Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

I did a post on University Corner and the changes there. One of the biggest changes was the passing of The Big Bird.

To be honest, I only went there a few times myself. Yes, I lived in The Towers, but I was on the University meal coupon (later meal card) system, so I always ended up eating at Russell House, Capstone or one of the other "company store" places on campus. The few times I did go, it seemed like quite an interesting place, with burgers, a cafeteria-like line with meats and vegetables, and some sort of game room in the downstairs part of the split-level building. The eponymous "Big Bird" was, of course, a Gamecock, and I doubt they got much business beyond college students.

I'm not sure exactly what happened to The Big BIrd -- businesses have always come and gone in University Corner, but it seemed like an institution. The actual address, 625 Main Street is now occupied by Moe's, but it seems to me that The Big Bird was gone for a good while before that happened.

UPDATE 3 Oct 08: Added two pictures of the Moe's currently at the old Big Bird location.

UPDATE 22 Jan 09: Added a picture of the old Big Bird sign from commenter Terry, who
writes:

The Big Bird sign has been stored at this sign shop in Hopkins for some time now. I'm not sure why they hang on to it.

UPDATE 27 December 2012: Corespondent wblood1 sends this 1980 picture of The Big Bird:

Notice also, the old 7-11 to the left of it and Stuffy's to the right.

I always considered Pizza Inn kind of a down-market cousin to Pizza Hut, at least in the beginning. Given my declining respect for Pizza Hut, I might reverse that opinion now -- Pizza Inn never tried to serve me fountain ice tea rather than fresh brewed. At any rate, while it may not have been my first choice, I never had a problem going to Pizza Inn, and I recall going to this one on Two Notch (now a Honey Baked Ham store) several times.

The most memorable time was the night my sister and I had dinner with one of my cousins and her husband. We had been seated with no incident, and had negotiated amongst ourselves a suitable mix of toppings for a large pan pizza. For whatever reason, when the server finally came, my cousin's husband placed our order:

"We'd like a large pan pizza with pepperoni, onions, bell-peppers and mushrooms", he said.

"It's not ready yet", the sever said.

There was a full stop while we all kind of looked at each other.

"Um, yes, we know, um, we'd like a large pan pizza with pepperoni, onions, bell-peppers and mushrooms", he tried again.

"It's not ready yet", the server said.

Another full stop.

"No, no, we're not asking about an order, we just got here, this is our order. We'd like a large --"

"It's not ready yet"

Final full stop.

"Ok, we understand that it's not ready. If we order it, will we get it?

At this point things kind of dissolved in mutual incomprehension and finally a manager had to come over and sort things out. As well as I can remember it, what the server had been trying to get across in a completely unhelpful and inarticulate way (and he was a native English speaker!) was that the crusts for large pan pizzas had not yet risen to the point of being cookable. We got two mediums and all was well despite a suspicion that Allen Funt must be around the corner somewhere.

UPDATE 23 Aug 2009: OK, in the comments this place has been identified as having originally been a Sambo's, and I was able to verify that today in old phonebooks at the RCPL. 7451 Two Notch first shows up as a Sambo's in 1978, and is listed for the last time in the 1981 phonebook. Pizza Inn at this location shows up first in the 1983 phonebook. Given that phonebooks only come out once a year, and require a good bit of advance notice, the building was probably not vacant long, despite not being listed as either store in the 1982 phonebook.

I don't know what finally happened to the Sambo's chain, but at one time they got a good bit of bad publicity by being associated with the Little Black Sambo story. As I recall, their response was that one of the chain's owners was "Sam" something and the other was "Beau" something and thus the name. That's plausible, but once having thought of a name, they did go on to associate it with the story by having a little Indian kid and a tiger in their logo (which I forgot to scan), and of course the story was set in India to begin with, and "Sambo" was actually a hero, having run the tiger into butter somehow (I'm a bit vague on the details now), but nonetheless in the US the story had gotten racist associations over the years, and if you're in business it's better to cut your losses and change your name than fight that kind of battle.

The time came when we, as every family does eventually, needed the services of a funeral home. Obviously it is a sad and painful experience. I can only say that I was impressed by the professionalism of the Dunbar staff as they took care of details I never would have thought of.

