Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

Parkland Plaza is on Knox Abbot Drive just across the bridge from USC (and now, though not then, The State Museum). It's an interesting retail venue, neither thriving, nor totally down on its luck. Over the years lots of businesses have come and gone. Probably the most significant of these was Parkland Pharmacy, which was an old-fashioned rural style drug/general/we-do-everything store which also housed a contract post-office with a wall full of PO Boxes. It eventually sold out and a CVS now occupies the spot.

The other significant business, or significant to me at any rate, was the Gamecock Theater. The Gamecock was on the East side of the plaza and was always a rather small operation rather than anything with pretensions to being a "Movie House". At some point, even the rather limited original space was partitioned, and the place became a duplex with the name becoming, if I recall correctly, The Gamecock Twin Cinemas or something to that effect.

Since The Gamecock was on the other side of town from where I grew up, we only saw a couple of movies there when I was a kid, and I can't recall now what they were. However, when I was in college, it was fairly accessible from The Towers, where I was living. Of course, the Russell House was even closer, and while the theater there was in its glory days, I sometimes saw 4 movies a week there, but those were all classics and The Gamecock was first-run. At various times, a group of us would find a car and go over, but I can clearly recall only two movies that I saw there during college.

The first was The Seduction, a 1982 flick starring Morgan Fairchild. At the time, Morgain Fairchild was in a very popular TV series, which I never saw, and the name of which I forget. I was aware that she was the show's sex symbol and when my roomate and I saw that she had her first big screen outing and that it was rated 'R', we figured (especially given the title!) that there was a good chance that she would not be over-burdened with clothes, and that seemed like a sufficient reason to scrape up the bucks and transportation.

Well, that was true -- in fact several times she was not-overburdened to the point of not being burdened at all, but while that was nice (very nice actually) we gradually became aware, as we looked at each other with incredulity from time to time, that this was an awful movie. Not, "well, it really wasn't that good" awful, but "did they really shoot that whole scene with the boom mike clearly in view?" awful. It was something of a trifecta in fact: Bad writing, bad acting and bad production values. I still don't understand how Fairchild couldn't leverage her small-screen popularity into a decent vehicle. I mean, it's not like she couldn't take her clothes off in a movie with a competent crew and a script that at least made sense!

The final movie I saw at The Gamecock was Yellow Hair and the Fortress of Gold. This was in 1984, and if I recall the timing correctly, I had just finished final exams and was exhausted and wanting a fun popcorn flick. The whole ad campaign for Yellow Hair, inasmuch as it had one, was to position it as a low budget "Indiana Jones" type movie, which was fine by me. As it turned out, the campaign had little to nothing to do with the movie, which was really (as comments on IMDB suggest) a late Spaghetti Western. The titular character "Yellow Hair" was a blond Indian "half-breed" and the rickety plot reached its climax with her finding out that her parents had loved one another (rather than her being a child of rape as she had been led to believe). Along the way, she had some Zorro-ish adventures (Disney Zorro-ish), but really not the non-stop cheesy action the posters implied. I was let down, but this movie was a first for me in a way -- it was the first time I was the only person in a theater! That's happened several times since and sometimes for good movies, but I distinctly remember thinking "Not a good sign!"

With graduation, I took a job out of town and kind of lost track of the Gamecock for a while. The next time I became aware of it, I found that it had closed, had been sold, and was operating as an "Antique Mall". That's the ReSale ReVue you can see in the pictures. As such things go, it was OK (I think I bought an old phone there), but with several very large Antique Malls in the Vista, and one just down the street, I suppose they really couldn't make a go of it. Now the space is empty, and I can't think of any theaters at all in West Columbia or Cayce.

UPDATE 12 September 2009: Added an ad for The Gamecock Theater from the 15 April 1973 State newspaper.

UPDATE 2 September 2020: Change the post title address from "Parkland Plaza Cayce" to the full street address. Add map icon, update tags.

The Impulse Club was a small private club on Two Notch Road, just past Food Lion, and behind the This Is It! lingerie store. It's set well back from the road, and I always imagined it as a rather laid back little nightclub, though that's pure conjecture on my part as I have never set foot inside.

I noticed some while ago that it seemed to be closed, and finally got around to taking some pictures on one of the warmer days we have had recently. When I got to the front door, and felt the cool breeze coming out the (missing) view panel, I thought at first that the AC was still running inside and that I was mistaken about the club being closed. A closer look established that it was just the lingering cool of an enclosed space which hadn't fully warmed to the outside temperature.

