Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

Man, this is a cavernous space! My eyes tend to glide over buildings that I'm not interested in, and most of the time auto parts stores fall into that category, but it's hard to believe how many times I must have driven past that behemoth without noticing it. Apparently this place was a machine shop as well as a parts store, so I guess that explains the larger footprint. Perhaps it explains why the place closed as well. I admit I have very little idea of what exactly a machine shop does, but if it involves auto repair, wouldn't most people use parts from the factory rather than having them machined locally?

According to a really cool real estate listing that you should look at, if just for the ariel view, the place has 9600 square feet in the main space and 2690 square feet in the mezzanine. Notice the curtains hung in the mezzanine window too!

Hat tip to ChiefDanGeorge..

UPDATE 28 Sep 2010 -- It's now a church:

I noticed on the electronic sign you see when you're at the Harden Street light heading downtown on Gervais a month or so ago that Peter Glenn Ski & Sports was going out of business.

The only time in my life I've even almost gone skiing was in, I think, ninth grade when we had a class trip to a North Carolina slope but I got sick and had to give my place to a cousin. It's probably just as well as I'm sure I would have broken something. All that is to say that I never went into, or considered going into, Peter Glenn.

The window "murals" were nice though!

UPDATE 16 April 2009: Commenter Brian notes that this place used to be "Jeff Price Tennis & Ski". I have updated the post title to include that. He also notes that the last day of "Peter Glenn" was probably 8 March 2009, and I have made that update to the post title as well.

UPDATE 13 May 2010: Rearranged Post title to put "Jeff Price" first, and added the "& skate"

UPDATE 4 February 2016 -- As noted by commenter Joe Shlabotnik, this place has been torn down:

UPDATE 13 July 2017 -- The new building is up:

This building across the street from Trenholm Plaza in the remnants of the Forest Lake Shopping Center is now Coplon's department store, but in the 60s and 70s, it was the store where my mother most like to shop for groceries: Colonial.

Although I went there many times, I was young enough that certain very specific things stick in my mind rather than a good overall memory. In particular, I recall that if you came in through the main doors (which were on the Sakura side of the building, I think), took your cart and jinked left across the row of checkout lines, you would find a wire cage filled with boxes of Barnum's animal crackers, and we would always try to wheedle our mother into buying some (it rarely worked). They also shared a house brand for cheese, Farm Charm with Big Star groceries, and we all felt that this was the best cheddar of all the local groceries.

In the right back corner of the store, there was a Coke machine (presumably mostly for employee breaks) which stayed at $0.10 long after all the other Coke machines I was familiar with had gone to $0.15. The restrooms were, I believe, through a swinging door behind the machine. As was common with grocery stores, and indeed most other stores, in this period, these were not official restrooms -- there was no customer access. Of course all bets were off with childhood emergencies and a persuasive mother. I recall she talked the staff into letting me back there once, and I was tremendously impressed by the raciness of having an exasperated handwritten sign taped up over the urinal: Those of you with shorter bats please stand closer to the plate. That never would have flown in an "official" restroom.

And then of course there was the park behind the store where we spent many hours while our mother shopped, and where I climbed the monkey bars and got stuck hanging from my knees.

Groceteria has a history of Colonial and Big Star. It's clear from that that Colonial was in trouble by the 70s and was rebranding as the lower margin Big Star, but I don't know exactly when this store closed. I know it was well before I went to college, so I'm thinking mid-70s. After it closed, we sometimes shopped the Big Star co-located with the Fort Jackson Boulevard K-Mart for Farm Charm cheese, but in general that was too far, and I think my mother usually went to Trenholm Plaza after that.

Coplon's remodelled the Colonial building to add the front drive-under canopy, and moved the main entrance to the Forest Drive side of the building. I have never been inside since Colonial left but I feel sure you can't get a $0.10 Coke there anymore.

Everybody have a great holiday weekend!

