Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

I'm pretty sure this pizza joint on Decker, now the R & R Lounge didn't make it through the 1970s, as I was very conscious of pizza, and think I would have noticed it driving (or riding) by. On the other hand the location, in a little strip mall near Percival Road with not much parking probably would not have been very inviting. (In fact, this section of Decker may have have come up since the 1970s). The pictures are not great because the sun was against me, and I didn't want to stand right in front of that open door snapping away.

Whatever the merits of the pizza, I'm pretty sure I can safely say The Kingston Trio never gigged here.

UPDATE 11 April 2010: The Hungry I was definitely gone by 1977, as that is when Yum Yum's Oriental Restaurant had a Bellsouth Yellow Pages ad for the same storefront.

Fine Foods Smartly Served!

I can't actually recall any other operation in this building, right up the hill from Dick Dyer, before Ole Place Club. That operation seems to be pretty durable despite having, at one point when Two Notch was especially bad, to put up a tart sign saying This Parking Lot is not a Loading Zone for Hookers!

The 1970 Southern Bell ad for The Celebrity Supper Club, as seemed to be common then, much longer hours than are now usual for a restaurant (though there were obviously entertainment elements as well). Nowdays almost everything closes at 10pm during the week, and if you walk in at 9:00, they act like its an imposition to stop mopping the floor and take your order.. It also seems like there were more "steak" places back then than now. I don't know if its 30 years of the food police harping on cholesterol or if tastes have just naturally changed.

UPDATE 17 October 2009: Added "(Mary's)" to the post title.

UPDATE 29 December 2009: Sadly Mary Dixon passed away on Christmas Eve 2009. From The State's obiturary:

UPDATE 29 June 2023: Adding tags & map icon.

This building off of Saint Andrews Road is now an "Ultra Lounge". I'm not sure what it was built as, but I first recall noticing it in the 1980s, when it was a strip club, the name of which I can't remember. After that, it was for a number of years the original site of The Comedy House, now on Decker Boulevard in the old Winn-Dixie building. I think it may have been something after the strip-club and before The Comedy House and after The Comedy House and before Pure, but I'm not sure.

I saw a number of comedy shows there including one guy who made me laugh so hard it hurt, but whose name (or act) I cannot now recall at all. I'm not sure what happened to The Comedy House as it was non-existent for a long while after closing shop here. Normally if a place is moving just as a normal course of business, they will do it as quickly as possible to keep a revenue stream active, but I think it took over a year in this case.

UPDATE 15 October 2009: Added a bunch of extra names to the post title based on the comments.

UPDATE 29 March 2023: Adding map icon. Also this building has been razed. Click on the address tag for details.

The Tasty Bake Shop provided "Artistry in Pastry" for many years on Forest Drive at Pinehurst Road, and apparently in a satellite operation I had been unaware of in Silver's 5 & 10 Cent Store. Silver's sounds vaguely familar, but I can't recall right now where it was. Certainly it wasn't somewhere we went regularly. In fact, I don't ever recall being in the Forest Drive location of Tasty Bake either. I was certainly aware of it, as we drove by all the time, but my mother took off work from when we were born until we were in high school, so she would always make any cakes we needed, either from scratch or Duncan Hines..

Tasty Bake however seems to have a loyal following of folks who remember how awesome it was as it has come up here in the comments a good number of times, making me wish I had stopped by on my own. It seems to have been fairly low-key at least in its Yellow Pages presence. The two ads here are from the 1957 and 1958 Southern Bell phonebooks and were the only "picture" ads that I saw. After that, Tasty Bake went to a small text box with no graphics.

I believe Tasty Bake was open until the lot was bought by CVS and the store torn down to build the pharmacy that sits there now, but I think that all happened while I was living out of town, so I'm a bit unsure on the timing.

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I don't play pool (now air-hockey is a game!), so this club has only been on the periphery of my notice over the years, but I was conscious enough of it that it caught my eye when I saw new signs up the last time I drove down Decker to I-77.

Doing a little googling I find that it has something of a tragic history, with the co-owner being fatally shot there in 2006. Google also insists that the place has been called Sue's Lounge though the Google Streetview for "Sue's Lounge" brings up the old Decker Billiard signage on the place.

The new name of the place is La Parranda which apparently means "The Big Party" in Spanish (and a song of that name was a hit for Gloria Estefan..), so I'm assuming that the ownership has switched from Korean to latin, though the graphic on the sign seems to indicate that pool and alcohol will still be available.