Through that front panel, I was able to see that the club had some nice wood fixtures and stick my camera through to get a little idea what was in the bar area and the left side of the club. I don't have any idea why the place closed down, but the sign over the bar implies that some of the patrons, at least, were trying to take advantage of the management's good nature.

UPDATE 29 April 2010: Add full street address to post title.

UPDATE 18 May 2020 -- Add map icon, more tags and new pictures. I wish I had made myself go inside the place back in 2008 when I made this post. It's impossbile now because the deck and other lumber has been stripped, or fallen, and there are hidden nails all around. The roof is shot and the building is ready to fall down. I can see what must be a "condemned" notice by the door, but could not get close enough to read it.

UPDATE 7 July 2020 -- Welp, this place is gone, razed to the ground along with the other building on this back lot:

The Key West Grill is another entry on the list of restaurants I meant to eventually get around to, but in the event never did. In this particular case, since "Key West" is an island, I figured that the menu would be largely seafood, something which I don't eat at all, so I wasn't chomping-at-the-bit to go there and order the token burger or whatever the landlubber fare was. Since I never did, it's of course possible that I was wholly mistaken about the cusine. Taking the pictures above, I was impressed with the building, which seems as though it would have had a very nice dining ambience.

At any rate, Key West always seemed to have a fair number of cars in the lot, so I was somewhat surprised when they closed up shop. It's still a fairly good corner for restaurants though: I like both Fudruckers and El Chico which are across the street and next door respectively.

I do think at this point enough years have passed that Coca-cola probably ought to accept the fact that they aren't getting their equipment back.

UPDATE 3 November 2011:

Well the building is going down hill a little bit, or at least has started to be a target for "tagging". From the view through the front door, it appears that some work took place at some point, as ceiling insulation is all over and most of the ceiling tiles are missing (and the murals look like they were nice). Coke still hasn't gotten their equipment -- I'll bet it's not worth having by now, and the front door has that ubiquitious sign of non-occupation: unclaimed phonebooks.

On the plus side, the Piracantha bushes are doing really well.

Looking at he pictures below, you can tell immediately that the "feel" of photos from Closing-Cam 1.0 (above) and Closing-Cam 2.0 is completely different.

(Also added the full street address and tags).

UPDATE 5 November 2011 Added full 24 September 2011 photoset.

UPDATE 9 January 2018 -- As reported in the comments, this building has now been razed. Here are some pictures from 18 November 2017 of the then partial demolition and highlighting the murals:

Photoset 24 September 2011

The Movies at Polo opened and closed while I was living in Aiken. I can't recall specifically that I ever saw a show there, though I was in town more weekends than not. I think this place is another example of Pat Berman's underfannied theory of the Columbia movie market. There are simply not enough fannies-on-seats week-in-and-week out in Columbia to support the number of theaters we used to have. Of course in this case, it probably didn't help either that a new theater was in the offing at the nearby Village at Sandhills, though I'm pretty sure The Movies at Polo gave up the ghost before that multiplex opened.

Unlike the Capiton Centre Theatre we can't see with any specificity which movies actually closed this operation, but there has been no lack of bombs in recent years. I like to think it was Son of the Mask.

At any rate, we can see that, as usual, it wasn't a shortage of parking that did the place in:

For restaurant buildings, the last stage is the "Asian Buffet" stage. For other retail space, the last stage is the "Self Storage" stage:

As an aside, The Movies at Polo was actually a rather misleading name, as the place is not that close to Polo Road. The Movies Near Sesqui would have been better.

UPDATE 11 September 2011 -- As mentioned in the comments, there has long been a sign indicating that a funeral home is coming to the property. In fact, the sign has been there long enough that it seems unlikely now. I guess there might be enough room in the old parking lot for such an establishment and its own associated parking, but it would seem rather crowded. The self-storage place mentioned above has been open in the old theater building, and several adjacent new buildings for a good while now.

Also, as indicated in the comments, commenter Andrew has pinned the closing date for this place as July 2005, so I have updated the post title to indicate that. Also added the full street address.

UPDATE 27 February 2014 -- Well, I'm not entirely sure what happened here. I always wondered how Shive's could possibly build a funeral home on this site given that Monster had the old theater building, leaving only the old parking lot open -- and funeral homes need lots of parking for visitation and organizing the funeral processions. At any rate, the sign proclaiming this as the new Shive's site sat there for years with no action, and it has finally been replaced with one saying that the new funeral home will be built on Trenholm Road Extension instead (but Monster's sign still welcomes Shive's..)

