Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

This ad from the 1974 Southern Bell Yellow Pages is similar to other ads for the Flaming Pit that I have seen in that it never gives a real street address for the place. That, and a complete lapse of mind that let me confuse I-20 with I-26 led me to originally post some pictures of what was certainly the wrong building for the place!

We never went to the Flaming Pit, though I seem to remember radio commercials that made it sound like a very exotic place. (I didn't do "exotic"..). I'm not exactly sure what "Open Hearth Charcoal Cookery" is, but combing that with the name of the place, I envision a large central grill in the middle of the dining area (hopefully very well ventilated with charcoal involved..) where your orders were cooked as you watched.

I'm a little surprised that the bar was The Wells Fargo Lounge given that Wells Fargo is, in addition to its evocative history, still around and presumably trademarked..

UPDATE 15 June 2010: Removed incorrect pictures, and corrected the text in which I was completely wrong about the location!

This little fast food joint has been a fixture on the Northwest corner of Harden & Taylor Streets for years, and with its location across from both Allen and Benedict, it comes by the name College Corner honestly.

A Subway opened on the Southwest corner fairly recently, which may have put some pressure on it, though the food mix is not the same. I'm not sure if the place is gone for good, or will be coming back after an uplift. Some work is going on for sure, and not all the fixtures have been removed.

UPDATE 21 Jan 2011 -- Open again:

UPDATE 2 December 2013 -- Closed again, for good. It's now Empire Grill:

The College Corner sign is still legible from Harden Street, but sort of painted over from Taylor Street

This mysterious billboard is on the South side of US-501 in betwen Galivants Ferry & Marion. If I'm reading google maps right, it would be at the intersection of US-501 and SC-41. At any rate, it's before you get to Sparky's Fireworks. The sign has been up for at least two years, and was always a bit mysterious to me.

For one thing, there is no indication of what it's for. I mean, sure it says "Web Site of The Year", but that's not really an explanation. Is there a contest? Web site of the year according to whom? Why would anyone driving through the most rural and un-webby parts of South Carolina care? What's more, it's not pithy. Invariably by the time I got home, I never could remember exactly what it was: Um, bestwebsite.com? Yearsbestsite.com? Finally I took this picture to help me remember to check it out.

The first time I did -- it didn't help. I duly went to the site, but it was obviously the text provided by the hosting company. Stuff like

Insert description of your site here.

Insert URL of your logo

Write a few paragraphs describing your products and services. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Phasellus ligula lorem, consectetur ut mattis eget, varius at justo. Aliquam sodales gravida arcu. Etiam a viverra metus. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos himenaeos. Nunc tincidunt nunc nec augue volutpat eget venenatis lacus pharetra. Donec mollis, leo auctor molestie placerat, eros ante tristique lectus, in accumsan enim nibh quis purus. Curabitur eget enim quis ligula fermentum faucibus eget tempus tellus. Etiam dignissim, augue non tristique fringilla, urna nibh viverra felis, vitae commodo eros urna et ante. In et odio erat. Nunc consectetur volutpat sagittis. Ut eu elit nisi. Nam accumsan sapien pulvinar elit pretium egestas sit amet nec elit. Phasellus mattis dapibus accumsan. Suspendisse egestas, justo ut imperdiet vehicula, dui eros tempus lorem, vel molestie dolor tortor vel dui. Vestibulum odio metus, tempus vel auctor sed, commodo nec leo. In sit amet magna et mi hendrerit vehicula vel et neque.

(OK, I used the Lorem Ipsum generator for that last paragraph..)

Anyway, I never got around to doing a post on it then, and now there is something of an explanation, if not a great one. Apparently someone is now using it to sell generic domain names, and push various small coastal oriented sites. It kind of has the feeling of an I might as well do something with it sort of project.

This isn't a current events blog. I don't feel compelled to do a post on everything that closed this week. Even assuming I knew about all that, I'm just as happy to do a post on something that's been gone thirty years. On the other hand, I don't feel compelled to not do a post on something that happened yesterday, since it's kind of odd, interesting and nearby.

Commenter Jamie pointed out this story on the WLTX site:

Richland County, SC (WLTX) - Some Ramada Inn employees and customers are looking for answers after the hotel on Two Notch Road shut down suddenly.

