Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

For a while in the 1970s, we were a Mercury family: Mercury Comet to be exact. The first car of my father's that I can remember was some sort of 1950s Plymouth, very rounded -- and that's just about all I can remember about it. The first car of my mother's I remember was what I believe actually was her first car: A 1950s Willis.

I remember that one much better than the Plymouth since my father drove his to work while our mother dragged us everywhere in the WIllis. In particular I can recall that the Willis had a manual choke, a radio with tubes that took forever to warm up and never really worked right, and that when the rear floor fell out, my uncle replaced it with some sort of grate, and we could watch the road under the car as we rode along in the back seat.

When the Plymouth keeled over, my father bought our first Mercury Comet. It was an early 60s model, a white coupe with pseudo tail-fins, and he had aftermarket seat-belts installed, making it our first car with them. (Not that we ever used them). Then, when the Willis became a Willisn't, my mother got a late 60s or early 70s Comet coupe as well.

I don't remember too much negative about my father's Comet (and again, it was not the one we kids rode in much), but my mother's was a constant source of repair bills. We bought it at about the time Detroit was forgetting how to make cars in general, and three-on-the-tree cars in particular. They would still sell you one, of course, but Ford seemed to have no real idea how to build a clutch or manual transmission, and the dealer certainly had no idea how to fix one. Even leaving aside the transmission, the car had a host of issues like the radiator heat sensor that left us stranded on US-301 somewhere between here and Florida, and the cigarette lighter that almost set the car on fire despite the fact that nobody smoked. Add to that the whole "coupe" concept when trying to run a car pool, and admittedly, the unsightly mess of cables I added trying to compensate for the lack of a radio by jury-rigging a cassette player didn't help matters.

At some point my parents completely lost faith in the dealer (I don't think it was Stivers), and we started taking the cars to Bob Andrews on Harden Street, but in the end it was Mercury that converted us to a Toyota family.

Early this summer, Ford lost faith in Mercury as well, and announced that the brand would be phased out by the end of 2010. Interestingly, by then, Stivers had already lost the concession. This 2009 year end story from The State is a little vague on exactly what happened, but says that the Lincoln-Mercury concession was moving from Stivers to Classic Ford. However the article also says that the Stivers location would remain open, selling sell Mitsubishis and Subarus and was looking to add another brand as well. Apparently that didn't work out, and as of late September the mercury was falling and the whole corner lot was up for sale.

UPDATE 2 July 2011 -- Here are some night shots of the place from 24 October 2010:

UPDATE 22 June 2013 -- It's now an Enterprise Rent-A-Car:

Home Furniture in Irmo closed in late September. To the best of my recollection, I had never been on the segment of Lake Murray Boulevard below Columbiana Drive before, and there was a lot more development there than my memories of visiting the Lake Murray area 30 years ago would have led me to expect.

According to this PDF though, Home Furniture had been around a lot longer than 30 years ( and a lot longer than I have for that matter!) -- 63 years. Also, from the PDF, it appears that they had a temporary closing back in January 2010 so the original owner could retire. Assuming those plans went through, I'm guessing the continuing housing slump kept the store from coming back full strength after the transition. At any rate, this closing seems to be final, unfortunately -- the electronic sign was cycling through an offer to lease the building along with the closure notice.

(Hat tip to commenter Andrew)

UPDATE 14 July 2013: Commenter Andrew points to this story in The State saying that Home Furniture is open again. I have updated the post title to reflect that.

UPDATE 14 April 2014: Fixed above update date to say July 2013 instead of July 2014..

Main Street, Columbia S.C. Showing location of ECKERD'S Modern Drug Store, Located at 1530 Main Street, Columbia, South Carolina

ECKERD'S Modern Prescription Department Employs Six Registered Druggists. 1530 Main Street, Columbia S. C. "Creators of Reasonable Drug Prices"

ECKERD'S Modern 42½ Ft. Soda Fountain. Seating Capacity of Luncheonette Dept.: 176. "Creators of Reasonable Drug Prices". 1530 Main Street, Columbia S. C.