UPDATE 21 April 2014 -- Just for the record, Shive's has broken ground on Trenholm Road Extension & Dawson Road now:

UPDATE 7 June 2016 -- Either vandals, the wind or the property owner have done a number on the old sign:

UPDATE 22 March 2017 -- I see the parking lot has finally been sold:

I first became aware of this building when it was "Po Folks", and I think that was the original tenant. Po Folks was, the name suggested, a sort of fauxy-down-home type of place where they served "country cookin'", served the drinks in mason jars and wrote the menus in misspelled "Southern" dialect. That's not really a criticism; there's a place for that type of thing, and I remember the food as being pretty good. Certainly my parents liked it a good bit, and we ate there fairly often. I don't know exactly what happened to Po Folks -- they are still around as a chain, but apparently they have contracted a great deal and no longer have any locations in South Carolina. I do know that they continued to have a Myrtle Beach location for a while after the Columbia location closed, but it's gone now as well. Today the chain seems to be largely a Florida operation with a few other restaurants in Alabama, Arizona and California.

After Po Folks left, the building went through a long period of "musical concepts". I think next it may have been the original Fran's location (Fran's later opened "Little Fran's" on Forest Drive as a smaller second store, which became simply "Fran's" when the original Fran's closed and which itself recently closed). After Fran's closed, the building was vacant for a while prompting some distruntled former patrons to put up a "Bring Back Po Folks" sign on the property. I lose track after that, but at some point it was one or possibly two different night-clubs and then an urban-comedy club. The Jim Moore used car dealership has been there a couple of years now, so possibly the site now has a stable tenant, though it's doubtful they can supply you a Blue Ribbon Chicken Dinner.

UPDATE 22 June 2009:

Well, not that stable! Moore For Less is now gone. (Also added the street addres to post title above).

UPDATE 13 March 2011: The building has been knocked down. See the Moore For Less link for pictures.

UPDATE 29 June 2021: Updating the post title with more former tenants of this building thanks to commenter Paul's research and adding tags & map icon.

How can I convey just how much of a *BIG*DEAL* the Tricentennial was for us in 1970? Well, let's just say that it was a much bigger event in our lives than the Bicentennial was in 1976. (And if you don't know what the Bicentennial was, you're a whippersnapper, and there's no helping you). If you were in Third Grade in 1970, as I was, along with the rest of my classmates at Satchel Ford Elementary in Mrs. Anderson's homeroom, the Tricentennial was a good part of your year.

Not only did we learn South Carolina history tidbits in school all year, but there were constant references on TV, and futuristic geodesic dome museums built downtown (Senate Street?) with all kind of historic artifacts. It was such a big deal that we were all mad when the Weekly Reader did a story on California's Bicentennial and didn't mention our Tricentennial at all.

But the biggest thing about the Tricentennial at school and even at family gatherings with cousins was the Tricentennial songs. We knew all of them by heart, and sang them constantly that year.

The songs were all composed by music teacher Nelle McMaster Sprott (with some lyrics borrowed with permission from the State's Poet Laureate, Archibald Rutledge) and seem to have been discovered by the Tricentennial Commission almost by accident. If it was an accident, it was a happy one, and an album of the songs was pressed by the Tricentennial Commission and sent to all the state's public schools (and was available for home purchase, along with sheet music for all the songs). I can hardly overstate how ubiquitous and well-loved this album was in 1970. You can quibble about a few lyric choices like "come and feel the pain" in Carolina Sunshine (though the intent is clear), but I think the album still stands up very well today.

For some reason though, the album and songs were orphaned after the Tricentennial. I suppose the Tricentennial Commission disbanded, and that might be the reason, but for whatever cause, the album was never re-issued even on LP much less as remastered for CD. That means what I am able to present here was recorded from a 39 year old LP in all its scratchy glory, but when you set the Way-Bac Machine to 1970 and put yourselves in the shoes of those third graders again, can you honestly say you don't agree with:

We are good Sandlappers,
Yes we're good Sandlappers.
And we're mighty proud to say --
That we live,
Yes we live,
In the very finest state of the USA

I know I can't.

