Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

Computer Renaissance is a chain of used computer stores. I first became aware of them when I was working in Augusta, and there was one on the Bobby Jones Expressway where we would sometimes get parts, and where I bought a much beloved AT&T/NCR 386 laptop. (Which I still have, and which still works great, running FreeBSD 2.2, though I never could get X working). I say "used computer" store, but they also have new parts such as sound cards, video cards etc.

This particular store, which is now sells fitness equipment, is off of Harbison Boulevard in the Books-a-Million plaza. I got my second "main" home computer there while I was still living in Aiken. At the time, I was still convinced of the virtues of SCSI disks vs IDE (eventually the price differential just became too great however), and I was struck by a used SCSI tower system they had. It was just a 100mhz but it served me well as a DSL anchor box for years, and was still running fine when I retired it shortly after returning to Columbia (though I had switched out the SCSI drives for IDE by then).

Not too long after I got it, I noticed the Computer Renaissance store in Augusta went under, and the next time I checked Harbison, this store was gone as well. I think part of the problem was that new computers had just become so cheap that the used computer market crashed. There may also have been management problems. There is a new Computer Renaissance store out on Hardscrabble Road, and one of the guys there told me that the chain had completely changed concepts after its hard times. I believe he said they had switched from a company store model to a franchaise store model though I could have that backwards -- at any rate it was a big change. I have gotten some parts at the Hardscrabble store, and have seen some good deals on systems there, but in general, Hardscrabble is just to difficult for me to get to (it's obvious it's going to have to be a 4-lane road someday -- why not just bite the bullet and do it?) especially since I'm pretty comfortable with my computing base right now.

My high school didn't have a cafeteria, so you either brown-bagged lunch, ate off campus if you had a car, or ate microwaved Stewart Sandwiches from the canteen. These were universally acknowledged to be awful, but they had a strange fascination, and we ate them anyway even as we joked about them. I for one, never could tell the difference between the Stewart "Steak Sandwich" and the Stewart "Hamburger".

The company was apparently originally called Stewart In-Fra-Red Commissary of Minnesota and their slogan was the dubious "Sold Almost Everywhere". After my encounter with them in the 1970s, they bought a couple of other companies, changed their name to Stewart Foods, Inc. then merged with Blevins Concession Supply, Co. and changed their name to Stewart Blevins, Inc.. That was in 1992, and I can't seem to find them after that.

Anyway, I was driving around off of Huger Street in the 1980s, and came across their local office. It was something of a revelation as in my mind, Stewart Sandwiches more appeared than were made and distributed on purpose!. The place now appears to be yet another barbecue restaurant: The Palmetto Pig. It may well be a great place, but while the location seems reasonable to me for a food distribution operation, I think it would be a bad place for a restaurant.

UPDATE 1 June 2011: Commenter Andy says this was Shealy's Sandwiches, not Stewart, and that Shealy moved here from the Assembly Street location (now TakoSushi).

Well, I'll try to verify that it was never a Stewart in old City Directories when I get a chance, but in the meantime, I'm leaving all the Stewart's memories here. (Similarly to what I had to do when I screwed up Krystal..)

The Horseshoe Deli now occupies the space in the first floor Russell House foyer which used to house the student post office boxes for most (or perhaps all) campus residents.

The Post Office box facility was rather oddly shaped in that it was a rectangular block set in the middle of the current deli space. There was a door to the Russell House courtyard at one end while the other end was open to the foyer. The entire rectangle was covered with old-style (combination lock) post office boxes on all four sides except for a door allowing Postal personell access to the inside so that mail could be put into the boxes. (There may also have been a window, though no full service post-office-like functionality was provided -- you could not buy stamps or mail letters). I don't remember what my PO Box number was, but my box was on the side of the rectangle nearest to Greene Street, and was at a moderate height which involved no stooping or craning.

Since Russell House is more or less in the center of campus, and since I lived in Douglas, which was at the far edge, my practice was that if it looked like it might rain during the day, I would take my compact umbrella with me from my room, and if it wasn't raining by the time I got to Russell House, and if it was after morning mail delivery (which it usually was as I avoided early morning classes if at all possible!), I would put my umbrella in my PO Box and go on with my day. As I'm sure most of you have guessed, this worked well until the day the spring catch decided to release inside the mailbox, turning the umbrella (which was point-first into the box) into one of those objects that can only be pushed one way (like a cable tie or Chinese finger-cuff). I finally had to wait until the next day and ask a postal worker to retreive it for me...