I knew they were emphasizing their Devine Street Chapel, but I had not realized that they had actually closed the Gervais Street location until I drove by recently and saw that the main sign was no longer on the property, and that parts of it were looking a bit overgrown.

I was a bit concerned since, despite the memories associated with it, the old house with its attached carraige-house is a Columbia landmark and a bit of stateliness on a more or less characterless commercial artery. It appears though that the house is on the historic register, and will be preserved as the USC Children's Law Center:

Proposed Whaley House Purchase:

Mr. Parham reported that the Childrens Law Center was established by the USC School of Law in 1995 to serve as a training and resource center for family court workers and attorneys who participated in legal proceedings involving children. The Center taught courses at the Law School, provided Continuing Legal Education and legal research for attorneys and judges, trained guardian ad litems and state agency case workers, and performed research-based juvenile justice programs. Currently, the Center provided more than 225 training programs and professional meetings annually to more than 5,000 professionals who protected, served and represented children in family courts. The Center was currently located on the 5th floor of 1600 Hampton Street where it had no on-site training or meeting space.

For that reason, Harry Davis, Director of the Childrens Law Center, with the approval of Dean Jack Pratt and President Sorensen, was seeking approval from the Executive Committee to enter into a Contract of Sale to purchase the property located at 1527 Gervais Street as the new home for the Childrens Law Center. This property was located directly across Gervais Street from the proposed site of the new law school. It consisted of approximately 1.25 acres, and contained 2 structures: the Whaley House (8,012 square feet), and an adjacent Carriage House (5,140 square feet). There were also 70 parking spaces on the property. Mr. Parham stated that the Dunbar Funeral Home had occupied this property for many years and the property was owned by Stewart Enterprises, Inc.

and:

Mr. Whittle asked if the building was on the National Registry of Historic Places, and if so, will it require any special maintenance and upkeep and/or will it limit the usage in the future as to how the property can be used? Mr. Harry Davis, Director of the Children Law Center, responded that the building was on the historic register. The University had several discussions with the Columbia Historic Foundation and discussions with the architects and engineers. And, it was his understanding that the University would not be permitted to alter the exterior of the building without permission of the Columbia Historic Foundation. However, interior renovations could be made as the University might desire. The USC engineer had also looked at the building in a preliminary examination and stated that it appeared to be a sound structure.

I didn't try to peer and take pictures through the windows as I often do out of a feeling of respect. It did seem that lights were still on inside, and the AC unit was running. However, USC doesn't seem to have been in any hurry to make the actual Law Center move, and the lack of maintainence and painting is quite visible on some of the woodwork as well as the lawn being unmown in some areas. I hope they step up to the plate soon.

UPDATE 29 September 2012 -- As mentioned by commenter Matt, some sort of extensive work is being done on the place now:

UPDATE 19 October 2012 -- Apparently the place is being painted yellow. This seems to be a very gradual process where first a section is repaired and made ship-shape and then is painted:

UPDATE 21 June 2022 -- I'm not sure what is going on, but the place is partially boarded up with work apparently being done again. The real estate sign suggests the property could be a cafe:

I see LoopNet has more details:

PROPERTY HIGHLIGHTS
2,592 sf restaurant/café space for lease in historic building
1,762 sf - interior café space $21.50 NNN
830 sf – porch seating area $12.50 NNN
Owner will deliver the space as a warm vanilla shell.
Delivery date – fall 2022

Also adding map icon and updating tags.

I only went into Kress a few times. When I was small, and we went clothes shopping downtown, Kress was not on the agenda, and we didn't go there for normal dimestore type things since we had both Dodd's and Woolworth's closer. I do recall that my mother was of the opinion that they had the best candied fruit for fruit-cakes, but I think that keeping up with us kept her busy enough that she just made do with grocery-store fruit on most of the occasions she made it. (And people joke about fruit-cake, but I love a good one).

After I started driving, and perhaps while I was living on-campus, I know I stopped by just to see what it was like: stepping inside was like stepping back about 50 years in time. Aside from the fact that anyone who wanted to could sit at the lunch counter, you could imagine that their retailing concept hadn't changed since the 1940s. I wish I had eaten at that counter when I had the chance, but the timing was off, and if I were in college, I was probably broke anyway.