ECKERD'S Modern Drug Store, Employs a Personnel of 42 Sales People. "Creators of Reasonable Drug Prices" 1530 Main Street Columbia, S. C.

There is no date on these postcards, but from the cars in the first shot, I'm guessing post-war, but not by much -- I'm sure a car expert (hint) could pin it down much more closely.

To the best of my memory, I never visited the downtown Eckerd's, and in fact don't recall it in operation at all. Given that, tempered with the fact that some people have mentioned from time to time in the comments that they do remember it, I'm putting the closing as probably the early or mid 1960s.

The building is certainly an imposing one, and one which does not say "drugstore" at all, with the stone facade and dramatic arches on the second and third floors. You might almost expect to see someone clutch his chest dramatically and fall over the third-floor railing as a gunshot echoes up and down the street..

And, in fact, the name plaque styles the building as the "Historic Canal Dime Savings Bank", so presumably it was built for that long vanished operation. The last postcard suggests that Eckerd's was a deep, narrow, one story operation. Does anyone know if there was another business upstairs?

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The Little Red Barn was a touristy gift shop that operated on US-17 just north of the draw-bridge in Georgetown during the late 1960s. At least that's when I'm guessing it closed -- I would have been around 9 or so years old, so the memories are pretty vague at that remove.

The place was (and is) on the route between Columbia and Pawleys Island, and was a stop we kids always wanted our parents to make, though they did so very infrequently.

Inside, the place was kind of Hammock Shop-lite, and skewed a bit more to the tacky side of roadside tourism, or at least those were the items most interesting to me. I remember bein particularly scandalized by a "belly button lint picker" joke device, and I'm sure there were some "Please Don't Pick The Daisies" type postcards.

Outside, though was the reason the place was really special to us kids: peacocks!

There was a little open shed to the left and behind the actual "red barn" building, which had a number of peacocks behind screen wire (I think that sometimes they would walk around "loose" as well). The thing about peacocks is that they don't feel like showing off very often, but when they do, it's spectacular and given that these were the only peacocks we had ever seen besides NBC, we always wanted to stop on the off chance that they felt pretty that day.

After the Red Barn closed as a gift shop, my memory is that it was vacant for a while, and then in the 1970s, it became the office building for a plant nursery which was run on the land surrounding the building. I think that lasted until quite recently, but is now closed, and the building is again unused (and starting to need a few repairs).

As for the peacocks? Well, I suspect they tasted like chicken.

UPDATE 16 June 2011: Added 14 August 2010 Photoset.

UPDATE 23 May 2012: Updated the closing date in the post title from "1960s" to "1970s" based on commenter Ali's information.

Photoset 14 August 2010.

Joyner's (as we called it) was a place my mother liked to visit every now and then. That's because you never had any idea what they might have in stock (and probably they didn't either!). They listed under Surplus & Salvage, and that pretty much describes the place.

It wasn't quite the same concept as Big Lots because while everything at Big Lots may be overstocked or something that no sane person would want, Joyner's specialized in beat up stuff that may have been fine items in themselves but couldn't be sold as new. Or that was a lot of it anyway, though I do specifically recall buying some bottles of Rodenberry's Cane Patch syrup there (a memory from growing up, which it was a favorite of my grandfather, who put it on biscuits) that didn't seem damaged.

Commenter Dennis described the store this way:

The place closed not too long after I left town in 1985, last listing in the Feb 87-88 phonebook. The space now seems to be some sort of transmission and towing operation.

Unique Lighting Center has been on O'Neil Court, just down from Parklane and beside the former NAPA store for a number of years. I actually had occasion to go in there about a year ago. I was looking for a replacement bulb-clasp shade. I had looked unsuccessfuly in a number of non-specialty locations with no luck, but they actually had one here. I figured that eventually I would go back to see if they could replace the globe in an old mogul-base floor-lamp I have, but that's yet another task I didn't get around to soon enough.