I'm not sure when the PO Boxes were moved. It appears to me that some have been put upstairs by the old game room, while the majority have been put in the "Carolina Underground" basement mall.

Redbone Alley on Forest Drive in a Wal-Mart outparcel was the Columbia incarnation of a Florence based restaurant. While the Florence location apparently made clever use of a vacated mall anchor slot, the Columbia operation built a completely new building, which perhaps in the end was a bridge too far.

I believe I was still living in Aiken when the place opened, and only ate there once. Looking at their online menu, I'm pretty sure I would have ordered a burger. Whatever I had, it didn't impress me as either exceptionally bad or good. I do remember thinking that the atmosphere was a bit upscale to become a regular hang-out for me. Apparently a lot of people felt that way, as the place did not last long at all.

The next tenant in the building was some sort of Memphis barbecue operation. I'm not a barbecue person, and so had the burger again, and again it was fine, but nothing to write home about. I recall that The Free Times was not impressed with the barbecue, leading to an amusing letter to the editor from one of the Free Times rack jobbers saying that he should have been warned that the FT had just panned the food before being sent to restock the FT rack there!

That place had a very short run as well, and the next operation was a San Jose mexican operation. This led the San Jose up Forest Drive by the Rite Aid to put up a We Are Not Moving! sign as people just assumed that they must be the San Jose handling the new operation. I never ate at that incarnation..

The San Jose had, I think, an even shorter run than any of the other operations there, and the place got new management which changed the name to Pancho's. I believe it's been that way for a year or so now, and I have yet to eat there either.

UPDATE: Commenter Matthew identifies the barbecue operation as Corky's

UPDATE 20 November 2009: Added Corky's to the post title, also added the full street address.

Folks,

After an epic 6 hour battle with WordPress, Silverlight and PHP, I have figured out how to enable comments on pages. This means you can now add comments to Signs Your Favorite Restaurant Is About To Close, and Ted's Rules For Restaurants.

It also means that I can finally add a Have Your Say page for general site comments, closings I've missed and random chatter. You can get to the "Have Your Say" page from the link I just gave, or (more likely) from the Navigation Bar which always appears at the top of the site.

Well, I suppose it had to happen, but it is rather jarring to see The Pelican Inn up for sale. Built about 1830, this landmark inn has been part of the Pawleys Island landscape forever, and has been an inn or boarding house since the turn of the 20th century and has been the locus of several sightings of South Carolina's most famous ghost, The Gray Man. It is also possibly the last inn in South Carolina not to be air conditioned!

The web site is mostly zombie now, but an archived version explains some of the place's appeal:

Our goal has been to maintain the historical feel and share
the Inn with our friends. The Guest Rooms are comfortably furnished and have a Queen and, depending on the room, one or two Twin Beds. The Rooms are cooled by ceiling fans over the beds and breezes through large windows. Guests will also notice the absence of telephones, TVs, radios and other modern distractions.

They were in the news just this year for taking on a new chef, so this closing is rather surprising. I hope that when the place sells, the new owners will continue to run it as an inn, but I don't really expect that to happen.

UPDATE 14 Aug 2009: Well, note the rental plaque in this picture:

The property is now a Pawleys Island Realty Property

This beautiful Historic Inn is located in the heart of Pawleys..Rented as an entire house it's a 10 bedroom that accomodates 24 with 6 baths. Beautiful wooded property that has with stood the test of time. Oceanfront but not ocean view with the largest creek dock on the island for crabbing, fishing, kayaking. Large restaurant style kitchen with attached dining area, Cable TV, washer and 2 dryer, Ceiling fans, Central Heat/Air.Grill. Oceanfront Gazebo with hammock. Come create lasting memories, great for family reunions and weddings.

UPDATE 25 March 2010: Good news! Check the comments. It appears that the inn will be back in business.

UPDATE 23 April 2010: And here is the Pelican Inn's new blog.

UPDATE 21 August 2010: here is the Pelican Inn's new official web site.

This location, now a Gamecock memorabilia store, and apparently starting life as a college hang-out called The Twilight Lounge at one time housed one of the most controversial businesses in Columbia: Chippendolls, a nude dance club.

