Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

Commenter Dennis sends in this link to a set of flicker photos he found of the old Burger Chef which apparently was at the intersection of Two Notch & Covenant roads. You can page through them with the "browse" box. I don't remember the place myself, but going by the picture captions, the owner was a forward-looking, stand-up guy.

Does the phone number 252-6341 mean anything to you?

If you were here when the whole state's area code was 803, it probably does. Certainly there were many times I dialed it to set my wind-up watch to the dulcet tones of Standard Federal Savings & Loan's time of day service. That was a time when you couldn't turn to CNN and get the time off the bottom-scroll, or get it to within a second over the Internet. Around here, it was pretty much wait for the NBC news-tone at the top of the hour on WIS or call Standard.

I don't know much about the early history of Standard. Apparently it was founded in the aftermath of the Panic of 1907 and weathered WW-I, The Great Depression, WW-II and the 70s. Up through the 50s and probably into the early 60s, it was known as Standard Building & Loan. You can see from my first passbook here that in October of 1962, they had just put a paste-on label reading Standard Savings and Loan Association over whatever had been printed there before. My guess is that they had just switched from Building & Loan given that the inside of the passbook and the coin-banks their kid members got still bore the B&L verbiage:

The passbook cover notes the association's two locations, Washington Street & Trenholm Plaza. The Trenholm location had to be pretty new at the time, given that the area was a golf course into the mid 50s, at least.

In that era, the way savings & loans worked was that you would bring your passbook with you to the bank (OK, technically it wasn't a bank..) whenever you made a transaction, and your passbook would be run into a printing machine (similar to the way checks are still sometimes handled at supermarkets) which would print the day's transactions on seperate lines. (I'm not sure how long it had been since the teller's actually wrote in the passbook, but there still seemed to be a lot of hand-inking involved.) If you didn't have any actual transaction, the bank could still compute your interest (dividends) and enter that for you.

On 12 October 1962, I had $396.36 in my passbook -- very likely the first money I had ever had in my own name, though as I was probably more concerned with learning to walk, I doubt I really thought on it much. I did enjoy later visits as the Trenholm branch had a magical coin machine into which the teller would dump all your coins and it would sort them out and give you a total after much pinging and whirring.

By the time 1973 rolled around and I got my second passbook, you could see that the intervening decade had been good to Standard:

With five locations in Columbia and new branches in Newberry, Orangeburg, Sumter, Mount Pleasant, Charleston and Myrtle Beach, they were obviously an institution on the move.

This was even reflected in the passbook itself, which had moved from being strictly utilitarian to a design with some panache, embossing and even gold-leaf for the text.

You could see the effects of inflation too in that the FSLIC guarantee had been raised from $10,000 per account to $20,000:

At some point in the 1980s, Standard started offering checking accounts as well as passbook accounts, and that's were I got my first checks. They were also fairly early into the ATM market, and though they never had many, the Trenholm location was convienient while I was living in town. (It was a walk-up, and I can distinctly remember thinking, I hope I'm never so lazy that I need to use the ATM without getting out of my car).

In 1985, I took my first real job and moved to Fayetteville NC. I kept my Standard accounts, but as there were no branches up there, mostly dealt with the (now defunct or subsumed) Southern National Bank. While I was living out of town, the S&L crisis of the 80s struck.

I know it's a complex issue, but I think it can be boiled down to the following: Gradually the state and federal governments took the position that George Bailey could go head to head with Mr. Potter -- and kindly, befuddled Uncle Billy was in charge of the new direction.

Standard was far from the only solid-seeming institution to dig its own grave at the time, but it was still a shock to me. I'm sure the taxpayers, en-masse, took it in the shorts as usual, but the government handled it pretty well from a member perspective. There was no panic, just an orderly takeover of the bank. It went so smoothly in fact, that my father decided he wasn't going to move his money and would just keep it in whatever institution ended up with the assets. At this remove, I can't remember what bank that was. It may have been NBSC. They certainly have the location at Trenholm Plaza which used to be occupied by the Standard Branch (which was a much smaller building, and was torn down when the current NBSC was built).

The downtown building is still there (it was obviously remodeled or replaced after 1908 if that was the original location), with its distinctive landmark clock beside it. My memory is that when Standard was at its peak, the building had one wall which was a waterfall -- that now seems to be gone. I have no idea what happened to the other branches either in or out of town.

The 2 August 1991 date for the closing comes from an online lawsuit which references the RTC takeover.

And that little coin-bank? It still has some change in it.

The Time At The Tone Will Be: Too Late

UPDATE 23 March 2010 -- Here are two pictures of the old Trenholm Plaza branch. They were taken inside another Trenholm Plaza store where Standard just happened to be in the background through the window, so the quality is not high:

UPDATE 21 June 2011 -- Here is an older picture of the Trenholm Plaza branch from a Chamber of Commerce promotional book:

I've written about Kroger Sav-On before. I believe the fate of this Kroger, near the Wal-Mart on Highway 1 near I-26 came about for similar reasons.