UPDATE 25 April 2013 -- Well it's back, sorta. I hope they didn't pay too much for those signs:

OK, I'm not entirely sure about this one. It appears to have been built as a bank perhaps, given the drive-through. I'm fairly confident that it was the Richland County Refuse Control office, which may have been inside an overall Richland County Utilities office. This Richland County document says:

The Utilities Department’s Administration and Engineering Divisions are currently located at 3506 Fernandina Road in Columbia. This building, which is located in Lexington County, has been leased by the Utilities Department since 1999. The existing office building has approximately 3700 square feet of office space and has been outgrown by the Department. Currently there are several offices with double occupancy and even employees within hallways.

A search for additional office space found an existing office building at 7525 Broad River Road for sale. This building is the former office of the Southland Log Home Mortgage Company. The building was originally designed and constructed to house an engineering firm. The land area is approximately one acre and includes a 6300 square foot single-user 1.5 story office building that was built in 1985. Thirty-six parking spaces exist with an entrance off the Broad River Road adjacent to the Ballentine Exit on I-26. The building is located in Richland County and is within the Broad River Sewer System service area.

As far as I can tell from google, the move did take place, and the office is now currently on Broad River Road.

The parts about google showing the place also having been home to M&L Construction and Palmetto Wood Designs seem suspect since the place was county from 1999 to 2008/2009, which leaves no open timeslot for those two businesses. It doesn't help matters that Loopnet shows a completely different building for 3506 Fernandina Road.

UPDATE 12 October 2009: Added MCEC to the post title based on the comments.

Happy the Tiger was a constant media and "personal" presence when I was growing up. I see from her plaque that she arrived in Columbia when I was three years old, and passed away when I was 18. In between those times, I must have seen her dozens of times, either at Constan Carwash on Gervais Street (where these pictures were taken), or at any number of events at which she appeared.

My memory is that her cage was behind the car wash in the area where you pull your car around to put it on the wash tramline. Such a thing would never fly in today's hyper-correct environment and I think that's good in some ways, and bad in others. I have no way of knowing how truly "happy", "Happy" was, but at any rate her situation doesn't seem to have affected her lifespan, and she got "modern" quarters at Riverbanks.

The plaque says that Marlin Perkins handled Happy's acquisition, but I'll bet he was somewhere nice and cool while "Jim" did the dirty work!

UPDATE 15 October 2009: Added a picture of Happy I forgot.

I don't remember what the name of this place was, and I don't think even the building remains now, or at least where I recall it as being is a car lot with a pre-fab looking HQ.

Anyway, there is an odd little triangular lot where Augusta Road (US-1) and SC-12 come together. The join of the two highways makes the point of the lot, and Hook Avenue makes the base. I recall that for years when I was driving out US-1 towards I-26, I would see this little building with a sign that said (more or less) "Hardware & Groceries". Finally one day I thought to myself, That's rather odd, isn't it? and decided to stop.

It was exactly what the sign promised, groceries on one side of the store, and hardware on the other. I didn't need anything, but I was the only customer in the store, and I felt like I ought to buy something rather than either letting them think I a) was an idiot, or b) had stopped in just to gawk, so I looked around and picked up a package of spaghetti noodles like I had meant to do that.

My guess is that the place started when the area was "the boonies" and had just carried on as the surroundings developed. As I said, when I went in, I was the only customer so business even then can't have been good, and with the coming of Kroger, Bi-Lo, Wal-Mart & Lowes, both the grocery side and the hardware side would have taken a fatal hit. I'm not sure when the place closed, but I don't think it made it into the new millennium.

Anyone know what this place was called?

UPDATE 18 October 2009: OK, based on the comments, I was able to identify this from the 1997 phonebook as "Sharpe's Hardware & Grocery Inc" and get the street address. I have updated the post title to reflect that and that the closing date was later than I thought.

I first wrote about this building back on 10 April 2009 when I was doing a closing on Kester's Bamboo House, and China Garden may have been closed even then, at least I don't recall seeing anyone inside, and from the pictures I took then (two of which open this closing), there already appear to be signs of work around the front door.

I'm not a big fan of Chinese food, and this wasn't one of my mother's favored places, so I never ended up eating here, but China Garden has certainly been a Five Points landmark for many years. The building has been there so long that when the fatal Harden Street renovation reached China Garden, they went under the sidewalk to shore up the foundations and found there were no foundations. This caused the street work to stall in front for an inordinate amount of time while they figured out what to do. Presumably that is all fixed now..

Anyway, it's definitely closed now, and it appears that it will reopen soon as a place called Grandma's, which I expect will no longer be Asian cusine. If they keep the "pagoda" sign as it appears they will be doing, we will have two non-Chinese restaurants in town with Chinese-themed signage. (The other is Bombay Grill.

UPDATE 24 June 2019 -- Add tags and map icon.