Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

Palmetto Fine Cleaners was on the East side of Broad River Road, more or less across from Dutch Square and Boozer Shopping Center (though not exactly across from either). It's the outbuilding of a little strip mall there, and has a really nice logo, and interesting facade. It appears to have been an orderly closing, with stored clothes passed on to another cleaner.

They also had a location on Sunset Boulevard.

Here's another defunct cash advance place, this one on Knox Abbott Drive just down from Tony's Pizza. As is a fixture on (fairly) newly closed businesses this time of year, you can see the new, uncollected, phonebook in a bag by the door. (The same is true for Master Tire if you look closely.)

I was a bit reluctant to do this post yet, hoping that the place was going to make it, but I've been by several times within the posted hours (including a Saturday evening) and found it dark (though the phone still rings..)

At any rate, I first wrote of this building when I did a closing for longtime tenant Little Mexico and follow-on Cancun.

After Cancun another Mexican operation Mi Tierra set up shop in the building, and lasted about a year. (And you should visit both of those closing links because the previous comments and pictures for Wata Wing are spread out between them).

After Mi Tierra closed, there were indications fairly early on that the place was to become a Wata Wing chicken wing operation. The setup seemed quite protracted, and with the stall out of the Wata Wing roll-out in the old Taco Bell on Knox Abbott:

combined with reports of some legal difficulties the chain (which I should stress is probably totally different people in different areas) was facing in Maryland, it seemed for a time that this location might not open.

In the event it did open some time between 3 November 2010 and 1 December 2010 when commenter Badger stopped by.

I had thought, given this sign:

that the operation might be headed in a Hooters, Wing House direction with the "Wata Girls" front and center, but that seems not to have been the case.

If this location is closed (and it certainly seems to be), then that would throw into question the opening of a Wata Wing in the old Shoney's/Santa Fe/Savannah's location on Two Notch Road:

Read the rest of this entry »

The Blue Martini was tucked away down an alley off of Lady Street, and I was totally unaware that it existed. In fact, when I first saw the news from commenter Summer, I read it as The Blue Marlin, and maintained that mistaken impression through what was for me a confusing article in The State. I had never suspected The Blue Marlin was a jazz club! :-)

The space is not vacant though. Legendary Columbia DJ Woody Windham has opened a new club called, naturally enough I suppose, The Woody in the spot. It certainly is a more intimate venu than one of his other ventures..

(Hat tip to commenter Summer)

On the whole, Scriven's Alley doesn't sound like my kind of place, though I could have perhaps found some pasta I liked. The opportunity to grill your own food does sound pretty intriguing though. In the end however, it may have perhaps proved fatal to the business as the place burned down and was never rebuilt. I'm thinking that the Scriven's building was where that narrow vacancy right at the corner is rather than on the Hertz site. As I recall, it was a two story brick structure.

I had the impression that it was a pretty well thought of place, and I've always wondered why they never re-opened. I would expect most any building to have fire insurance, but perhaps they were down long enough for all the staff to disperse and the cash reserves to deplete.

The State:

Richland County plans to buy a strip mall on Decker Boulevard and relocate yet-to-be-determined offices there as a way to address a cramped courthouse and administrative offices.

This, of course, is the former home of Kroger Sav-On, Land of Oz, Little China Buffet, Richway/Gold Circle/Target, Flipside and many other things over the years.

I've noticed this car care operation on the corner of Gervais and Barnwell Streets a number of times over the years, though I never stopped in. In particular I believe I used to drive by on my way to the dentist, and other times I would just wonder at the way businesses sometimes cluster, as Master was catty-cornered to an almost identical Firestone operation and just a few blocks from a Goodyear.

I really like the Jasper Transmissions plaque -- It has that late 50s, early 60s design esthetic that is really nicer than what you generally see now.

