Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

The UPS Store at Trenholm Plaza made the move across the parking lot from the Holligan's wing to the Post Office side near the new Italian restaurant. It rejoins former neighbor Foilline Vision Center there, leaving Holligan's as the only business still operating on the outer edge of the plaza. At one time I had heard Holligan's was to move into the old Rogers Brothers spot, then I had heard it was going into the old Coldstone location. Unless the property owners have changed their mind about tearing down that wing, it will have to go somewhere.

I find it a little interesting that the UPS store is now so close to the Post Office. In theory, they are competitors, and strip malls often have "no compete" clauses that play into who they will lease to. I remember an interesting news story about a court forced to rule if a "burrito" was a "sandwich" to decide if a property owner had broken a promise to a sandwich shop not to allow another sandwich shop in. Of course Trenholm Plaza has always been weird that way. They have two grocery stores, and essentially two "Hallmark" stores.

UPDATE 29 November 2011: The old location is to be a Cafe Caturra.

I was going to Panera Bread the other day, and noticed that this Advance Auto Parts store in an outparcel of the Garners Ferry Road K-Mart was gone. Actually, the day I noticed it, one of those fly-by-night sofa sales operations had set up shop in the parking lot (which is well located for access and visibility). The door sign optimistically states "closed temporarily", but we shall see. Interestingly (or not :-) this place is just catty-cornered across the street from the NAPA Auto Parts store I wrote about a while back.

And as a special added bonus, the historical marker for "Camp Jackson", which is in the store parking lot:

UPDATE 18 March 2009:

Well, looks like I took those pictures just in time. I went by on 12 March, and they had already knocked the whole place down (except for the front steps) and were digging a honking big hole where it was. So far the historic plaque is untouched.

UPDATE 17 Dec 2010: Fixed the post title to indicate "Devine Street" rather than "Garners Ferry Road". Added a second picture of the new store.

UPDATE 5 October 2009: The new store is built and open:

UPDATE 17 Dec 2010: Changed post title to indicate Devine Street rather than Garners Ferry Road. Added another picture of the new store.

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

When I was growing up, my grandmother had a La-Z-Boy, as did two aunts. We kids always loved to get into them, lever out the footrest and throw ourselves backwards, listening to the chair ratchet up. When my sister moved out, she got one for herself, and I finally took the opportunity to get one for myself a few years ago.

In the event, I find that I spend more time sitting in front of this computer than in my comfortable recliner, but still it's nice to finally have a good chair. I picked it out at this outlet on Forest Drive, just down from Trenholm Plaza heading towards Fort Jackson, and they delivered and assembled it with no drama. There were a number of contractors working in the building today, so I suppose it is going to have a new life as something though I didn't see any indication as to what. I'm also not sure what happened to La-Z-Boy itself. I'd guess another casualty of the housing crash -- you most often need new furniture for a new house, otherwise you can live with the pieces you have for a while longer.

UPDATE 20 April 2009:

As Mrs. SK notes below, Tuesday Morning is here.

It's interesting that they came back this close to Trenholm Plaza. That makes me guess they were shown the door there as part of the plaza upgrade rather than just not being viable there as I had initially thought.

UPDATE 18 May 2023: Updating tags and adding map icon.

I wrote about J. B. White (White's) before, so I don't have much about that to add here. Actually, I don't have much to say about the distribution center either -- it wasn't a place a consumer would ever go inside, but I just wanted to note that it was here, out on Sunset Boulevard just a bit to the south of the I-20 intersection.

I see that a company called Span is using it now, though they don't seem to be doing much trucking in and out of there (granted it was a Sunday when I took these), and appear to be trying to sell the place (or perhaps they are simply leasing it until the owner can sell).

I suppose I shouldn't do two Eckerd Drugs posts so close together, but writing about the one on Taylor Street made me think about the one at Dutch Square, and I already had the pix, so why not?

The Eckerd's at Dutch Square is the only Eckerd's I know of which had a lunch counter. Even at the time Dutch Square was built in the early 70s, drugstore lunch counters were on the way out, but I suppose they figured they had a captive audience and plenty of foot traffic, like an old downtown, plus there was no food court at the time (I believe Chik-Fil-A, Annabelle's and a cafeteria were the only restaurants in the mall).

The layout of this store was a bit unusual. I have taken the pictures catty-cornered because that was the way the store was oriented. You can see that the current tenant, The Dress Barn has an entrance on both the main up-and-down corridor of the mall and on the cross corridor leading to a mall entrance on the Dutch Square Boulevard side of the mall. So did Eckerd's, with the lunch counter being situated crossways such that if you walked in through the main corridor entrance and out through the cross corridor entrance, you would have walked across the whole lunch counter space parallel to the counter.