1) Sandlappers
2) Come With Me
3) Sunny Yellow Jessamine
4) Indian Ghosts
5) Country Things
6) Carolina Sunshine
7) A Carolina Wren
8) We Belonged to the Land
9) Someting To Sing About
10) Stand Tall for South Carolina

[NOTE: I have replaced the full versions of the songs above with 30 second clips. I have heard from Mrs. Sprott's granddaughter that she is working on a web-site dedicated to her grandmother. When it's up, I will link it here!]

UPDATE 9 November 2012: Here's some interesting information on the Charleston, Columbia & Greenville Tricentennial buildings.

UPDATE 18 February 2020: I have been remiss in not noting the November 2017 passing of Mrs. Sprott. She certainly brought music and joy into the lives of many people. Here is her obiturary.

Also, as I said above, I had replaced the full versions of the Tricentennial songs with thirty second clips at the request of Mrs. Sprott's granddaughter. That made sense in the days before everything had been uploaded to youtube, but currently the songs are already widely available, so I think it no longer makes sense to not have them here. Thus, I am embedding each song, from youtube (where they were uploaded by someone else, not me) below:

We Are Good Sandlappers:

Come With Me:

Sunny Yellow Jessamine:

Indian Ghosts:

Country Things:

Carolina Sunshine:

A Carolina Wren:

We Belonged To The Land:

Something To Sing About:

Stand Tall For South Carolina:

The Whole Album:

I don't remember what name this mall had when it first opened, but I'm pretty sure it was not Market Pointe Centre. I think it was something that emphasized the initial theme of the place like Outlet Point Mall.

At a certain time in the 70s, it seemed that everything was going to "outlets", and outlet malls sprung up everywhere. The largest and most famous of these in South Carolina (the way I recall it anyway) was Waccamaw Pottery in Myrtle Beach, but there were many others. Market Pointe or Outlet Point or whatever it was, was Columbia's attempt to cash in on the trend. Frankly it was never a place I was really interested in because as far as I could tell, "Outlet" essentially meant "little clothes store", and I wasn't interested in clothes stores, big or little. I suppose there were non-clothes stores there, but what really interested me were bookstores, electronics stores or hardware stores, and I don't think there were any of those. Still, I would always end up there when my cousins made one of their whirlwind shopping trips to Columbia, and the place always seemed busy to me. Apart from the outlet stores, I remember they had Columbia's only "Orange Julius" kiosk, though I never got to try one.

Sometime in the 80s, I think, the "Outlet Mall" concept ran into hard times. I don't know why exactly, any more than I know why it came into vogue in the first place. Waccamaw Pottery went under, with the mostly empty buildings still sitting there in front of Hard Rock Park today. A mall very similar to Market Pointe went through several unsuccessful incarnations while I was living in Fayetteville, and Market Pointe itself started to struggle.

I never seemed to get back there to check it out (apparently few people did..), but my understanding is that they soldiered on as a mall for a good while with lots of empty storefronts, but the writing was on the wall. Even the success of locating Hamrick's there didn't help the rest of the mall, and parts of it have now gone to state government offices and parts of it are for sale.

Outlet malls still seem to be viable on I-95; I can think of one in Santee, a couple in Georgia and one up in either NC or VA. I'm not sure why I-95 works and I-20 didn't, but I'll speculate that I-95 gets a lot of vacation traffic, with people more in the mood to spend money while the east-west traffic on I-20 is less festive and free spending.

Or maybe people just don't want to shop at a place that manages to mispell two of the three words in its name.

Here's another place that was always on my "hmm, maybe I'll try that someday" list, but which in the event, I never got around to.

There are probably several reasons for that. For one thing, downtown Gervais Street is a location I only very rarely find myself at during lunch time. For another, the two left and right outrider words beside "Restaurant" (hard to read here, I think the closing-cam lens needs cleaning) are "Billiards" & "Saloon", which made me think that the place might be a bit on the rough side, and probably smoky. I guess I'll never know now.

UPDATE 5 Dec 2010: Added full street address given by commenter Andy S.

What to say about the original WIS Radio? Well, I think it's hard to describe to a modern audience, but for me growing up, it was a constant and welcome presence in my life.

WIS started broadcasting on 10 July 1930 with call letters that stood for Wonderful Iodine State (to celebrate the natural abundance of the goiter preventing element in South Carolina, a big deal in the days before iodized salt). I'm not absolutely sure if it signed on with its historic frequency, but for all the time I knew it, it was AM 560 (560 kilocycles or as it is now called, 560 kilohertz). Or if you were in your car, once you set the station, it was was just known, as the drivetime show put it, as WIS:Pushbutton One

In those days (from the 30s to the 60s) AM radio was the norm, and FM radio was a bit exotic. Most radios sold were AM only, and AM radio was the medium for all kinds of music from rock & pop all the way to classical and opera. Most importantly, the clock radio sitting on top of our refrigerator was AM only, and too high for a kid to retune easily, and it was set to WIS.

