Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

I got a late start to this year's Nights Of A Thousand Candles because a) I'm slack, and b) It was raining a bit earlier, but on getting there, found it dry, and the warmest of any of the years I have been there. There have been a number of years that it has been so cold I could barely take pictures since I couldn't feel the camera buttons, but this year I hardly needed a sweater, and the new "S'mores" pits were actually a bit too hot.

The basic theme of candles & lights in trees remains the same, but there are always a few new setups, this year's lighted bottles, for instance to keep things fresh, and I always highly enjoy it. The festival continues through New Years, and if you have a chance to check it out, you really should.

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To my memory, I only ate at Scatori's once, probably about five years ago, and it was fine, though not any better than my normal Strand pizza venues. I did think whenever I heard of it that the name was a bit unfortunate.

The Sun News says that the place had been open 15 years, which would have made it an early storefront in this shopping center, which I still think of as 'new' itself. The chef, who featured on TV's Cutthroat Kitchen has gone on to West Virgina to run a food truck which seems like an odd progression, but I guess that's what he wanted to do.

Both news articles say that Scatori's was sold in January (though it did not close then), but it appears that as of yet, the new owners have not done anything to the interior setup or furnishings.

(Hat tip to commenter Dan R)

I'm not a golfer, though some of my friends are very into the game. That said, I always thought it would be neat to ride the cable-car gondola across the waterway here at the Waterway Hills Golf Club.

This article on the closing of the club says it was designed by Robert Trent Jones and opened in 1975. As it closed in 2015, that's a 40 year run, which is not bad given the pace of change on the Grand Strand. The course was purchased by the company owning the adjacent Grande Dunes, but it appears to me that as of yet, nothing has been built on the former course.

You can see a picture taken from a gondola here. Also, I am going to try something new (for me) here. Google Streeview often has images I am unable to match, as they preserve things that have been long torn down in their year-by-year views of the same spot. My assumption had been that I could link to those, but not embed them, but in looking at the actual terms of use, it appears that embedding is OK. So, below I am embedding an image from June of 2013, which shows the course in operation, and a gondola en-route. You can click on the embiggen square to get fullscreen.

Looking at other Streetview images, I can say that the cable car infrastructure was torn down sometime between January and July of 2019.

This was the Fatz location in Camden. As of 10 September 2023, there is still muzak playing on the patio (as was the case for the Florence location. This building is on a nice parcel very convenient to I-20, so I suspect something will move in before long.

Here's another former Fatz, this one on US-501 in Conway on the main drag towards the beach.

Google reviews suggest this was re-purposed as an Asian buffet sometime around 2019.

The Florence Fatz Cafe still has a billboard on I-95, and the music in the foyer is still playing, but like all the rest, this location is now history.

Apparently the Southern 500 had just been run, and I had a heck of a time getting out of here and back onto I-95!

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To the best of my memory, I had never been in Clio until July when I drove through on SC-9. The town has obviously seen better times; Wikipedia says the current population is 726, but the downtown is still mostly intact if often vacant.

In the early years of the 20th though, it was a bit of a boom-town as the railroad came through, and took advantage of that to put up a Vaudeville theater to host acts travelling from New York to Miami. It was called an Opera House as such things tended to be, because that sounded classier.

According to The SC Picture Project and The Eccentric South, the place survived as a theater into the 1950s.

Currently it seems to be mostly empty, with a retail operation in the lower corner that looked not to have been open in a while. In the meantime, the pocket sized local police department hangs off the other side.

This old-style retail storefront is on Society Hill's main drag, next to an insurance agency. As far as I can tell from looking at Google Streetview, it may have been open as late as 2012. You can check there for a view of the "Buttercup" sign, which is no longer present. There is also a nice one taken in 2018 here. The flickr link says that Buttercup Ice Cream started in Hamlet NC in the 1920s and lasted into the 1960s, surviving as Mello Buttercup. Here's one of the whole building from the same photoset, and a much better shot than any of mine.

It's not clear to me if the ice cream operation was part of the flowers, craft & framing business, but it is on that end of the building, and the main sign does call out Coca Cola, and the Pepsi coolers inside, so beverages were also sold there.

This stretch of road does the neat trick of being US-401, US-52 & US-15 all at the same time.

I did some driving around in parts of the state I don't usually get to during July. I think I've featured a few of those closings already, and there will be some more in the future. As far as I know, I had never been down this stretch of road in Bennettsville before, on SC-9 heading towards Dillon.

I honestly don't think I've ever eaten in a Huddle House either, though it's possible I did in Fernandina once. Anyway, I've always thought of them as sort of a discount Waffle House, and the, almost uniformly bad, reviews for this place don't dissuade me from that notion. (To be fair, there are some positive reviews). At any rate it sounds to me they were having extreme post-COVID staffing issues, and I think you can disregard the the Now Hiring signage.