Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

This nondescript building on Taylor Street down from The Big-T now houses a phone operation of some sort, but once upon a time, it was a porn store.

I don't suppose that such a place could have operated out in the open any time before the late 60s or 70s, at least not in Columbia, but eventually the "revolution" arrived even here. I recall riding down Taylor Street one day with my mother, reading the sign, and asking her exactly what was a "peep show". Strangely (to me then) she didn't really seem to have a ready explanation.

Since that time I believe that porn stores have been zoned out of downtown though there are certainly still some in the metro area. This building has had a lot of tenants in the years since then, and was in fact a law office at one time if I'm recalling correctly. It appears that currently, you can once more "reach out and touch someone" there.

I believe this restaurant, on Decker Boulevard in the plaza with Rite Aid and Food Lion, was originally a Burger King. As I mentioned in discussing the vanished USC Burger King, once upon a time, all Columbia area Burger Kings were closed in a franchisee/corporate dispute. I believe that this one closed then and never re-opened.

After Burger King imploded, a Zesto's set up shop. Zesto is a local, greek-influenced fast-food outfit that has a number of locations in town. I believe chicken is their big selling point, but for me it will always be the chocolate dipped soft-serve cones. During the ongoing general flight from the Decker Corridor, this Zesto joined many other Decker restaurants and moved out on Two Notch road. Evidently they did not move far enough out, and with their new fortunes tied to a dying strip-mall, they did not last too long (that building is now a matress store).

Anyway, a couple of years after Zesto left, the current occupant, a Vietnamese "Pho" restaurant set up shop in the building. I've eaten there once, and found the Pho very tasty (admittedly I have no standard of comparison there) though they do limit you to one refill on the ice tea. I could be wrong, but I believe this place may be the only solely Vietnamese restaurant in town.

UPDATE 1 June 2019: Add tags, map icon.

UPDATE 4 June 2024: Update tags.

The Top of Carolina opened in 1967 and was the first (and I think still the only) revolving restaurant in the Carolinas. The revolving platform was built from equipment donated after the 1964 New York World's Fair. I don't know if the Capstone domitory on which The Top of Carolina sits was originally planned with that end in mind or not.

I remember it was quite a big deal when the restaurant opened (I would have been 6), and although our "eating out" was generally reserved for Sunday lunch in fairly prosaic spots (The Russell House, McDonalds, Ponderosa Steak Barn, Frank 'n Stein), my parents made it a point to take us kids.

We were fascinated by the whole "revolve" thing, and at seeing Columbia in a panarama below us. The food however, at least from a child's point of view, left a lot to be desired. As I recall, the only choice available was a buffet, and it didn't have sandwiches or hamburgers or spaghetti or indeed anything I liked. I believe my parents were less than impressed with it as well, though I may be projecting my feelings onto them. At any rate, we never went back after that one time while the place was in its initial mode of operation.

At some point -- it couldn't have been long after The Tricentennial, if indeed the place lasted that long -- the Top of Carolina folded as a retail operation. I'm not sure of all the reasons. I believe USC had always owned and run the place, and I'm sure the college "industrial food" mindset didn't help. Also, as far as I can recall, there was never a parking lot dedicated to the restaurant which can't have helped matters either.

After that, the University would still (and do still, I think) rent the place out for banquets, and I believe I attended one such function in the 80s. I can still recall noticing, and being pleased by how many trees downtown Columbia still had as I looked down on them.

Often we used the word Capstone to invoke The Top of Carolina, but actually Capstone is the name of the building on which TTOC sits. During my tenure at USC, Capstone was a girls' dorm (one of my cousins lived there a few years) with one of the University cafeterias as the ground floor. I often ate there, and vividly remeber a particular meal when ARA acted out a bad punchline come to life. I had gotten a burger and fries, and the food lady told me:

I burned the fries, so I gave you some extra.

As the comic said, if there's one thing I like more than bad food, it's more of it!.