UPDATE 16 Oct 2010 -- They are definitely closed now. The banners are still up, but the door signs say "Store Closed" & "Out of Business":

The Spaghetti Warehouse was in the old R. L. Bryan building at the corner of Gadsden & Lady Streets. My memory is that you entered on the Lady Street side, and I was surprised to find that the official address was on Gadsden Street.

They first listed in the phonebook for 1993, and last listed in the one for 1999. The Spaghetti Warehouse's original concept was to find disused properties in old commercial districts, buy them at low prices and fit them out as restaurants. (The chain is not connected with the Old Spaghetti Factory chain, which had a similar concept). In the early 1990s, this space in the Vista certainly fit that description.

Apparently each Spaghetti Warehouse also had an old trolley car inside, and in which there were a few tables for patrons. I did not know it was a chain-wide thing, but I definitely recall the one in the Columbia location. In the event, I believe I only ate at the Columbia Spaghetti Warehouse twice, and I really like spaghetti. Part of that was the fact that I was living out of town during the entire life of this location and had my favorite places I liked to hit on weekend visits. Another part of that, though, was that I felt the food was pretty average. I think I recall that they had several different types of sauces, and maybe that you could get free refills, but none of them really stood out. It wasn't bad, but neither (despite the knocks it takes) was The Olive Garden, and that was considerably closer.

According to this write-up Spaghetti Warehouse got into trouble in the mid-90s. Part was that people were nervous about going to some of their industrial locations (not a problem here), and that trying to expand into the suburbs was much more expensive since the real-estate wasn't blighted and vacant. They tried some other concepts, including an Italian Grill concept, and in 1998 were bought out by Consolidated Restaurant Companies. The chain closed the Columbia location about this time, though they continue to exist in a number of places. (I think I ate at one in Kansas City after that, though it could have been an Old Spaghetti Factory).

It appears the building now houses law offices.

UPDATE 29 Sep 2010: Updated post title with additional tenants based on the comments.

I first became aware of Ship-A-Hoy in Augusta Georgia. The restaurant has changed owners since then, but when I started working in Augusta, the Athens Restaurant & Taverna at the foot of the Bobby Jones Expressway was run by a man who had some family connection to the Columbia Ship-a-Hoy and he had several black and white photos of the interior posted by the cash registers.

Given that it had closed before I was born, I had never heard of Ship-A-Hoy, but the pictures showed a really elaborate interior, someplace that very much said "fine dining" rather than "fish camp".

As near as I can figure, the restaurant would have been about where the parking garage in the NBSC building now is. Certainly the Ship-A-Hoy building itself is gone, as currently NBSC is 1221, and the next building is 1241. The phonebook ad (from 1959) lists the address as 1235, but the postcard lists it as 1235 - 1237 suggesting Ship Ahoy was a pretty big place.

I'm not sure exactly when this store, in Dentsville across from Columbia mall, and near the Two Notch / Decker intersection closed, but it is still listed in this years phonebook.

The motto, "Furniture, flooring and more" seems rather ambitious for what is a pretty small storefront. They must have had a warehouse somewhere to support everything shown here in this archived version of their website from 2008. This area of Two Notch is still struggling. I'd like to see something go in there, but I have to say that since there's no light, it's not well situated for traffic heading towards town.

UPDATE 28 Sep 2010: Added "Color Tile" to the post title based on the comments.

UPDATE 22 March 2011 -- It's now a "Cheapo" grocery:

Here's another vacant storefront in the same plaza as Mushi Mushi. I have found out the the plaza is actually called Garners Ferry Crossing, but have not been able to identify this store through google.

It sits in between Casa Linda and H & R Block, and has apprently been vacant for a good while, although it obviously did have a tenant at one time judging from the evidence of a removed sign above the awnings.

UPDATE 26 Sep 2010: It looks like commenter MB is correct that this place was a Physicians Weight Loss Center, or at least there was one listed at 7546 in the 2009 phonebook and there's not one now. I'm thus changing the post title from the generic Storefront to that. (And, no, they apparently don't use an apostrophe in their name for some reason).

UPDATE 25 October 2018: Add tags, update title format, add map icon.