When Kroger first hit the Columbia market (and I believe this store, like Decker & Fort Jackson, was in the initial build-out), it was upscale, but by the time these stores closed, it had been leapfrogged by other chains' new generations. This store in particular has a nice new Bi-Lo across the street from it, and a Wal-Mart Supercenter just a block or two away. So (and this is all pure speculation), they weren't as nice as the Bi-Lo, and couldn't be as cheap as the Wal-Mart. Kroger's answer, in general, has been new stores like the one near Spring Valley High School, but that requires new construction.

Anyway, I noticed the other day that the building is no longer empty -- Kimbrell's furniture has set up there now. That's good to see, and I wish something would take the buildings on Fort Jackson & Decker!

UPDATE 11 March 2011: Changed closing date to 2000 based on commenter Andrew's research. Also added full street address.

I've written before about OfficeMax pulling out of the Columbia market. I had forgotten that they had the store on Two Notch as well as the one on Bush River Road until I drove by and saw that a new tenant was going in.

I don't have any problem with a Haloween store, per se. I don't know that it's happening as much around here, but in some places at least, Haloween is becoming quite the big adult party holiday. I remember spending one Haloween in DC, and taking the Metro to Dupont Circle for supper. Now, I won't say the escalator into the Dupont Circle station is long, but I will say that after you're on it for a while, you expect to see an Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here sign. Of course, what goes down also comes up, and being on that escalator behind 20-somethings costumed as naughty nurses and "wicked" witches is, um, inspiring.

So, anyway, I'm fine with a Haloween store, but I do have to cavil a bit about the timing. I mean, come on Haloween is the last day of October -- that's two and a half months from now! If you're in the mood to pick out a Haloween costume now, you're probably one of those annoying folks who already have all your Christmas cards written..

And oddly enough, this was the second Haloween store I saw today. There's one setting up on US-1 out near I-26 as well!

"I got a rock".

UPDATE 11 March 2011: Updated the closing date based on the comments. Also added full street address.

Taco Cid is a local (a fact I didn't know until just now) Mexican fast-food chain. Well, I say chain but from their web site, they are down to one location, on the Charleston Highway, at present.

When I first became aware of them, they had at least three locations. The one on Charleston Highway, one on Broad River Road near Intersection Center, and this one, on Decker Boulevard just up from Decker Mall. At that time, I was just starting to sample Mexican food, and I was never a steady customer, but I had this odd custom that whenever I was going to drive to Charlotte (usually for the Heroes Convention, but sometimes for other reasons), I would hit the Decker Taco Cid for lunch first (I will rarely start any voluntary trip before noon!). I'm not sure exactly why this was. The food was better than Taco Bell, but not spectacular, and before the Completion of I-77 to Percival, Taco Cid really wasn't on the way to Charlotte in any meaningful fashion. Even now that connection is tenuous since you can only get on I-77 going the wrong way if you use Decker, but I would drive down Decker to Parklane to 277 and tell myself that made sense.

The Decker location was the first to close though it predated the total collapse that happened to Decker later. The Broad river location lasted years longer. I don't know exactly when it went under, but I don't think it has been more than 5 years ago.

The vet's office moved in a few years after Taco Cid vacated the building, and has been a steady presence there ever since as Kroger, Target, The Olive Garden, Red Lobster, and most recently Zorba's have crashed and burned around them.

UPDATE 15 Aug 2009: Added scans of Taco Cid matchbook provided by commenter Melanie.

UPDATE 18 April 2013: The building is to be Atlantic Seafood.

UPDATE 30 August 2022: Updating tags, adding map icon.

I'm not entirely sure of the details, but when I was growing up, my parents had two different banks. I suppose they had each had accounts before getting married, and decided to keep them, or perhaps there were different banks for checking and for savings (the family definitely had passbook accounts at Standard Savings & Loan). At any rate, First Citizens at Forest Lake seemed to be the one my mother stopped at most often to cash checks when in the car with us kids.

From time to time, she would go inside (and perforce drag us with her), but usually she would go through the drive-through, which we always looked forward to since the teller would usually pass out a sucker to each of us along with my mother's cash.

This particular branch of First Citizens was a bit unusual in that the drive-throughs were staffed seperately from the main building. As you can see, there was a little outbuilding by the drive-through lanes. I doubt very much that it was plumbed; I imagine the tellers had to make a trip back to the main building when nature called. Of course in those days bankers' hours were short enough that it probably wasn't a big issue.