Employees say they haven't gotten paid and customers have been showing up looking for refunds on their deposits.

"It's sad. Why would they do this? Or how could this happen," said employee Stacey Knight. Knight and her coworkers are without a job and without a paycheck. They say the owners of the Ramada Inn closed for business, padlocking the doors shut.

It's not too uncommon for employees at a restaurant to show up for work and find the place closed, but hotels are not a day-to-day business. People make long term plans involving hotels, and normally, at least for a chain hotel, I would expect some sort of orderly wind-down, with people being rebooked to alternate properties or having up-front money refunded. Apparently not so here:

There was one lady in particular that made a deposit for a family reunion, $1100, and she wanted her money back," said another employee.

I'll wager that's one family that never uses any Ramada again..

Anyway, my first memory of this property is when it was a Holiday Inn. I never stayed there (why would I need a hotel in my hometown?), but I think I did go inside once. If I recall correctly, I went with a group of friends after a wedding, probably in the late 70s or early 80s. At that time, the lounge (now McKenna's) attached to the hotel was called Pawleys (a name calculated to attract my attention), and they catered to the backgammon boomlet (which petered out not long afterwards) by having backgammon sets available in the bar area.

I believe Holiday Inn dropped the property after I-77 came through to move closer to that Interstate. For a while the place was (I think) independant, with a big sack covering up the old Holiday Inn sign.

(Hat tip to commenter Jamie.)

UPDATE 26 July 2010 -- Here are some more pictures:

UPDATE 28 August -- After commenter Matt pointed out goings on at this closed Ramada, I decided to take a look and I'm still a bit puzzled at what is happening. It looks like the whole place is being gutted, but they don't seem to be knocking it down in toto. Perhaps it will be like the old Columbia Athletic Club and Splendid China where they have replaced everything except the actual outer walls..

UPDATE 12 September 2012 -- The whole building has now been fenced off. Driving by, I could still hear the chirps of hundreds of smoke dectectors needing new batteries..

15 June 2013:

Full demolition has started. For a long time it appeared they had only done enough demolotion to "poison-pill" the structure, ie: make sure nobody could buy it and reopen it as a motel. In these pictures, the full knockdown is well underway. Also, note the for-sale sign just off of Trenholm Extension.

14 July 2013:

Not nearly as much "progress" as you might expect, but the demolition goes on.

10 August 2013:

I had never seen a freight train stuck on this stretch of the track by Two Notch, but in this case a long train was stopped for upwards of 45 minutes, blocking off both Dawson Road & Oakway Drive. I had to go all the way down to the Two Notch / Trenholm Extension intersection to get back to the old Ramada. As I finished taking this set, train finally started to move and the railway maintainence pickup truck (fitted with track wheels) came along the tracks behind the train. What a track crew could have been fixing behind a stopped train, I'm not sure.

As you can see, the Ramada is now entirely gone except for a pump building and some incidentals like TVs and silverware.

UPDATE 17 August 2013: Added verbiage and pictures for 15 June 2013, 14 July 2013 and 10 August 2013. Also added complete photosets for those days.

UPDATE 5 December 2014 -- This is interesting. Apparently I missed it, but the property went to forced auction in August 2014. That means that whoever originally owned it tore down a perfectly good hotel property with no idea, or no workable idea, how to make money off the property any other way:

Photosets:

Photoset 26 August 2012
Photoset 15 June 2013
Photoset 14 July 2013
Photoset 10 August 2013

There's been a good bit of churn in the venerable Boozer Shopping Center lately: Golden China closed and became an Indian restaurant, the Book Dispensary moved, the allergy store moved, and the idiosyncratically apostrophed Gift's of Love florist has moved as well, or at least I hope it has. The sign says so, but the web site seems to point to something generic, and the new location is described in a rather non-specific way.

On the plus side for Boozer, Manifest is hanging in there after some initial plans to close, and a Dollar General has recently moved into the old Heroes & Dragons / Key Catalog Wholesalers slot.

I've writen before about The Shrimper on Knox Abbott Drive. This was the chain's other location, on Two Notch Road in front of Atlantic Twin Theater and more or less across the street from Dick Dyer Toyota.