That meant that all through grammar school and into high school, I mostly started my mornings with toast, orange juice, milk & cereal ... and Gene McKay. McKay was the morning host at WIS, and he ran a very low key show with gentle humor and good helpings of music interspersed with the events and news of the day. He had a number of running jokes, with two of the most popular being first the reports of new doings at the worlds most inept college, Crodney Tech, whose teams, under the aegis of head coach Arms Akimbo had apparently never won a game of any sort, and second, anything involving Irmo. McKay apparently was at first just fascinated with the way the word sounded, and used it as a tag for jokes, but later he started making up "history" bits about the doings of the Ancient Irmese and eventually, in a manner on which I'm not entirely clear, ended up either inspiring or founding the annual Irmo Okra Strut, which endures to this day.

The other personality I remember from the classic era (ie: when I was growing up :-) is Bill Benton. Benton had a talk show, perhaps called something as simple as Time to Talk though I'm not sure that's right and conducted many interesting interviews with local personalities and people passing through town on publicity tours. In general though, I heard few of those because I would be in school during the day, and frankly as a kid wasn't that interested in the abstract, though they did catch my ear sometimes when I was home sick. What I did listen specifically for was Ghost Story Thursday. That means exactly what it looks like. It's hard to imagine now, and even at the time it was a bit retro, but every Thursday night, Benton would bring out a book of ghost stories and read out-loud as many as his time slot allowed. That was some scary stuff! Of course, the only one I can actually remember right now was not scary so much as it was funny, though I'm sure Benton was not amused at the time. Whether a crew member was having a bit of fun by setting him up, or if Benton just pulled a likely book from his stash without having time to pre-read, he ended up one night with a book of "modern" ghost stories and started reading something (think Ann RIce or Lauren K. Hamilton) that was heading in a direction he clearly could not allow it to go on the radio. I was old enough then to kind of appreciate what was happening, and after a couple of references to "thighs" and Benton reading slower and slower, trying to edit in real-time, he finally just had to stop, apologize for not being able to finish and move on to something else. (Yes, I know this is similar to a Garrison Keillor bit, but it really happened).

WIS was the station for USC athletics and though I was never really into sports, I can remember many times hearing Bob Fulton ("The Voice of the Gamecocks") calling games on the radio. It was also for many years the local affiliate for the Atlanta Braves, and I was listening one night grilling burgers in the back yard (perhaps the last time I did that, come to think of it) when Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth's record. WIS was also the dominant radio news station, and had the first, and still perhaps the only, helicopter radio traffic reports. These were given added authority by the fact that instead of them being done by station personnel, through some sort of arrangement with the Highway Patrol, Sgt. Frank Ravetta flew in the traffic chopper and did the reports live himself. In fact WIS was where most people automatically turned for the news up into the late 70s. I remember when I was in high school around 1977 when Columbia had a terrible ice storm which left people without power for days (we were without for two weeks), one of the girls in my carpool commented that she had heard the station save someone's life by talking him out of running a charcoal grill inside.

Not that WIS was all talk, news & sports. Music was a big part of the format, and they tried to walk a narrow line with pretty good success. WIS wasn't a rock station, nor was it country, jazz or classical (though they did have the Metropolitan Opera on Saturdays for many years before it moved to public radio). The format, I think, was not rigidly thought out as today's are, but was designed to appeal to adults, who had been adult when the rock revolution started. That meant that they played a lot of Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Jack Jones and the like. It wasn't oldies, these were artists still releasing new songs -- it was sort of what pop radio might have been had Elvis and The Beatles not come along. Today the closest tag would be "Adult Contemporary", but that doesn't exactly fit. At any rate, because my parents listened to WIS (they weren't against rock the way some people were, they just didn't like it much), I mostly missed the rock era. On the whole, I'm very happy about that. I got to hear and enjoy a lot of music that was foreign to my peers, and still had rock to discover later (for instance, when I finally discovered Van Morrison, there were about 30 Van Morrison albums to listen to!). Gradually this started to change as the years went by. Personally I think "The Carpenters" were the death of the people trying to carry on the Sinatra traditon. "Such nice kids! So melodic!", but if you listened to the guitars on "Superstar", it was rock, and the dam was broken. The last WIS personality I really remember was Mike Collins, and he epitomized the new style, playing standards or non-edgy rock as the mood took him.