I'm not sure exactly when the place started. There is a very long and extremely dry 1995 legal opinion on Chippendolls's application for an ABC permit which suggests that the establishment became a strip club around 1988. I was living out of town for most of the period of the Chippendolls controversy, but my memory is that the club had the standard grumbles from the neighbors while it was a topless club, but was operating mostly below the radar of the city establishment as a whole.

That changed when the club decided to go from topless dancing to fully nude dancing. Apparently those few square inches of cloth made a big difference and trying to close the club became quite a local cause celebre for a while -- I believe there were a number of zoning efforts made to shut it down. Either one of them finally succeeded, or the club ran into trouble of its own making, as these places often do. For whatever reason, it has been gone for many years now. In fact, I was a bit surprised to see the 1995 date on the ABC action. If you had asked me, I would have said it hadn't lasted that long. The city continues to have a number of strip clubs, but I don't believe any dare to go bare now.

UPDATE 25 Aug 2009: Added The Twilight Lounge to the post title.

UPDATE 12 May 2010: Added the 1998 Bellsouth Yellow Pages ad for Chippendolls

UPDATE 10 June 2011: Changed the closing date in the post title to "12 September 1997" based on commenter Michelle's info. (Which made me relook at the phonebook mentioned above -- It's actually the Feb-97 through Feb-98 (ie mostly 1997) phonebook.

Back, I believe, in 1970, Sesquicentennial State Park inaugurated, with great fanfare, a concrete ampitheater. My memory says that it was inspired by The Tricentennial. At this remove, I can't recall why anyone thought this boondoggle made sense, but at the time it was a fairly big deal, and I understod everybody in the arts community to expect great things from it. (Inasmuch as a 9 year old understood what the "arts community" expected!)

The first production I saw there was The Liberty Tree. I believe this was part of the Tricentennial celebration, and was a play set in Revolutionary Times, full of patriotic themes. I remember it had a very catchy theme song where the refrain was "Dee dah dah -- dah dah, The Liberty Tree, The Liberty Tree, something something..", but I don't think the play itself was a musical. At any rate, it was great fun for us kids, and one of the few live plays we saw growing up (the others [aside from below] were The Roar of Greasepaint, The Smell of the Crowd, and an imfamous USC production of Huckleberry Finn which my mother ended up paying my sister to leave). It was fun to drive out to Sesqui, which we never had done at night, and to run around the asiles.

The next production we saw there was a production of Gypsy: A Musical Fable with local radio personality Gene McKay cast as the act's manager (Herbie?). In retrospect, I'm a bit surprised that our parents took us to a show (partly) about strippers, but of course there was no actual stripping involved, and they probably figured that most of that would go over our heads, as indeed it did, and besides, I had figured out how to make a flashlight by taping two D batteries to a 12-inch ruler, wrapping a wire around a flashlight bulb and then touching the wire to one end of the batteries and the bulb to the other. Naturally I insisted on bringing this to the show and spent most of my time fooling with it (I hope my parents made me go back into the building portion of the amphitheater!).

After that the ampitheater fell into disuse. I can speculate as to why, and I would advance several guesses. First and foremost would be the fact that it is located in South Carolina. I don't mean anything cultural by that, rather that the climate is not really ideal. In the summer, the days are blazing hot, and nobody wants to sit in a concrete oven. The nights are better, but the location in a wooded state park guarantees plenty of bugs. Spring and Fall are better, of course, but you still face the prospect of rain-outs and daytime shows are still uncomfortable. Second, Columbia was (and still is though to a lesser extent) a medium sized city which already had two permanent drama companies (Town Theater & Workshop Theater) as well as various productions by USC. It's not clear to me that there was ever a drama community to support productions out in the boonies (as Sesqui certainly was at the time). Also, I expect that the location of the ampitheater inside a State Park probably would raise problems regarding anything of an avant-garde nature, or involving the sales of alcohol.

The final production I saw there was probably around 1976 or 1977 by which time, the ampitheater was definitely out of regular service. I don't recall the name of the show, but it was a British farce of some sort, put on by a travelling British troupe and essentially our whole high school was bussed over to Sesqui to see it. I think they got the by now defunct venue for free or a nominal fee since it was "educational". (If you make students go, then it's "Educational" by definition, right?) The only details of the show that I can recall, were that you had to listen very hard to hear the speakers, and to interpret their accents, and that a lot of the action seemed to revolve around making "bubble & squeak", apparently some sort of English "delicacy". This would have been in the spring, around May, and in the early afternoon. The place was blazingly hot. I had recently read a book on science projects which included a chapter on building a solar oven, and I remember thinking that the wall of white concrete seats surrounding the stage floor (where we were all clustered) looked a lot like the tinfoil "solar wings" which reflected and focused the sun onto the oven in the book. It certainly felt like that anyway!

