Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

DRAKES RESTAURANT
Columbia, S. C.

Best food on Highway One, north of Columbia. A spe-
cialty Restaurant serving good clean food. So duck in at
Drakes and enjoy a delicious meal.

DRAKE'S RESTAURANT
Columbia, S. C.
Best food on Highway one, north of Columbia. A specialty
Restaurant serving good clean food. So duck in at Drake's
and enjoy a delicious meal.

"Good Clean Food" -- I'm not sure I've ever seen that exact phrase used as a selling point before..

Over the years I've been running Columbia Closings I've gotten a number of requests for Drake's Restaurant on Taylor Street. I've never done much about it because we never ate there, and I really didn't remember the place, and because the building was gone.

Recently though, I was searching an online postcard site, and found two good postcards of Drake's. As fate would have it, commenter Dennis emailed me the same day with a copy of one of the same postcard images, saying:

This is Drake's Restaurant that stood on the southeast corner of Two
Notch/Millwood and Forest Drive. It's been long demolished and is now
a Church's Chicken. This view is from the south on Millwood. My family
ate there a lot in the early 1960s. It was a nice, quiet, "white
tablecloth" place that I truly miss. The Drakes ran a florist business
in the same building, no doubt doing a lot of business with Providence
Hospital patients across the street. And Yes, there is a connection to
Drake's Duck-In on Main Street, or at least there was originally.

I'm not sure what years these cards are from. I'm confident however, that the first card is earlier, as you can see that the roof air-conditioning units are the old wooden-slat type, while in the next card they are more modern.

I'm not sure when Drake's was started either. It *is* listed in the 1954 Southern Bell phonebook, the first one available at the RCPL. That, and subsequent phonebooks up to 1960 give the address as simply "Taylor Street". The December 1961 book is the first one to give the street number of "2436 Taylor Street". As far as I can tell, the place never bought a full yellow-pages ad. However, also starting in the December 1961 book, it did start buying a small box ad (pictured above) touting its "Go Service" wherein you could phone in your order and pick it up to go. This continued (with the same design and text) through the final listing for Drake's, which was in the January 1977 phonebook.

As Dennis mentions, the Drake's address is now a Church's Chicken fast food outlet, which is a completely new building.

One thing about the whole situation which blows my mind is that Drake's had (and Church's has) a Taylor Street address. If there was anything I thought I knew, it was that Taylor Street was West of Millwood and Forest Drive was East of Millwood. Full stop end of story. There's probably some sort of street re-routing story there...

(Hat tip to commenter Dennis, and a few others over the years)

When I was around 10, I semi-inherited a bunch of darkroom equipment, and drove the guys at Jackson Cameras to distraction with all my questions, and my mother to distraction with all the chemical stains (still there today) on her kitchen countertops. Given that, and the number of film cameras I have salted away in storage somewhere (including a Kodak 616 format box camera that worked the last time I tried it..), I always figured I would drop by film haven The F-Stop Camera Shop someday. I noted when it moved here from Five Points, and somehow still didn't get around to it.

Hard to believe I haven't been in a darkroom since 1976..

UPDATE 12 September 2012: Added two pictures of the place in operation that I forgot to copy over.

I noticed while at Starbucks the other night that the one of Trenholm Plaza's three banks, Capital Bank, while remainging open, is doing major remodeling.

I believe that Capital Bank is a fairly new name for this building, which has been a number of different banks over the years.

Why you (and I) couldn't access the site for part of today:

Anonymous member claims responsibility for GoDaddy outage.

GoDaddy says sites are down; hacker claims responsibility.

This little storefront is on Devine Street more or less across the street from the former Burger King and in the same strip as the former Brassworks.

I don't get many hits on the address, but according to the Secretary Of State's Office, at one time this was Midlands Tax And Business Services, Inc. which disbanded in 2007.

I don't have any information on Styles By Sir Walter aside from the fact that it was listed in the February 1997 phonebook as being a few doors down from this slot at 4443 Devine.

This 24 hour gym was in Boozer Shopping Center on the Bush River Road side just a few slots down from Dunkin' Robbins. This is not too far away from the former Curves gym on Colonial Life Boulevard.

This little three suite building on Farrow Road just past SC-277 (headed away from town) was the home of the Short Stop Barber Shop & Hair Styling barber shop and salon on the right side of the building, and Dessie Short Stop III convenience store on the left side of the building and an ABC store in between.

You can still see where the barber pole was mounted on the wall, but the shop closed sometime before the February 2007 phonebook. There is a large gap in the books I have at home, but I can say that it *was* listed in the February 1997 book.

The convience store is not listed in any of my phonebooks, so apparently it went into operation after the Feb 1997 book and closed before the Feb 2007 one. (There is still another Dessie Short Stop at another location). This does not quite jibe with the Richland County business license list, which lists the place as holding business licenses as a convenience store in both 2008 and 2009 although it is consistent with the Columbia Star report of an application for a beer and wine permit in September 2006.

I don't have any information on the Red Dot ABC store in suite 2.

This little sandwich & chicken restaurant was across the fence from Frank's, and shared the building where Mr. B's nightclub is located. This suite is also the former location of Rookie Billiards and Gardenia's restaurant.

I'm not exactly sure what "New York" means in a sub style (I hear "New Jersey" more often), but the reviews they got on Urban Spoon were positive.

UPDATE 30 October 2012: Commenter badger points out that this storefront was once a adult video store. Actually "Chasers Wholesale Video" is listed for this storefront (3122) while "Chasers' Mags-N-Mixers" is listed for the left end of the building (3128). I think the whole building (which has three storefronts now, had only one or two then).

Video:

I think taking the time and trouble to program a Thank You message into the roadside message board was a nice touch.

This storefront (which looks to me as though it may once have been a grocery) on Saint Andrews Road north of Lake Murray Boulevard was the first location for the Carolina Wings & Rib House chain. I'm not sure what the "Smokehouse" marquee signifies exactly -- I don't believe I have noticed that at other Carolina Wings locations.

(Hat tip to commenter jonathan)

UPDATE 8 September 2012: Label the video (first image).

UPDATE 20 April 2020: Add tags and map icon.