I think the lane that was on the side of the building facing Trenholm was a drive-through as well and would have been staffed from the main building, but if I recall correctly, it was harder to get in and out of (and it may have been simply a night depository lane rather than a real teller window).

My memory on timings is always very suspect, but I think this branch closed before the main part of Forest Lake Shopping Center (with Campbell's Drugs etc) was torn down and a new First Citizens was built there, so that there was a period whn First Citizens didn't have a branch in the neighborhood.

I'm a little hazy on what happened after the bank left. I think there were a few tenants in the building before the current arrangements gelled, but I'm not sure. At any rate, I think the current clients have been there for at least the last ten years: A gallery and frame shop in the "main" building, and a garden shop in the outbuilding, teller lanes and the rest of the exterior.

I was a little surprised that the garden shop made it, as I would have guessed that that space was really to constricted to work with, but they have really prospered. I suppose the closure of Forest Lake Garden Center around where the Lazy Boy store now is opened up the area for a new store. I've been to the garden shop a few times (this spring for a pair of gloves, last year for some mint plants), but I've never been in the gallery. I like art galleries, but I always have the feeling that if one is small enough that I'll be the only person in there other than the proprietor, I'll feel like I need to buy something..

Oh, and that Flood Hazard Area sign?

They weren't kidding:

UPDATE 19 October 2013 -- Just found out the original name of this place was Commercial Bank & Trust so I have added that to the post title. Here's a picture of it in operation from 1964.

UPDATE 30 September 2016 -- The main bank building (except for the vault) was razed on 28-29 September 2016. See pictures here.

UPDATE 20 October 2022: Fixing street address, updating tags and adding map icon.

You'll Never Pay More at Parisian

Well, that's true, I suppose, though not in the way they hoped.

The decline of Richland Mall happened mostly while I was living out of town (though still spending quite a bit of time here). I think the first phase: The tearing down of most of the un-enclosed mall, and the renaming it to Richland Fashion Mall may have happened around the time I left for Fayetteville, though I'm a bit fuzzy on that. I do know that quite a bit of the brou-ha-ha justifying the Fashion part of the new name was inducing Parisian & Bonwit Teller to locate there.

As I think I have mentioned elsewhere, I felt pretty comfortable buying clothes at White's. I felt they were solidly middle-class, and that I could find clothes that wouldn't make me look funny from a staff that wouldn't try to make me feel like an idiot. I wasn't so sure about Parisian. I don't think I ever went in there, but I had the impression that it was something of a frou-frou upscale store, though perhaps less-so than Bonwit Teller. I don't know if that impression was accurate, but perhaps I wasn't the only one who had it because neither store lasted more than a few years. I see from Wikipedia that even if it had hung on, the whole chain was bought by Belk, so I imagine it would have closed anyway after Belk's got White's..

I think Parisian failed before Bonwit Teller and was the initial sign of the impending failure of the mall. I suppose it could have been the other way round -- it's a little hard to say since the BT building remained in use for Black Lion. I do know that nothing else ever used the Parisian space. I wondered a bit about that as I was taking these pictures. It's not good for buildings to remain empty, not only from the morale point of view, but also from the mold, fungus & vermin point of view. It seems to me it would have made sense for the mall owners to let some charity or other set up there rent-free rather than keep such a large space completely dark.

I'm pretty sure this place went under before the housing crash, so I guess there was something else going on there. A lot of places go out of business rather quietly, with just some sale signs, but High Point went all-out, with frentic sign-wavers up and down Forest Drive, a tactic that seems rather strange to me. After all, you either need furniture or you don't. It's not really an impulse buy in most cases. Of course I could be wrong since I'm a) not married and b) inherited most of my furniture in the first place.

At any rate, things seem to be happening on this stretch of Forest, so it will be interesting to see how long the place continues to stay vacant.

UPDATE 2 September 2009: It's now a Strobler Home Furnishings store.

UPDATE 8 January 2010: Added full street address to post title.

UPDATE 6 April 2011 -- It seems this store was a Heilig-Meyers before it was High Point. Helig-Meyers went under and closed all their stores in 2001. Here is their Bellsouth ad from the Feb 1997 phonebook:

I've written about Circuit City before. The gist of it was I never liked the store in its original concept because the salesmen were so predatory. This store dates from that era. Unlike the NorthEast store, this one (as far as I know) had only two locations rather than three. It started here, on Bush River right at the I-20 intersection and then picked up and moved out to Harbison when that area started to get hot.

Frankly that strikes me as a bad choice. This location is an easy-in/easy-out right from the Interstate, while nothing in the Harbison area is "easy". They may get more drive-by traffic there, but I'll bet they get less "destination" traffic.

Nothing else ever located in the Circuit City building after they left, but stores have come and gone from the surrounding strip mall. I believe there was an If It's Paper for a while and there has been a medical equipment tenant for many years now. I tried to shop there once for a hospital style "over-bed table" (they are *great* for using your laptop in bed!) but it turned out to be easier to order one on-line. Given the new traffic brought to Bush River Road by the new Wal-Mart Supercenter, it will be interesting to see what happens to this property.

UPDATE 11 March 2011: Changed closing date to 1999 based on commenter Andrew's research. Also added full street address.

UPDATE 4 June 2012 -- Not much visible has changed, but Hamrick's does have their building permit posted in the north doorway:

UPDATE 24 June 2012 -- The Hamrick's signs are now up:

UPDATE 20 August 2012 -- Hamrick's is now open in this location:

The Dutch Square White's from the Bush River Road side:

The Dutch Square White's from the theater side:

The Dutch Square White's from the Dutch Square Boulevard side:

White's in the original Richland Mall:

The (second) Richland Mall White's from the Beltline Boulevard side:

The downstairs interior entrance to the Richland Mall White's from the "Parisian" side:

The upstairs interior entrance to the Richland Mall White's from the Barnes & Noble side:

White's as J. B. White was known to us was the department store we most often shopped at when I was small. This may have been due as much to the location as anthing else as White's was in nearby Richland Mall, both closer and easier to park at than Main Street. Whatever the reason, White's was always on the docket when it became time to "buy clothes". Mind you, when I was a boy, I hated "buying clothes" with a white-hot passion, and must have been a real trial for my mother to shop for; even now, I tend to buy 5 of the same pairs of pants or 10 of the same shirts if I know they fit so I won't have to do it again any time soon.

Despite hating clothes shopping, I liked White's. I think part of the reason was that the store, at least at Richland Mall, seemed rather mysterious to me. If I recall the layout correctly, there were doors on all four sides of the store (3 into the parking lot, and one into the mall's open air corridors) and the centrally placed escalators made it impossible to see from one side of the store to the other, so it was easy (for a kid) to become confused about exactly where you were. The escalators were somewhat mysterious and exciting in themselves. By today's standards they were very narrow, so you could stiff-arm your self up off your feet between the two rails and pretend that you were on some sort of space conveyor-belt, and when you got to the top, you had to walk around to the other side to come back down, so it was kind of confusing as well. The most mysterious aspect of the store though was the PA. In those days, I suppose there would not have been a phone at every service desk, and important announcements were communicated to the staff in code. And not just innocuous phrases that the customers would miss, but real numeric spy code! And the code would always be over-ennunciated by a melodious female voice: Fiiiiive-NiiiEeen, Fiiive-NiiiEeen!. It was sort of like I imagined announcements on Trantor would be.

Aside from clothes (which as I said, I hated), the merchandise at White's was a mixed bag. As I recall, they had no heavy electronics or appliances, but they did have cookware and small kitchen appliances upstairs. I liked that because it was "sort of" like hardware. They also had a small book department upstairs which I guess had bestsellers, but more importantly to me, remainders. I remember specifically finding the last Tom Swift, Jr. book there. Unfortunately, The Galaxy Ghosts had apparently been written by an entirely different team than the rest of the series, violated continuity and the characters, and wasn't very good.

If I haven't said anything about the Dutch Square store yet, that's partly because we went there less often, and partly because it was about the same, but less interesting. By the time it was built, the chain had dropped the code-talk, and its escalators were the modern width and harder to play on. (For that matter, by that time, I would have been getting self conscious about doing stuff like that). Its building is still standing however. The original Richland Mall store was razed during the ill-fated conversion to an enclosed Richland Fashion Mall, and a new one was built in the middle of the oddly shaped new space. Some time after the chain was sold in 1998, both the Richland Mall store and the Dutch Square store became "Belk's" locations. I was a bit disgruntled because as an adult I had come to rely on White's as a source for clothes that I considered looked "OK", and Belk's had a slightly different mix (no Arrow shirts, in particular).

As a side note, since we didn't travel much growing up, and I never saw a White's in the places we did go, I always assumed it was a Columbia chain like Tapp's, but when I started working in Augusta in the mid 90s, there were several there (which became, if I recall correctly, Dillard's instead of Belks).

UPDATE 20 Aug 08: The White's store at Richland mall was not torn down, and is in fact the same building housing the current Belk's and still has the skinny escalators. I think memory played me false because Whites was at the end of the original mall, and I was mentally assuming that the current end of the mall (Black Lion) was the same geographic spot.

UPDATE 14 March 2011: Updated closing date in the post title to 20 September 1998 based on commenter Andrew's research.

UPDATE 17 May 2011 -- I've mentioned it in the comments, but the closed off (except for salon and restrooms) third floor of the Dutch Square building is sort of spooky:

UPDATE 21 June 2011: Added a vintage shot of White's in old Richland Mall from a Chamber of Commerce promotional book.