Read the rest of this entry »

This building, on Two Notch Road, next to the former Hi Line Imports, and more or less across the street from the former Ranch Restaurant, had a definite Huddle House look to it, but I couldn't ever remember actually having seen a Huddle House there. Some research in old city directories at the library showed that 4967 Two Notch Road did not exist as a street address prior to this building being built, and that it was in fact built as a Huddle House.

The ad is from the February 1990 Bellsouth phonebook, and the restaurant did not last long beyond that, being gone by the February 1992 directory. As far as I can tell, there were never two Huddle House restaurants open in Columbia at the same time, and shortly after this one closed, the one at 3801 Rosewood Drive began listing in the phonebook. That could mean either that this one relocated, that the chain was only issuing one franchaise for Columbia at a time, or it could simply be a coincidence.

Today the building is Auto Image, where summer lasts all year.

UPDATE 17 August 2023 -- Update tags, add map icon.

Well, assuming that no real news breaks this evening, there's supposed to be a piece on the WLTX late news for 1 March 2011 dramatically demonstrating why I don't have any pictures of myself on the site.

If that brings you here for the first time, feel free to sit a spell and take a look around.

Here's a list of Alphabetical Closings where you can look up your favorite places from days of yore, and here are some of the site's most popular posts and pages:

Tricentennial Songs

Forest Lake Park

The Hi Hatt Club

The Towers dorms

Waccamaw Pottery

Hurricane Hugo

The Wade Hampton Hotel

J.B. White's

Signs Your Favorite Restaurant Is About to Close

Ted's Rules For Restaurants

The Myrtle Beach Pavilion

Chippendolls

Gibbes Planetarium

Old Richland Mall

Red Wing Rollerway

Feel free to leave comments!

UPDATE 2 March 2011: Commenter Chief Dan George has found the piece on the WLTX web site. It is here.

This Year:

For a FREE copy of your residential listings..

Last Year::

At this remove, I can really only recall two scenes from Steve Martin's debut movie, The Jerk, but those two were very funny.

The second is when Martin's character is breaking up with his girlfriend and declares as he leaves the house that he doesn't need "anything".. "except" the large assortment of odd items (starting with a chair) he picks up on his way to the door.

The first is when Martin has left his childhood home and is out in the world by himself for the first time. He greets the arrival of the year's phonebook in a hysterically over-the-top scene: "The new phonebooks are here! The new phonebooks are here" (flips to his listing) "I am somebody!".

Well, no more, it would seem. I got my new Columbia phonebook last week, and totally failed to notice a real oddity until my sister pointed it out: There are no whitepage listings for Columbia!

It's been coming for a while. As far back as the late 1990s, I noticed that people in my office would do the most complicated (pre-Google) searches for phone numbers rather than pick up the directory sitting right on their desk, and as the number of unlisted cellphones keeps growing and the number of residential landlines keeps dropping, we have finally hit the tipping point. Now perhaps one of the "fake" phonebooks that other directory companies drop on your porch from time to time ("The Talking Phonebook", "The LOMAR Directory" etc) will make a white-page print-run, but it seems the white pages are dead.

While I wasn't expecting it, the death of the white pages does make sense. When I think about it though, I'm surprised that Yellow Pages are doing as well as they seem to be. Obviously businesses are going to keep public listings, but I wonder what the bang-for-the-buck ratio of the cost for a Yellow Pages ad is today versus investing in your web-site and search engine optimization? I admit that there are still times when it's easier to look up a locksmith or plumber or whatever in the phonebook than come up with an online search that doesn't have Columbia Maryland results or Columbia County Georgia or some other mass of inappropriate responses, but google continues to get better at using where you are located in its results, and I suspect we aren't far from a tipping point there too.

One thing that does not make sense to me at all is the fact that the new phonebook does have some white page listings: For Eastover, Chapin & Little Mountain -- go figure..

In the meantime, if you need to talk to me, I'm in the book. Oh wait -- well I never liked talking on the phone anyway.