Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

It always impresses me how easy it is to take a well known, well regarded brand and run it into the ground. There's no reason carved in stone as to why Sears shouldn't be the country's number one retailer. They had universal market penetration, a trusted image and core products that were consumer touchstones for quality: Craftsman, Kenmore & Diehard. Yet with all that going for them, they still fell asleep at the wheel and let Wal-Mart and even Target eat their lunch.

Something similar happened to Howard Johnson. At one time they were so ubiquitous and well known that Mel Brooks could joke about it in Blazing Saddles and be confident that everyone would get it. The chain is still around, but it's certainly not what it was. The location on Bush river continues in business as a hotel (the one in Cayce with the Cinderella carraige is boarded up). I think it's one of those generic sounding chains now with, I'm guessing, a low franchise fee. It's also got one of Columbia's several Indian restaurants. The time I went there, the food was fine, but the service was a bit slow -- it's changed ownership at least twice since then though. (My favorite Indian restaurant continues to be The Delhi Palace in another hotel over on Broad River).

(By the way, if you can't see the cat in the last picture when you click for full-size, then your browser is automatically scaling images for you, which is, in my opinion, bad. You can fix it in the browser settings [it's different for Internet Explorer and Firefox].)

Sometime in the late 1980s, The State newspaper ran a weekend feature article about the search for the best hamburger in Columbia. I cut the article out and put it in my glove compartment and over the next few years, tried most of the places mentioned. As it turned out, I wasn't that impressed in general by the writer's research and the burgers he identified struck me as "OK", but not spectacular. What's perhaps most interesting though is how many of those places are gone now.

I can't recall them all, but the list included Edna's on Forest Drive (I really wish I had some pictures of the interior of that -- it's not often you see someone merging preoccupation with both sex and Jesus in one setting), a small place in Woodhill Mall called, if I recall correctly, Johnathan's, Ed's Drive-Thru on Meeting Street in Cayce, The Seaboard Diner on Gervais (which recently came up here in a comment thread) and Cedar Terrace Pharmacy.

Unfortunately I can't even get a photo of a re-purposed building for CTP, it was all torn down to make way for a new Eckerds (now a Rite-Aid), but it was an old time drugstore with a lunch counter (and booths). In fact, it may have been the last drugstore with a lunch counter in Columbia. I certainly can't think of any still operating right now. When I went burger hunting there, I'm guessing it was about 1989, and while the counter wasn't swamped, there were a number of other diners. I think that if the base pharmacy operation had been able to hold its own against the chains, the counter would have stayed marginally profitable and might still be with us today. We'll never know, and as I said, it's not a tragedy for the Columbia burger market -- the burger was good, but not a classic.

What does depress me just a bit is that what I consider the best burgers in Columbia today: Five Guys, Fuddruckers & Red Robin are all chain operations and not local.

Actually, I'm not 100% sure this is the old Key Catalog Wholesalers building. My memory says that it was in Boozer Shooping Center first and then moved out here, but I could be wrong. (I'm sure someone will let me know :-)

At any rate, Key was an odd store that we visited infrequently. I think they were one of that vanished breed of stores where they had a catalog showroom with sample merchandise on the floor and when you picked something, they would go in the back and bring one out. (There were also catalog items which were not kept at the store).

I also think, and remember this as the only reason we went, that they had some sort of arrangement with Greenbax trading stamps (before Greenbax had their own store) such that your books of Greenbax were usable to get certain items for free or at a discount (depending on how many books you had). My memory is that when I started Boy Scouts, we went to Key to get sleeping bags and used trading stamps.

Contrary to appearances, there is a tenant in the building now. Apparently it is not a retail operation at all, and doesn't care if drivers-by see their name or not, but looking in the front door establishes that there is a nice looking reception area. Some of the parking signage suggests that they might be called Spherion, but that could also be left over from a previous operation, of which I think there have been several since Key.

UPDATE 10 June 2010: As I say in the comments, I think it's pretty clear by now that I was completely wrong about this being the place Key moved to after it was in The Boozer Shopping Center. At some point, I need to fix this entry by adding some Boozer pictures, and changing the text, but it will be hard to do without messing up all the comments about this building..

Woolco was Woolworth's discount department store. These were big buildings, much bigger than a standard Woolworth's "Five & Ten" and had a larger selection of merchandise.

In Columbia, we had two. The one shown here on Garners Ferry Road, now a "Save-A-Lot" (I think this is the right building -- it's been remodeled), and one at Dutch Square. The one at Dutch Square was kind of torn down, and the space was used by what is now the suit store and Office Depot. At the time, Woolco was an anchor store, and had an entrance to the mall interior. Even though the Garners Ferry location was probably a bit closer, we usually shopped at Dutch Square since it had more going for it than just Woolco.

