there isn't even a street address on it anywhere, so google isn't particularly helpful either. To my eye, it was clearly a store, perhaps a small grocery, at one time.

Looking back at the post I did for the building in front of this on Gervais Street, I would guess from the paint jobs that the two buildings have the same owner.

Good Day Chinese Restaurant in North Columbia Square on Fairfield Road reminds me a bit of the old Chung King restaurant in Intersection Center, at least as far as having painstaking, attractive, woodwork nailed to the bricks.

The building itself obviously predates Good Day and it's on the tip of my tongue what it must have been originally, but for some reason I'm drawing a blank.

UPDATE 30 September 2012 -- Tender as Quail! Tasty as Pheasant!

Commenters have identified the original tenant of this building as Golden Skillet and pictures like this one confirm that. I don't know when that closed, but it was before the February 1997 phonebook, and Wikipedia suggests the chain went into decline after 1981.

As I mentioned a week or so ago in an update to the Intersection Center Pizza Hut post, that building at 1929 Broad River Road has been taken over by Carolina Title Loans (last picture above). This is the building they moved from.

It was obviously a gas station at one time, though I don't remember of what brand, and sits at the corner of Broad River Road and Garner Lane (which is also the Eastbound on-ramp for I-20). I would say the Pizza Hut location definitely has easier access than this lot, which is difficult to get to if you are heading towards Dutch Square on Broad River Road.

UPDATE 25 March 2022 -- This place has now been razed:

(Hat tip to commenter Gypsie for the notice that this place has been razed).

Also adding map icon.

This little auto lot was at the corner of Airport Boulevard and Glenn Street in Cayce. The full name comes from the 2012 phonebook -- as you can see, the roadside sign stops at International Auto Sales.

To me, it looks as though the garage wing of the building might have been added on after the front part was built, leading me to believe this has not always been a car-related spot.

This little four unit storefront on Decker just on the South side of Faraway has seen a good bit of turnover recently.

I'm sure there were other businesses here in Suite A, but all I see in google right now are an undertaker, and two names for the same income tax service. MO Money is in this year's (February 2012) phonebook, so both the name change and the departure seem to have taken place this year.