The Capstone cafeteria was also the site of an incident which put me off of my habit of drinking tea and reading a book after eating and before my next class, something I enjoyed quite a bit. The tables were not exclusive, but generally if there was space, nobody would crowd. I was a bit miffed then when someone sat down by me and started a conversation, especially as looking up I saw that there were plenty of empty tables, but he leveraged the title of the book I was reading, got me to tell him a bit about it and started making general chit-chat. I was annoyed, but figured he was a new guy trying to make friends and didn't want to be rude, so I made an effort to be courteous and talked for 10 or 15 minutes, at which time of course he dropped the "would you like to come to our prayer group" bomb. I'm afraid that for the rest of my time at USC I was pretty uncommunicative verging on rude to anyone I didn't know taking a seat at "my" table, and didn't take up lunch reading again until I started working.

I think Capstone is still a dorm, but I believe the cafeteria is now gone. I believe you can still have a banquet at The Top of Carolina though I would still expect the view to be better than the food.

UPDATE 3 Dec 08

Commenter Dennis sends the following notes and picture:

I was always very interested in this place because of my great interest in the 1964 World's Fair, but have only managed to get in and eat once. It is impossible to get information about the rare times it is open to the public. On USC websites it is referred to as the Top of Carolina Conference Center and it seems you can only rent the place for events, but they sure don't advertise or make it easy to get info.

Anyway, I found this dated April 2007. Don't know if they ever did this renovation:

In addition to receiving that report, the University's Buildings and Grounds Committee approved a plan to use about $700,000 in Sodexho dining services funds to renovate the Top of Carolina facility at Capstone in summer 2008. The revolving restaurant atop the 18-story residence hall has been an icon in Columbia since it was built in 1967. The facility was used for 32 Sunday brunches and 44 catered University events in the past fiscal year.

"We're planning to replace carpet, window treatments, and the heating/cooling system along with making the facility ADA accessible," said Rick Kelly, vice president for business and finance.

After renovations are completed, Top of Carolina will be the venue for catered events throughout the academic year, said Michael Scheffres, general manager of University dining services. Sunday brunch at the facility is open to the public during the fall and spring semesters.

The picture conveys what I didn't really note in my initial post. The "revolve" part of the restaurant is a circular band which orbits a non-moving core. Essentially, only the guest seating rotates.

UPDATE 1 November 2009: Open again!

The Boat House at Sesqui also used to be the Bath House. I didn't swim there too often since we had access to Bell Camp, but it was an odd little setup.

The park guys in the mid-section of the building (there is, or was a counter behind those wooden shutters) would give you a wire hamper and a honking big safety-pin with a numbered stamped metal tag. You would go into the Men's Dressing Room, strip out of your clothes and put them in the basket, put on your trunks, fasten the safety-pin through them, and hand the hamper to the park guys. They would put the basket with your clothes on a shelf inside and you would go swim. After you finished, you would turn in the safety-pin, they would match it to a wire hamper and give you your clothes back. Even at the time, it seemed a rather quaint and archaic procedure.

The Boat House / Bath House, like a lot of the original Sesqui structures, was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps. This was a Federal government team recruited during the Great Depression from the vast ranks of the able-bodied but unemployed. The CCC did a lot of great work on public projects, kept a lot of men off the dole and probably not coincidentally helped forestall any more Bonus Army-like incidents. I know they also built the main structures at Poinsett State Park and Florida Caverns State Park. Their work tends to have an identifiable style, and the Boat House is a good example of it. I suspect the bench alongside the structure goes back to that era as well.

I think that American youth have gradually been undergoing a "swimming wussification" over the last several generations. My grandparents' generation thought nothing of jumping into totally unimproved "swimming holes". My mother's generation were happy to swim in Hartsville's minimally improved "Black Creek". I, on the other hand, already didn't really like swimming in lakes. Bell Camp was fine since the swimming area in the section shallow enough to touch ground had had all the stumps removed and the bottom covered with sand. (Still some of my peers were irked at the way the water turned any swimsuit to yellow). The Sesqui lake was a bit too slimy for my tastes, and I didn't like touching bottom at all. I suspect the generations after me didn't want anything to do with lakes as far as swimming went. At any rate Sesqui banned swimming in the 90s, and I have to think falling demand for lake swimming had something to do with it. I read the news in The State and remarked on the end of an era though not one I had much partcipated in. I don't know if the ban was state-wide, but last time I went into Poinsett it applied there as well.

