Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

Eat Boogie's Grill

That was the memorable exhortation that adorned the west wall of this vanished Gervais Street "soul food" restaurant when I was in middle and high school.

In fact, the place was so well known from that slogan, that I thought I would be able to find out more about it than I did. Here is the meager information I was able to come up with from old phonebooks:

Boogie's Grill apparently started in 1966, first showing up in the January 1967 Southern Bell phonebook at 509 Childs Street, a place I had never heard of, but which is in a neighboorhood west of Bluff Road.

Sometime in 1972 they moved to the iconic 2124 Gervais Street location, listing there in the December 1972 phonebook.

By 1977, they were back in the same Bluff Road area, listing at 1717 Zion Avenue in the January 1978 book.

As far as I can tell, they never bought a yellow pages ad, and in fact, dropped out of the yellow pages entirely after leaving Gervais Street.

2124 is on the block of Gervais betwen Harden and Pine Streets. There is currently no building at that address -- I think it must have been at one of the curb cuts between Holman's Barber Shop and the next building up (which looks as though I should probably do a closing on it). This surprised me a little bit, as I had been sure, before looking it up, that it was further down Gervais towards Millwood.

Surely someone out there has a picture of Boogie's and the west wall sign?

And to drift the subject a bit, how about that mural of the USS Enterprise blasting phasers down at a planet that adorned the west wall of a nearby building on the other side of Gervais Street?

Might want to look here

Here

Here

Here

Here

Here

and

Here

Carolina MoneySaver (or Carolina Money$aver) if I'm recalling right was one of those little "only classifieds" papers you would find around town in various lobbies and foyers. I think I saw it most often at Constan Carwash on Gervais.

The Internet has not been kind to such publications (or to the classified section of "regular" newspapers). In fact it has basically wiped them out. Why would you pay to place an ad in such a paper when you know that few people would see the paper itself, much less leaf through all the ads when you could instead list on Craigslist for free knowing that people could use online-search to beeline to your listing?

The URL on the roadside sign still works, but now redirects to a Charlotte area MoneySaver niche on the PennySaver USA site. I believe that PennySaver was once sort of an umbrella for all those little regional ad papers, but now it seems to have more of a pure online focus.

Maybe someone should put this real estate listing on Craigslist..

UPDATE 7 January 2012: Added several new tenants to the post title. I believe Fresh Encounters LLC to be the oldest of those. The Secretary of State's office indicates that it organized in 1998 and dissolved in 2001. There's no actual indication of what it was. With that name, it could be anthing from an escort agency to a produce stand.

The other names are more clear, and Beds Plus is undoubtedly the mattress store referenced in the comments.

I first wrote about this building when it was NAPA Auto Parts. By September of 2010, Triumph had moved in, after repainting the place.

I'm not sure whether Triumph disbanded or simply moved elsewhere. Google suggests they were on Taylor Street before they were here on Millwood, but I'm not pulling up any hits that suggest a followup location. Their Facebook page (which I can't fully access without joining Facebook) seems to say that they were having events here at least until 17 October 2011.

Well, it's the New Year. If your hangover has died down enough, you may notice that that calendar over on the wall is now showing LAST YEAR.

Not to worry. You can easily fix that with either a Columbia Closings or Pawleys Island 2012 wall calendar.

Columbia Closings Large Format 2012 Wall Calendar

Columbia Closings Regular Format 2012 Wall Calendar

Pawleys Island Large Format 2012 Wall Calendar

Pawleys Island Regular Format 2012 Wall Calendar

And what better way to start a new year than with good reading? You can order my book in either paperback or electronic format. At $2.99 for the Kindle version, what have you got to lose?

Paperback:

Kindle:

I don't know how I suffered this mental lapse, but somehow I convinced myself that on the day after Christmas, the Christmas rush would be over, and it would once more be safe to hit the Harbison area. Bad call!

I came up Harbison from Saint Andrews Road, and that wasn't so bad. Neither was getting into the circle for Columbiana Centre. Getting out was the hard part. It took me half an hour to merge into the counterclockwise outbound traffic and work my way to the Columbiana Drive exit. In between arriving and leaving, the mall itself was as packed as I've ever seen any mall. I guess I have been "spoiled" by the nearly empty expanses of Richland Mall, Columbia Mall and Dutch Square. I guess that makes Columbiana Centre Columbia's success story, but it doesn't make me want to go there again any time soon..

At any rate, Payless Shoe Source were in their final few days and were selling everything down to the store fixtures in preparation for clothing store Forever 21 to expand into their spot. In years past, it's always seemed to me that shoe stores are the most over-representated category in malls, but perhaps that's now changing.

UPDATE 27 February 2019: Add tags and map icon.

(Hat tip to commenter Dustin)

These are the (slightly sanitized) 100 most popular keyword searches given to search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing which brought visitors to Columbia Closings in 2011:

These are the 100 most popular posts or pages for the year 2011 as determined by Google Analytics. Notice that the post may not have been made in 2011, what is measured is its popularity (in pageviews) for 2011.

I'm not going to attempt to rank these all according to how good they are or how well I like them as that would be difficult and pointless. Instead here are my favorite 20 posts from 2011 in rough chronological order:

01) If It's Paper:

02) Myrtle Square Mall:

03) Boardwalk Plaza (older post, but massively updated this year):

04) (The Original) Lizard's Thicket:

05) Circle K (Forest Drive):

06) Cayce Bait & Tackle:

07) Harbison Medical Building:

08) USC Bell Camp:

09) Blue Cross / Parcone at Sandhill:

10) Yo Burrito:

11) Cayce School:

12) Cafe Risque (Darien GA):

13) Splendid China Buffet:

14) CMC Construction Services:

15) Borders Books (everywhere):

16) Leesburg Road Garage:

17) South Carolina State Fair:

18) The Ballistic Center / Videos & Beyond:

19) Building 581 Myrtle Beach Airforce Base:

20) Kimbrell's Furniture on Main:

BONUS) Best Roadside Offer I Ever Saw:

Other than some "year in review" type posts, that's it for this year. I hope everyone had a great one, and has a very merry Christmas tomorrow.