The building itself, or at least the Kress part of it, is rather odd in that it doesn't have a rectangular shape. There are several other storefronts on Hampton such that you would think Kress was a fairly small space, but then you go around the corner onto main, and you come across the main entrance. The Hampton Street part seems to be an architect's office now while the Main Street entrance was the old Rising High location -- something that had completely escaped me when I did a closing on that store. The Main Street facade may have once been the impressive side of the store, but with the Rising High makeover, I think the art-deco-ish sign on the Hampton Street entrance is now the best side.

I didn't go to Kress often enough to miss it, but I do miss dimestores. I know we have dollar-stores now, but it's not the same experience.

I've written about Denny's before, and about how I am not a big fan, though I confess I've had my share of 2AM suppers at various locations over the years after insane work schedules. I knew about the old Two Notch Denny's, the one that used to be on Airport Boulevard, and the Denny's "Diner" that is still on Harbison Boulevard, but I didn't know about this place at all.

Wilson Boulevard is what North Main Street is called after it gets close to crossing over I-20, and as it happened, I had some business in the area recently and noticed this closed restaurant as I was driving by. The shape of the sign suggested a Denny's, and sure enough a quick google verified that. I don't have a closing date, but it can't have been too many years ago. On the surface, the I-20 location, near to a truck stop, and with lots of parking seems like it could have supported a restaurant. I don't ever recall seeing a sign from the highway though. Perhaps they didn't advertise well enough, or perhaps people don't want to eat at Denny's unless they have to, and the interstate corridor through Columbia has a number of better alternatives.

It seems a bit odd now, but for years after Columbia Mall opened, Lowrey Organs sat at the top of the curving staircase on the Penny's end of the mall, across the way from The Record Bar. The spot is currently a toy store.

I say odd, because a console organ isn't really an impulse purchase -- you think about it and go to the showroom whether or not it's in a walk-by retail area. Be that as it may, the store was there for years, and the organs they sold were wonders to behold with arrays of keys and knobs, pedals, switches and lights. I believe that some of them would probably play better without a human messing around with the keyboard. My memory, in fact, is that they often had an organ playing in demo mode with noone at the keys, though they did have humans demo them as well from time to time.

I don't know when, or why, they moved out of the mall. I think some of it may have been changing times. People still buy pianos, but electronic organs have a very 70s feel in my mind. Some of it may have been changing tech as well. I bought a toy keyboard for my neice from a drugstore for $10, and it can do a lot of the same things those huge console organs did.

It doesn't look like something Captain Nemo would have in The Nautilus though, and the Lowrey Organs did.

The Byte Shop was Columbia's first computer store, or at least that's the way I remember it. You may have been able to get a TRS-80 at Radio Shack by the time The Byte Shop opened, but Radio Shack was not a computer store.

The place opened in the late 70s, and was very much an Apple shop basing their product line, if I recall correctly, around the Apple IIc. I was in high school at the time, and was, in theory, very much interested in computers. In practice, I knew nothing about them, and had no real way to learn anything. I recall that one of my classmates had a TRS-80 and bought it to school for a presentation in science class. Everyone was fascinated, but looking back, I don't think the machine actually did anything. I think there was a BASIC program which asked a few number questions and computed an answer and that was about it.

A few years after that, one of my friends got an Apple IIc with with a logo interpreter and learned how to write programs using the language's turtle graphics which I thought was amazingly neat. It was out of the question given my total lack of money at the time that I would get a computer, but eventually I did take a "continuing education" class at USC that involved using a statistical analysis program to massage numbers we entered on punch cards and produce ASCII (EBCIDIC, actually..) "graphs" on green and white fanfold line-printer paper. Luckily, this did not quite kill my interest in computers though it came close.

In 1979, VisiCalc for the Apple became the first electronic spreadsheet, and suddenly there was a reason to buy personal computers other than the fact that they were "neat". As displays improved, and daisy-wheel printers became available, word processing provided another reason.

I was only actually in The Byte Shop once that I can recall. After I started college and picked a Computer Science major, I became enamored with the ease of writing with text editors and text processors (the names vi and nroff will be familiar to some..) and convinced my sister that she ought to look into getting a computer for word processing. I still didn't have a computer of my own because I had easy access to school computers, and didn't actually know that much about personal computers, but I think I had in mind that an Apple II with an 80 column CPM card would be a good platform for Wordstar.