The lake is still available for fishing and walking around, but like many lakes, it has been so overtaken by filthy waterfowl, that even if you liked lake swimming, you would hesitate to thread the feces-laden-minefield from the boat house to the water's edge. Even if you could still get a hamper and pin.

When I was growing up, comedy was something distant. You saw it on Ed Sullivan, or The Tonight Show if you got to stay up that late. There were a lot of classic comedy bits I would hear from time to time on WIS. Bill Cosby's "Noah? Build me an ark..... Right!" was a favorite as was a Tim Conway prison-warden routine and Alan Sherman's "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah". I know there were travelling comedians in the days of Vaudeville and burlesque, but all that was long gone by the 60s and the idea that you could go pay money and go see someone do comedy was kind of alien to me. That was TV stuff.

Then The Punch Line opened in Five Points in this odd little strip mall next to the old Sears building. I'm not now totally sure of it's location in the building, but I think it was in the space now occupied by PT's Caberet.

As always, I'm fuzzy on dates, but I believe The Punch Line started in the mid-80s. I'm pretty sure I was still an impecunious college or grad-student at the time, and then started working in Fayetteville, so in the event, I only ended up going to one show there. It was a total introduction to the format for me: Local guy, feature and finally headliner. I can't remember who I saw, but it was certainly the hardest I'd ever laughed (over an extended period) in my life!

I don't know what happened in the end. It seems to me that Five Points would be a natural for a comedy club, but The Punch Line folded, and the new venue The Comedy House set up shop in a distinctly non-entertainment-district, non-foot-traffic location off of St. Andrews Road (followed by a move to Decker Boulevard -- also a non-entertainment-district non-foot-traffic location). As far as I know, that's currently "it" for regular comedy venues in Columbia. Charleston seems to be a much more fertile area with The Have Nots in their own theater and regular events such as The Charleston Comedy Festival.

UPDATE 25 July 2010: OK, the old Punch Line building at 1101 Harden Street has been demolished. See the link for details.

I know I have a lot to be thankful for, and I'm sure you do as well.

Drive safely and take breaks to let the food settle!

I'm assuming that this location of Sears Roebuck will carry on through the holiday season. There doesn't seem to be any downside to that, and folks aren't going to hesitate buying from them since they know they can always do returns at Columbia Mall or Columbiana Center.

This store is something of an odd duck for Sears. It is the only Sears I've ever been in that has shopping carts and front check-out lanes. I know Sears bought K-Mart a while back, and this place felt to me like a Sears branded K-Mart. As far as I can recall, I only shopped there once, and ended up getting that retro-Atari (pong, battlezone, missle-command etc) box that was semi-popular a few years ago. Of course like a lot of re-released toys ("Cootie", "Candyland", "Lite-Brite") it wasn't as good as the original, and one of the controllers died the second time I used it.

Once the Sears goes, I think this plaza will pretty much be a "dead mall". It's already in really bad shape, and anyone with money is going to locate in the Wal-Mart strip across the road if they can.

UPDATE 29 February 2020: Changed the title from Sears Roebuck to Sears Essentials, added a full address, tags and map icon.

Well, it was bound to happen, but now they're knocking down the "Cinderella" Howard Johnson's motel on Knox Abbot Drive. This place's claim to fame (aside from being Cayce's first "national" motel) was the whimsical Cinderella-inspired pumpkin carriage that sat in front of the lobby. This was a Cayce landmark, and the site, I gather, of innumerable high school prom pictures. In fact, in the end, I believe more people cared about what was going to happen to the carriage than cared about the motel going under, per-se. In the end, the carriage was saved and moved to City Hall, leaving the spiral staircases (which you can see in a couple of these shots) as the only touches of whimsy left in the buildings.