The Southern Bell ad is from 1974 -- I'm not really sure when The Shrimper closed; 1980s is just a guess, but it seems like quite a while ago to me. The building was split into two storefronts after that. I'm not sure about the one farther from Beltline, but the end towards Beltline has been a copier store at least since 1998, and probably before (though it looks to have had some trouble lately).

I note that the ad offers Calabash Style seafood. It seems to me that that's a selling point I see mentioned less and less in recent years.

UPDATE 9 June 2010: Added "Lum's Restaurant" to the post title base on comments (and the 1970 Yellow Pages).

UPDATE 18 September 2020: Here is a Shrimper cup I found at my sister's house:

Also updating tags and adding map icon.

My queue of comments marked as "spam" gets longer every day. I thought this one was a bit amusing, as apparently it was supposed to have been parsed by a spam-posting program to pick *one* alternative, which did not happen:

Hi|Hello|Hey there|Thanks}, {very|really|truly|genuinely} {cool|nice|good|interesting} {post|article|stuff}. Such {insighful|entertaining} writing is rare these days. I'll {surely|certainly} be looking in on {this|your} {blog|site} again {soon|in the nea

This little strip on the outside edge of Richland Mall has seen a number of things come and go over the decades, and through several makeovers. I believe that at one time a hardware store was there, and it was the original (or at least a former) site of Ambassador Animal Hospital. The last time I posted about it was when Wild Birds Unlimited moved out of the corner spot.

I don't tan at all -- that is to say I don't attempt to, and I don't think I'm capable of it. I'm pretty sure my dermatologist would like me to dig a tunnel to the mailbox and otherwise stay inside until sundown. That's not to say I don't think tans look attractive. I wonder though if all the froo-fraw the last decade or so about skin cancer hasn't hurt the tan industry.

At any rate, you can't get a tan at Tan For All Seasons anymore, though I daresay this being South Carolina, and June, that you could get a pretty good start just standing outside their door for a bit..

(Hat tip to commenter ChiefDanGeorge.)

I wish Zorba's Express in Irmo were closer to home so I could get out there for pizza more often, but last time I did, I noticed that this nearby storefront in the same Publix plaza was now vacant.

Judging from the google hits, Kwik Kopy seemed to offer the same range of services as The UPS Store or FedEx Office. I wonder if the copying business is taking hits from home printers and electronic documents. I vividly remember the first time I used a copy center (it was kind of a new concept then) to make a copy of The Lions' Book. It took hours and cost me a considerable chunk of my nearly non-existent college-student cash. Today, someone would just download the PDF..

UPDATE 7 June 2010: Changed post closing date from 2010 to 2009 based on comments.

UPDATE 15 March 2022: Updating tags and adding map icon.

This motel is a landmark which has existed for all of my life, but which I never (in memory) saw until 2006. This motel is on the east side of US-17, just south of Gullie's Shell station, and north of the Georgetown credit union. To say that by 2006 I had driven this stretch of road more than a few times understates it a bit, but I never had the least clue that there were buildings just off the road -- the whole place was so overgrown as to be completely invisible. Apparently the lot was partially cleared late in 2005, and when I was down that winter, I had quite a What the heck did I just drive by? moment as I passed by the first time after that.

Graphitti in a concrete slab at the old office building dates this place to early 1956, and the fixtures all have that mid 50s look as well. In fact, the bathroom tile looks a good bit like what I have at home which is almost exactly the same vintage. I have no idea what happened to the place. It certainly wasn't (and isn't) uncommon for Grand Strand businesses to fail, and the south strand was very isolated and non-commercialized for quite a while. For years the abandoned cabins of another motel sat at the South Causeway of Pawleys Island, more or less where the Food Lion now is. In fact for years, the only motel south of Murrells Inlet was the Quality Inn Seagull -- most people then and now rented houses to vacation in the area.

The whole area is being further cleared now, all the way back to the marsh. I suspect work would have started sooner after the initial clearing of the motel except for the economy. At any rate, I suspect the whole thing will be houses before too long, and I fully expect the motel to be knocked down before the year is out. (I've already got my shower handle, to go with my other one from Douglas.)

If anyone knows what the motel was called, when it closed, or why it closed, sound off!

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