Sesqui is not one of my regular hangouts, but I've been there dozens of times since the 1970s, and idly wondered whatever happened to the amphitheater. On my most recent visit there, I decided to look for it. I remembered that it was off to the left as you drove in from Two Notch, but not how far down it was. In the event, I got all the way to the lake parking lot without finding it, and it didn't seem to appear on any of the park signage. I drove back out towards Two Notch and saw a disused dirt road to the right, parked and hiked in a bit before deciding that there was no way the access could have deteriorated that badly since the 70s and it was too far off the road anyway, so I drove back down to the lake one more time.

Hmm. That building behind the (still!) never finished colonial era house looked oddly curved -- Could it be? There were still no signs, but I parked and walked on up. There was a little building in front that could plausibly have been a box-office, and the big building was oddly curved. I walked around to both ends of the building, but there was fencing keeping me from getting behind it, or even seeing what was behind it. OK, there was a little access road to the side signed Training Cener, so I walked down that. The whole place was fenced in, and the path didn't go all the way behind it, but siddenly I could see -- the bank of concrete seats! This was the ampitheater! I took some pictures and figured that was probably that, but then decided to walk back up to the building again, and see if I could see anything through the doors.

I couldn't; the glass was too dark, but then on a whim, I turned the handle, and the door was unlocked. Now, normally when I take pictures of abandoned buildings here, I don't make any attempt to go inside. There may be alarms and it's certainly trespassing. Given the total lack of signs here, I'm pretty sure the ampitheater building is not considered an "open to the public" part of the park, but since it's a State Park, I figured I was part owner, and I went in.

As it turned out, there was nobody inside. It appears to me that the theater is now a training "retreat" for State Park employees with sleeping quarters and a nice kitchen in the old concession stand. The back door leading down into the ampitheater was locked, so I was not able to go down into the seats, but I was able to get some reasonably good pictures through the back windows. The place looks kind of sad, as you would expect after 30 or so years of disuse.

On my way out, I took some more pictures of the "box office" and wandered over to the log cabin. I have some kind of vague recollection that it was originally meant to show colonial building techniques as part of some historical village exhibit, but that never came to fruition, and the place remains unfinished despite having been there over 20 years now.

Oh well, it wasn't economical, or practical, but it was entertaining!

Let me entertain you
Let me make you smile
Let me do a few tricks
Some old and some new tricks
I'm very versatile

UPDATE 21 June 2011: Added (at top) a picture of The Liberty Tree being performed in the ampitheater from an old Chamber of Commerce promotional book.

UPDATE 13 March 2013 -- Commenter Bo sends in this photo:

along with this information about the log cabin:

Hey Ted here is a photo of the "old Log House" at Sesqui Park. Before the lapboard siding was removed. It was a rental house near the corner of Lancaster & River Drive. Now an empty lot next to Head of Style Salon. The "tenants" were customers on my paper route That building was originally "Watson's Tile and flooring. Owned by The Honorable Albert Watson US House of Representatives.

and this youtube video:

L A Weight Loss was in the Forest Park shopping center, which is on Forest Drive, next to Cardinal Newman high school. This place was on the end in between the Piggly Wiggly and CVS. I kept meaning to go back in the daytime and get some better pictures, but you know how that works sometimes.

A bit of googling establishes that the chain is franchaise based and has a line of protein bars and other foods. As with anything, I can find people on the web saying it's great and people saying it's a scam. At any rate, their weight on Forest Drive is down to 0.

UPDATE 4 March 2010: Added full street address to post title.

This lot, across from Trenholm Plaza and originally behind Bell's Drive-In and the Gulf station was once a plant nursery. I think I went there with my mother a few times, but I believe she favored another place, perhaps out on Two Notch. I can't really recall much about the place, even the name. And though it's hard to believe with all the building activity in this part of Forest Acres now, I do remember that after the Nursery closed, the lot sat vacant and overgrown (with some of the nursery infrastructure still there) for many years. Fairly recently, within the last ten years, I would say, it has become a dental plaza.