As you might expect from a Woolworth's "discount department store", stuff at Woolco was not top-of-the-line or name-brand. I didn't particularly care -- it had two things I cared about.

The first was the book "department". I put it in quotes because it was mainly just a bunch of bins with "cut-out" stock. I had much more patience (and much less cash) then than I do now, and I was willing to go through evey book in every bin to find ones I wanted. For some reason, they got a lot of Grosset & Dunlap series overstock, and I was able to nearly complete my "Rick Brant" collection there up through Rocket Jumper as well as finding a number of "Tom Swift, Junior" & "Space Eagle" books.

The record department was a similarly mixed bag. I think they did have shelves with the current hit albums, but again, for me, the cut-out bins were the big draw. I can't remember many specifics of what I found there, but I do recall finding an 8-track Bette Midler live album which had her semi-risque first-radio-hit, "You're Moving Out Today" as a bonus track:

So pack your toys away
Your pretty boys away
Your 45's away
Your alibis away
Your Spanish flies away
Your old tye-dyes away
Your one more tries away
You're moving out today

Your nasty habits ain't confined to bed
The grocer told me what you do with bread
Why don't you take up with the baker's wife instead of me, fool!

For some reason, Woolco didn't become "Wal-Mart before Wal-Mart", and they were in big trouble by the end of the 70s. My memory is that the Columbia stores actually closed in the 70s though wikipedia says the chain struggled on until 1983. Interestingly, the smaller Woolworth's stores lasted a good bit longer, and the one at Richland Mall even survived the Richland Mall/Richland Fashion Mall transition.

Lately the thing to do rather than remodeling an aging store is to simply build a bigger one right next door and move shop.

That's what happened to this Piggly Wiggly on Garners Ferry Road. The trouble with that, although it gives me something to take pictures of, is that it leaves behind a dead or dying strip mall as seems to be the case with "Garners Ferry Plaza". On the other hand, I would in general rather shop in a store like the new one (seen across the street in the last photo) than in a run-down store, and building a new store avoids a lengthy period of remodeling which can drive away customers. A remodeling store, even one open for business is like a road with ongoing construction -- you know you could get through, but you'd rather plan another route and avoid the hassle.

UPDATE 3 March 2010 -- some sort of work is being done on the old Pig and plaza:

UPDATE 9 March 2011: Updated closing date based on the comments (and added full street address).

UPDATE 16 July 2013 -- Garners Ferry Plaza has ben renovated now, including the former Pig site:

Also, The Pig is closing at its new location.

I'm afraid I went to take this set of pictures about 15 years too late. I think if I had taken them in 1993, you would be able to look at them and say "yep, I can see that was a Putt-Putt course". It not having occurred to me to do that then, you're just going to have to take my word for it now.

In the 1970s, the corner of Percival Road & Forest Drive was, if not a thriving retail hub, at least a viable one. The lot had a strip mall of sorts with a number of businesses. I think the largest was some sort of mini-grocery which was a size up from the 7-11 model, but not quite big enough to be the "country store" type. There was also a barber shop (which survived the longest, I believe). I'm not sure if the Carraige House strip-club had started then, or if that building (now Liquids) was some other retail.

Across the parking lot from the grocery, a few feet further down Percival, was the Putt-Putt course. "Minature golf" is the generic name for the sport while "Putt-Putt" is a specific brand. At the time, it was a fairly famous name (always struggling to make sure it wasn't used generically like Xerox and Kleenex) and its orange bordered courses tried to put some seriousness into the sport. Putt-Putt branded courses tended to eschew most of the whimsy of minature golf. They concentrated on making holes tricky through banks, caroms, dips, plateaus and hills rather than shooting through windmills or around dinosaurs. In retrospect, that may have been a mistake. I think people like whimsy on a minature golf course, and since it costs nothing to come up with your own ideas for holes, it's unclear what benefit paying Putt-Putt for a franchise gets you and in recent years, Putt-Putt has seemed to struggle, with parks closing on Clemson Road and in Augusta.

I don't recall that this particular course was ever really popular, but it was close enough that I could ride my bike there, which I remember doing the only time I ever played the course. It was, I believe the longest bike ride I ever took in Columbia (not that it was far in absolute terms, but my parents were very against our riding on main streets, and this was the first time they had let me cross Trenholm). At any rate, I rode up with a school friend, and we played a few rounds, and I think had a coke at the store. No big story there, I'm afraid. This would have been around 1974, and the course folded a few years after that. At first, they left the greens pretty much alone, but at some point they came in and ripped up all the carpet and frames, just leaving the concrete beds. I'm not sure why, unless they thought the lot would be easier to sell that way. If so, it was unsuccessful. The strip mall was torn down several years after Putt Putt closed, and I'm sure the owners thought that with the Interstate coming through, they could get a good price for the lot, but nothing seems to have happened so far.