I'm titling this post with HoJo, since that's what everyone remembers, but in fact if I recall correctly, Howard Johnson pulled out years before the actual closure of the motel, leaving it as one of those anonymous low-budget national chains that exist only for reservations purposes.

I don't go down Knox Abbot that often, so I missed the start of demolition, and it appears that they have already taken down the lobby/office. I'm a bit concerned that the lot has been bought by CVS. To me that throws up a big question mark over the future of the CVS (the former Parkland Pharmacy) in Parkland Plaza -- The plaza really can't afford to lose that anchor...

UPDATE 31 March 2009: Added Yellow Pages ad from 1970 Southern Bell phonebook.

UPDATE 24 June 2009: The CVS built on the old HoJo site is now open:

UPDATE 7 Jan 2010: Here is the Cinderella pumpkin carraige now at the Cayce City Hall complex:

Also added full street address and full hotel name.

I've mentioned in one of my other posts, my gradual disenchantment with Pizza Hut which over the years has, due to bad corporate choices, turned from a place I looked forward to going to into a place which provides a mediocre experience at best.

I believe this former Pizza Hut on Knox Abbot Drive in Cayce is, to date, the last Pizza Hut I have eaten at in Columbia. There was nothing particularly bad about it that put me off Columbia Pizza Huts, in fact the staff was quite friendly and attentive -- it's just that in my own stomping grounds, I generally have better options for pizza. This was, however, about 10pm on Christmas Eve 2002, a date and time when anything higher up the food chain than The Waffle House that's still open is pretty hard to find. I was en route from Augusta to Pawleys Island. I can't quite picture now how I ended up on Knox Abbot unless I was cutting down I-26 to get to I-77 and the Sumter Highway, still it was a welcome break.

I don't know when this store went under, and it seems a bit odd, since I can't think of another Pizza Hut on that side of town. At any rate, the tax place has now been there several years. Perhaps they can get you a deep-dish refund.

UPDATE 25 January 2017: Added the full street address and some tags

UPDATE 23 February 2022: Adding map icon.

UPDATE 26 June 2023: Update tags.

This is one I've gotten several requests for, but about which I can really say very little -- hopefully some good comments will take up the slack here..

Gene's Pig & Chick was a Five Points landmark for a good part of my life. I'm not sure when the place was established, but it seemed to me that from the very earliest days that I can remember going to Sears on Harden Street, Gene's was there.

Unfortunately, from a point of view of actually having real memories of the place, I was a very picky eater when I was a kid, and I had decided very early in life that I didn't like chicken (I made a partial exception for Campbell's Chicken & Stars soup, though I still tended to pick the chicken pieces out of it) and that I didn't like barbecue. I'm not sure exactly when I made the barbecue "decision", since that wasn't something my mother (or anyone else in the family) made, but the chicken aversion survived a decade -plus campaign by my mother to force me to eat it. Ultimately, she gave up, and even when I was a kid, she knew better than to make one of our infrequent "eating out" trips into an unpleasant experience for both of us.

So the upshot of that is, that whether she would have wanted to stop at Gene's on a Five Points shopping trip or not, we never did.

Still the place was a constance presence, and while I don't remember quite when I found out that it was gone, I do remember being shocked and sad. The original building has long since been torn down, and the lot is now the site of a self-service Shell station, which I have also never been to.

UPDATE 14 March 2009: Added 1963 Yellow Pages Ad

UPDATE 17 June 1020 -- Becky Bailey sends in this photo of the old North Main location:

and writes:

I'm also sending a funky shot of the former Gene's Pig and Chick on N. Main Street. Probably could have defined its orientation a little better. It's near the intersection of Confederate Avenue and N. Main Street, up the street from the former Doug Broom's, and directly across the street from the present It It's Paper. Looks kinda sad, now, but in its day, there was a rooftop studio and lots of action! Doug Broom's, of course was demolished 20 years ago, I'm guessing.

UPDATE 2 Sept 2010: Added the 1970 Yellow Pages ad.