I think that when we went to The Byte Shop, she was willing to be talked into a purchase, but in the event it didn't happen because of the staff. Now anyplace can have a bad day, and perhaps we just walked in on theirs, but the staff that day struct me as actively rude. First we were ignored totally for a good while, and then when someone deigned to talk to us, and I started to explain the capabilities were were looking for, the reaction I got was more or less If you don't know exactly what you want to buy, why are you here?. Now I'm a doormat in these situations, but after a few minutes of this, my sister got her dudgeon up and we walked out and never went back. In the end, we waited another year, I learned a bit more about PCs (and IBM compatibles started to appear) and I set her up with a Leading Edge Model-D with NewWord and a Brother daisy-wheel printer from Softek. After using that for a surprising number of years, she did eventually end up with an Apple (Mac), but not from The Byte Shop, which had anyway gone out of business in the interim.

I had completely forgotten that the original location of The Byte Shop was on Fire Lane Drive. When I was taking pictures of the old Taylor's Restaurant the other day, I saw a building down past the firehouse with a kind of new-agey mural. I had noticed it off and on when I would go to Lowes, and it had always seemed to be empty. I got to wondering what kind of place it had been, walked over, saw the nameplate on the front stoop, and it all came back to me (though the mural may postdate The Byte Shop).

There's currently a builder's permit on the building, and some sort of renovation is going on, so perhaps something new may show up here. On the other hand, the permit is more than a year old, so I wouldn't hold my breath. I'm not sure if the horseshoe pitch dates from The Byte Shop era, or if they firestation next door unwinds there. The final picture is the Two Notch location where, I believe, The Byte Shop ended its tenure.

UPDATE 22 March 2010: Added full street addresses to post title, and added some tags.

Taylor's was a meat & three on Fire Lane Drive, opposite what was then The Spring Valley Theaters (which is now the Lowes site), and beside (logically enough given the road name) the fire station.

I remember the place as being nice enough, but not, in my mind, as good as Lizard's Thicket. My mother liked it better though, so we went there fairly often when she was in the mood. I do remember liking the cornbread quite a bit, though I can't recall exactly why right now. I don't know the why of this either, but eventually the place stopped working as a restaurant and switched over to a catering service. Perhaps the location was simply too hard to spot from Two Notch Road, though as you can see, they had a highly visible sign which still remains even after the catering operation has changed names to A & J.

We were a Ford/Mercury family in the 60s and 70s, and are now mostly a Toyota one, so I don't know much about Chevys or this dealership. I'm saying that it closed in this millennium since there is a prominent URL posted on the building, but I'm pretty sure it's been 5 years or more since this was a going concern.

Actually following that URL leads to Capitol Chevrolet on Newland Road. This is that new dealership off of Clemson Road. I'm guessing they bought out Newsome in Columbia, though Newsome dealerships still seem to exist in other cities. (As an aside, this is the dealership with the humongous flag that I used for a 4th of July post. It was getting a bit ragged, and hasn't been up lately -- I hope they get a new one soon).

It looks like the old Newsome lot is starting to see some tagging and vandalism. I don't know who won the auction, but they need to get something going there pretty soon, or area will continue to decline.

UPDATE 30 Jan 09: Looks like the place is to be torn down soon:

UPDATE 13 April 2011: For some reason, the demolition never happened, and the place is still standing.

UPDATE 23 December 2011 -- And here is the still undemolished building:

UPDATE 10 June 2016 -- Well, at *some* point the building finally was demolished, and now something new is going up, I don't know what:

UPDATE 30 August 2016 -- Construction continues:

UPDATE 4 October 2016 -- Whatever they're building is coming along:

Truthfully, I don't remember this place at all. I was walking around Intersection Center the other day, and coming up on the place, I was sure it was a defunct restaurant, probably a Mexican one. I think given the architecture, that probably is the case, but clearly after the restaurant departed, the building had another life as a video arcade.

Of course I could be wrong about that. I think I would remember a video arcade and I don't recall this place (plus it would have been in competition with the one inside Dutch Square), so perhaps the "video games" referred to are console cartridges etc. To confuse my recollection even further, I'm pretty sure there was a music store chain called Coconuts in town during the 80s/90s as well.

Anyone go to this place?

UPDATE: Everyone seems to agree that this was a Burger King, not a Mexican restaurant, and that it lasted into the 90s. I have changed the date on the post title line from 1980s to 1990s