I think they would get more interest if it had had dinosaurs and windmills.

Here's standing in the mall parking lot looking over at the Putt-Putt parking lot:

Here's standing in the Putt-Putt parking lot looking at the back of Liquids (towards Forest Drive):

Looking from the Putt-Putt parking lot towards the old "greens":

Standing on one of the old greens (concrete base):

Another old green:

Standing on an old green, looking at what appears to be a wild pyracantha:

Standing on a green looking towards Percival Road:

Standing on the shoulder of Percival Road, looking back into the course:

Looking down into the course from just past Liquids:

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

I said in another post that Asian Buffet is the last stage a restaurant building goes through.

I didn't mean that in any disparaging sense -- I have a lot of admiration for the folks who, often as a family effort, can take a marginal location and make a go of it. Unfortunately, as we have seen before, it doesn't always work.

In this case, the building was the former Red Lobster location next to the former Olive Garden on Decker Blvd. The Red Lobster closed in the general flight from Decker towards Sandhills which also took the neighboring Olive Garden. I'm not sure why Jumbo Buffett failed in this case. It could be that the established buffet on Two Notch by Lowes was too nearby, perhaps the Red Lobster building was just too large for an operation with less traffic to pay the utilities or perhaps people never got past the "jumbo shrimp" jokes. Whatever the reason, I recall this operation as rather short lived, no more than a year or so.

UPDATE 19 Feb 2010: Added full street address to post title.

UPDATE 26 August 2024: Add Red Lobster to the post title, edit tags, add map icon.

You get a very inaccurate idea of what bus travel is when you take class trips. When I was in middle and high school, our long class trips (Washington DC and Disney World were the most notable) were done on chartered Trailways buses, and the administration always requested, and got, the same kid-friendly driver. When the bus is filled with your friends and classmates, the ride is almost part of the attraction.

I've never actually ridden a scheduled long-haul bus as a party of one, but from seeing the Trailways stations and the people in them on rest-breaks during those class trips and from talking with aunts and cousins, I think I have a pretty good idea that, unfortunately, the "scum of the earth" passengers make life very unpleasant for the "salt of the earth" ones, and that the novelty of having a bathroom in a land vehicle is rather eclipsed by the horror of having it overflow.

What that adds up to saying is that I never took a bus at the Greyhound station downtown, but we did wait there once to pick up my aunt from Florida (she never did it again), and once to see off a cousin. I was fascinated by the Art Deco look, and by all of those glass blocks. I don't suppose it was any nicer than the more newly built stations inside, but sometime after this was built, US architects forgot how to design good looking buildings.

Wikipedia has a great very high-res shot here and says the station was built in 1938 & 1939 with Grehound moving out in 1987. That's about what I remembered. Apparently the building is a doctor's office now.

If you look up above the station, in some of these shots you can see another Columbia icon as well.

As perhaps some of you may have guessed if you have read many of these posts, I have rather odd tastes. In particular, I don't like chicken, or even the smell of chicken at all. My visits to KFC over the years have been very few.

The last time I stopped by a KFC was in an Interstate "any port in a storm" situation where I just desperately needed something to drink. There was a line at the drive-through, so I went inside, and was releived to see tea urns on the drink machine counter. I ordered and took my cup over only to find that they were fake urns. They were deliberately designed to look like fresh-brew tea urns, but were in fact connected to a fountain dispensing pressurized, undrinkable Nestea!

Of course, that has nothing to do with this KFC (near the intersection of Two Notch & Beltline) other than putting me even more off on stopping by than I would otherwise have been. It does sort-of explain why I hadn't noticed that this store was closed, despite it having been long enough for the front "awning" to have started falling apart.

Which makes it difficult to understand how the plants inside are still alive :-)

UPDATE 3 Oct 2008:

Well, it's open as a Titlemax now, and it looks like they ask for a lot of collateral!

UPDATE 7 Jan 2010: Add full street address and KFC abbreviation to post title.

Here's an imposing looking place. It may not have beaten any other dealerships on size, but the building itself puts on a great front with the massive black columns -- It's The Parthenon of Columbia showrooms. (It's a bit less impressive from the back however..)

I'm not sure exactly what happened here. The sign in the door reads Closed Due To Relocation to Atlanta, but closing signs often (more often than not, I suspect) fail to tell the whole story, if they are not outright lies. For a Columbia business, relocating to Atlanta is like relocating to Mars, except for the part about Mars being an underserved market.

Whatever happened, it happened quickly enough that they didn't bother to settle with Pepsi and have the machine picked up or pack the car display racks, and recently enough that all the tinsel hasn't blown down from the parking-lot display.

UPDATE 30 April 2009:

It's open again as Global Automotive

UPDATE 26 July 2010: Added full street address to post title.