In 1977, the classic era ended. FM and stereo were obviously the coming things for music, and personalities Gene McKay, Bill Benton & Dave Wright jumped ship, buying local station WSCQ (FM 100) as an outlet for their efforts. By this time, we had a stereo with FM in the dining room, and I remember tuning in Gene McKay for what I think was his first morning broadcast on WSCQ. He played Abba's "Dancing Queen", and I remember thinking that I had never heard anything as glorious as that coming out in stereo from the two speakers.

After that, WIS moved more in a news direction with less and less music and finally the station was sold around the early 1980s. The new owners tagged it WVOC (Voice of Columbia) and it remains at AM 560 to this day. Somewhat later, the WIS TV organization decided getting out of radio had been a mistake and started a new WIS radio, but it is a new entity with no real ties to the original.

The pictures at the top of this post are of WIS TV on Bull Street. Growing up, the building housed both stations and had signage indicating that. Sometime in the 70s, I think, despite being the elder entity, WIS radio moved out. I visited the radio studio three times that I can recall. Once to pick up some tickets I had won in a contest, once to take Mike Collins a Beach Boys record, and once for the station's 50th anniversary celebration (which featured Snuffy Jenkins & The Hired Hands -- the same band that had played on-air when the station opened in 1930 if I recall correctly). Despite that, I can not today remember exactly where the studio was. I think it was somewhere off of Broad River Road on a flood plain (the station was set on pilings like a beach house), but I can't for the life of me recall just where. I know the location was always given as "1 WIS Lane", but mapquest doesn't know anything about it, so I'm guessing it was renamed after the station was sold.

I wouldn't go back to the way things were -- I like being able to find any song from anyone on itunes and being able to check the news at any time, but just because I wouldn't create WIS today doesn't mean it wasn't great then.

We'll be right back after tonight's top story.

Update 30 May 2008:

Well, thanks to commenter Jonathan, I was able to find the old WIS studio and towers.

I had thought it was somewhere off of Broad River Road, actually it is on (or off of) Garden Valley Lane, which is off of Bush River Road.

You go down Garden Valley Lane until you hit the Saluda Hydro Project recreation area, a place which seems very nice, and which I had no idea existed. I believe this is the point where WIS Lane used to start, but apparently it is all just Garden Valley Lane now. The studio and towers are about a quarter mile down the road from there on the Saluda River flood-plain.

It appears that, as I recalled, everything at the old station is now owned by WVOC. There are three transmitter towers.

This is one:

This is another:

Here is the old studio. It appears that WVOC does not use the building on an ongoing basis (which makes sense as the phonebook lists their studio as being on Greystone Blvd):

Notice the old broadcast TV antenna. Apparently they never got cable at the studio!

Of course the whole place is posted, so I didn't go up the stairs and take a look inside:

I seem to recall that the last time I was there, the studio did not have the red wood grille work covering the pilings that keep it off the flood-plain:

I'm guessing this antenna mast may connect the current Greystone studio back to the towers here, but I have no real idea:

UPDATE 11 October 2009

WIS Time to Talk ad from November 1970 Sandlapper Magazine:

UPDATE 26 October 2009: Ad from Jan 1972 Sandlapper Magazine:

Yep, it's another Decker posting!

The Olive Garden can't get no respect, and I'm not entirely sure why. Yes, compared to your favorite little hole-in-the-wall that you discovered in Little Italy, it's not that great. Compared to the chains? I'm not sure exactly where it rates with Macaroni Grill (MG's bread is definitely better), and it's definitely not as good as Carabbas. BUT: it's not bad. Certainly not as bad as all the insults comics have thrown its way for years. I'd go so far as to say that the "Soup, salad & breadstick" lunch is very nice, and the Capelini Pomodoro is quite good.

This location is another place where my father, sister and I used to eat Sunday lunch from time to time. I can understand why the chain would want to put a new location out on Two Notch near Sandhills -- there's a lot of growth there, and a lot of people to feed. What I don't understand is why opening that new store required closing this one. It seemed to do a good business, and the people in the Forest Acres area haven't gone anywhere. We still eat! In fact, I would probably eat lunch there at least once a week whereas the new location is just too far to go for lunch hour.

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

UPDATE 15 Feb 2011: Updated closing date in post title to April 2005 based on commenter Andrew's research.