Kester's Bamboo House occupied the spot on Harden Street now held by China Garden and Jungle Jim's. The first (rather unflattering) image comes from the 1963 Southern Bell directory and the second from the 1970 one. I'm not sure when the place closed, but I suspect it was sometime in the 1970s. I'm pretty sure I recall hearing about it as a child, but don't recall seeing it after I began to drive myself. A posting to a genealogy website says that the original Mr. Kester passed in 1966, but I don't know if the business stayed in the family after that or was sold at that point.

I also don't know if 724 Harden was split into two businesses at that point, or if Kester's occupied the whole space by itself, though the 1970 Yellow Pages ad claims banquet seating for 100, which seems larger than the current China Garden capacity. At any rate, I'm pretty sure the current China Garden building was at least part of Kester's and does date back to that era, and is somewhat responsible for the closing of The Parthenon.

As I remember it, the story in The State was that when the interminable Five Points road work of a few years ago reached The China Garden a snag developed. As the work crews went to replace the infrastructure under the building's foundation, they found that the building had no foundation! The front wall was basically supported only by the sidewalk, so before they could go under the building to work, they had to shore everything up and this took a lot longer than they expected -- and all the while they were there, access to The Parthenon was very difficult.

UPDATE 24 June 2019: Add tags and map icon.

You don't tug on Superman's cape, you don't spit into the wind, you don't pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger, and you don't open a restaurant at 2630 Decker Boulevard.

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You can still see the empty placard in the K-Mart sign showing where the Advance Auto Parts sign used to be -- If K-Mart were in better shape itself, they probably would have pulled that down, as it looks decrepit and bad for their brand.

Anyway, the way I recall it, this space which apparently dates from 1970 like the K-Mart, was in its first iteration, a Western Auto.

The Western Auto that I remember best was the one at Trenholm Plaza, where I used to browse the Western Flyer bikes and buy those huge 1-volt carbon-zinc batteries with the screw terminals for hobby projects. I know I went into this store a number of times, but I can't really reall anything specific about it. Wikipedia says that Western Auto was acquired first by Sears, and then later by Advance Auto Parts, which phased out the Western Auto name (mostly) in 2003 (though many stores had already switch to "Advance" by then), and in fact this store was an Advance when it closed.

That history is a bit ironic since K-Mart like Western Auto was bought by Sears. If Sears had held onto the Western Auto brand a bit longer (Sears dropped Western in 1998 and bought K-Mart in 2005), they could have had some sort of super-mega store in this building

UPDATE 4 April 2022: Updating tags, adding map icon.

Honestly, what more can I say about Sounds Familiar? I've written about it here, here, and here: Nice Columbia based record store chain that had a good selection, and knowledgeable staff but fell victim to the Internet revolution as did most record store chains. This location, on Parklane near Columbia Mall, was the penultimate one to close, leaving the Rosewood store alone for the last month or so. Note to the almost antique "cassettes and records" slogan given on the sign. I wonder how many of either they sold in the last 10 years?

However little else I might have to say about the chain, I will say that today was a magnificent day for taking pictures, especially if you like clouds -- and I do!

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I just noticed the other day that this Hess filling station by the K-Mart on Two Notch Road was gone. It's by the Wendy's that's gone, which is by the Casual Male which is gone, making that strip something of a desolation row.

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I drove up in the parking lot of the Kroger on Fort Jackons Boulevard because I had noticed some activity there and wanted to see what was going on. In the event I'm still not sure about that, though it appears to be water utility work, but while I was there, I noticed that this Goodyear car repair place on the Kroger outparcel was gone.

There's no date on the note they left on the door, but I believe it's fairly recent. I've used the one on Forest Drive, and they seem pretty decent, so I'm not sure what the issue here was. From this real estate report it appears that the property was built in 1974. I guess that would be not long after the Starlite Drive In there went out of business -- I know it was still there in 1973.

UPDATE 5 April 2009: I see in a comment about the Garners Ferry Kroger that I had forgotten that this place closed in April of 2008 -- I've updated the post title to reflect that.

UPDATE 29 February 2012 -- As mentioned by commenter Andrew below, this building has now been razed: