Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

Curiously enough, just as I started to write this post, a palmetto bug (or as I like to call them, our state bird) landed on my sleve and freaked me way the heck out. To make matters worse, I was barefoot, and didn't have stomping gear immediately available. Nonetheless, I can report a confirmed kill, and it's still better than the time I woke up with one nestled in my palm..

This building sits just up the hill from Bayview Baptist Church and across the access alley to the defunct Few Acres trailer park from the old Mr. Muffler at Two Notch and Pinestraw.

The whole corner is potentially valuable property, but whatever is going to happen to it seems to be taking its time. There usually seems to be some sort of truck activity at Few Acres, but nothing seems to get demolished. The same goes for the Mr. Muffler building, and indeed this building seems to be undergoing a gutting rather than a knockdown.

The business names are clear enough for the exterminator and barber shop to say what they were -- the third business, Bonnies Treasures is a little less specific: Gifts & Tools?. At any rate, I think it has been many years since any of these operations were in business. Google, in fact, pulls up very little for "5308 Two Notch": just the barber shop and a late 2006 delinquient property notice from The Columbia Star.

Whatever the fate of the various businesses, the building itself seems very solidly built, and I hope it is, in fact, refurbished rather than torn the rest of the way down.

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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

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.

Well, this is the second Tuesday Morning to close in the last serveral years. Of course events now seem to suggest that the first one I wrote about at Trenholm Plaza probably was a casualty of the up-scaling of that venue rather than any inate problems (based on a classy restaurant being put into that spot, and Tuesday Morning opening a new location just a few blocks down the street).

I doubt Spring Valley Commons is upscaling (at least not as long as there is "self storage" in the old theater slot), but I guess time will tell if we see another Tuesday Morning in the same general area. I have finally been in a couple of Tuesday Mornings, and it strikes me as a store you would not have reason to visit very often, so it seems to me that each store would take a pretty large population to sustain one.

(Hat tip to commenter Andrew).

UPDATE 2 March 2023: Updating tags and adding map icon.

Here's another vacancy at The Shoppes of O'Neil Court. According to Loopnet there are currently six open spots there. This one has been vacant going on half a year now, and the Pro Golf of Columbia slot has been vacant at least a year and a half..

According to the Roundabouts web site, they were established in 2003 as Capital City Consignments and this site was their second storefront, the original one being another slot in the same plaza. This January they moved into the old Stein Mart location at 70 Polo Road. To me it seems like sort of a wash from a visibility point of view. O'Neil Court is off the beaten path, but while the Polo / Two Notch location gets a lot more drive-bys, it's up on a hill that makes it invisible from the road, and there's really nothing else in that plaza to pull traffic in...

UPDATE 7 September 2012 -- There is now (and has been for a while) another consignment store Divine Consign in the old Roundabouts location:

Here's an interesting little coda to Friday's posting about the Boozer Book Dispensary. That story noted The State article about both the Boozer and Two Notch stores being folded into one new location.

Well, I went by the old Tillman's Plaza location on Two Noch Sunday evening, and there's an interesting sign on the door. It seems someone connected to that branch feels that the area is still viable for a used book store, and will be re-opening the vacated Book Dispensary space with the same concept and a new name.

I wish them good luck!

UPDATE 28 June 2011 -- The follow-on operation Books Revisited has been open for a good while now:

There are a couple of variations of the name of this car lot on Two Notch Road. McDaniels Acura Value Cars seems to be the most common, but sometimes it's just McDaniels Value Cars, and as you can see on these pictures, the building itself says McDaniels Acura Wholesale.

At any rate, this is on Two Notch Road, just opposite of Arcadia Lakes Drive, and across the street from the old Po Folks Restaurant / Moore For Less car lot. Apparently this intersection is not a good location for a used car store. In fact, Two Notch Road as a whole seems to run through used car lots at a pretty rapid clip -- I've probably done closings for a half dozen or more.

I probably should read The State more often than I do..

First -- Richland Mall is back:

Sandhill developer takes over Richland Mall

Village at Sandhill developer Alan Kahn has been tapped to breathe new life into Midtown at Forest Acres. And his first act will be to give it back its old name - Richland Mall.

Second -- Kroger at Sparkleberry Square is in trouble:

Kroger on Two Notch Road at Sparkleberry Lane is no longer open 24 hours. The store reduced its hours last week to 6 a.m. to 1 a.m. daily. Other stores in the Columbia area will remain open 24 hours. The chain reduced hours at some stores so they could continue to offer low prices during a difficult economy, a spokesman said.

As to the first, I, for one, have always refused to call the place either "Richland Fashion Mall" or "Midtown at Forest Acres", so I'm glad to see the "classic" name back. Kahn certainly has an uphill slog ahead there though. Given that even the new Village at Sandhill has had a lot of churn and ongoing vacancies, an older, already perceived as failing (because, it is failing) mall is going to have even more trouble luring tenants. I guess the obvious thing to try, as I think Sky City has suggested, would be to try to lure Macy's from Columbia Mall to the vacant Parisian or Bonwit Teller slot. Of course that would put paid to Columbia Mall so I'd rather something else happen..

As to the second, I think that after this, this, this, this, and this, I can say that Sparkleberry Square is "troubled". Kroger cutting its hours certainly does nothing to reverse that perception. For a restaurant, it's fatal sign #1. I don't think the Kroger will close, but I'll bet they're nostalgic for the rents at Decker Mall about now.

Columbia Northeast Drive is the official name of the easternmost little access road from Two Notch back into the Big Lots / Dunkin' Donuts plaza on Two Notch Road just west of Spring Valley. Both the main plaza and this little side strip-mall have been down at the heels for years though they have generally avoided vacancies. Aside from having the only Peurto Rican restaurant in Columbia (that I know of anyway), the strip also has the only Indian Restaurant in the Northeast.

La Pizza Cucina was, I think in the storefront now occupied by San Juan (which itself used to be at the bottom of the strip parallel to Two Notch at one time). A, personal web calendar (apparently not updated since 2004) describes La Pizza Cucina thus:

La Pizza Cucina

Serving gourmet pizza pies and over 100 beers and wines to choose from, this quaint little pizza parlor offers you the infectious hospitality of a "Cheers" styled pub. Come eat here once, and you're a friend for life. "There's edible and there's Incredible" - La Pizza Cucina.

I suspect the restaurant supplied the text to the performers as I think it is pretty close to how they used to advertise. I'm saying the place closed in 2007 because it is not in the 2008 phonebook but it was still in a newspaper restaurant listing (which are notoriously slow to fix closures) in February of 2008.

I had only two problems with La Pizza Cucina:

1) I expected "gourmet" pizza to be, you know, good, and instead found it pretty mediocre.

2) The staff, at least on shift the one time I went, was rude. In particular, there was a table of teenage boys -- being teenage boys. They weren't thugs, they weren't trying to create a disturbance, they were just having a good time. One of them rocked his chair onto the back legs, and the manager came down on him like a ton of bricks. I thought it was totally inappropriate. No, it's not good for the chairs, but your restaurant chair is not going to be handed down to your grandkids. If something absolutely had to be said, it could have been said politely.

Anyway, I never went back.

Here's another of Two Notch Road's many car lots. This one (which apparently also occupied the adjacent 6600 Two Notch Road address) seems to have moved. According to their sign, to 6729-A Two Notch., which google gives that as the address of the Very's plaza.

The buildings here are nothing special, but I really like the free-standing canopy in the parking lot, both for the canted roof and for the fact that it has only one support. And of course, what would any car lot be without the strands of flag triangles?