Between the lunch counter area and the main store proper, there was a silver turnstile which only allowed passage in not out, which I always considered an unfriendly touch, but I suppose it helped with shoplifting since there was no store checkout on the lunch counter side (the store entrance with registers was on the cross-corridor near the mall door).

There was also an Eckerd's in Columbia Mall, and I'm unsure which store packed it in first, but I'm pretty sure the Dutch Square one did not make it out of the 1990s.

UPDATE 10 August 2020: Add map icon, update tags.

Well, that was a bit sooner than I had expected. For some reason, I was thinking that the Sounds Familiar flagship store on Rosewood was staying open through February, but when I went over there on the 26th, the place was already closed and emptied out. I've written about Sounds Familiar before, here and here. I guess over the years, I was in this store the most, though the Myrtle Beach store was probably my favorite. The last thing I specifically recall buying here was the ABBA Gold greatest hits collection sometime last summer -- used. I know I bought a good bit of beach music here including some ripete LPs, (For the longest time, that was the only way to get Lamont Dozier's Cool Me out though it is finally on CD now), and some interesting "import" CDs (though they basically stopped carrying those in later years).

The counter "podium" was an interesting feature of this store. The area where the registers, CD players and computers were was raised about a foot off the store floor on a wooden platform which is still there. The only reason I can think of for doing such a thing is so the staff could keep an eagle eye out for "shrinkage", but the effect was such that when you picked out your CDs, it was like approaching the throne: Oh please, your majesties couldst thou smilest down on me that I might purchase these graven disks of recorded sounds?

I haven't checked out the place being advertised in the window signs, and am not sure what the connection with Sounds Familiar is, if any. At any rate, the closing of this store marks the end of a local success story (20+ years is a pretty good run!), and puts us one step closer to the end of the "music store" era.

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From what I understand, Eckerd was long an arm of J. C. Penny, which was looking to dump the thing for years before it was able to. That notwithstanding, Eckerd went on a building spree in Columbia a few years before the chain was finally taken over by Rite-Aid.

This included building a number of new stores which went under even before the take-over was in the works, and this building, at 1720 Taylor Street (between the train tracks and the old Big-T) was one of them. My memory is that it closed down almost as soon as it opened, though that may be something of an exaggeration. I'm not sure if it was caught in the chain's problems, or just not a viable location. Dollar General proves retail can work in that spot, but Eckerd's was a bit pricier.

UPDATE 15 May 2011: Changed closing date in post title to April 2000 based on commenter Andrew's research.

UPDATE 10 August 2020: Add map icon, update tags

Go here for a substantial update. (it's not good news..)

If you've been clicking through to the high-res pictures lately (and assuming your browser doesn't auto-scale them into medium-res), you'll have noticed that they are a lot bigger. That's because I've been using the Lumix LX3 I gave myself for Christmas as the new closing-cam.

The original closing-cam was a Kodak DX3600. My memory says that I bought it on New Years Day 2008, but the photographic record says that, as usual, my memory for dates if off. At any rate I'm sure that I bought it at the antiques mall on Centre Street in Fernandina Beach FL where the old down-town grocery store used to be. I've picked up antique cameras and parts there several times, as well as books, postcards and other what-nots, so when I saw a digital camera for $14.99, how could I resist -- I mean, come on, an antique digital camera!

I went to the Kodak web site and downloaded a PDF of the manual, put in some batteries, and found it ready to go. I'm guessing what happened was that the original owner lost the software somehow or other and found himself with no way to download his pictures (ther was no flash card when I bought it, just the camera built-in memory). I would have had no use for the software anyway as I don't run Windows, but I installed Gnu Photo which recognized the camera immediately, and I was good to go.

At 2.2MP, the resolution wasn't great by modern standards, but I was very happy with the camera, and it performed yeoman's duty for this blog, and in general, including lots of shots it wasn't really designed for, like the avaiable light shots I did at the 2008 State Fair. Unfortunately, it took a spill off the dresser one evening, and was a little flaky after that, culminating in total failure on a trip to Monkey Business indoor amusement park in Lexington on 31 Janurary 2009.

I'm quite happy with the new Lumix, though I still haven't actually read the manual to figure out all the functionality I'm not using yet, but I can hardly say I didn't get my $14.00 worth out of the original closing-cam. Sic transit gloria mundi.

The picture isn't very good because the sun was against me, but Jack's was a local shoe store on Sunnyside Drive (which is a side street off of Forest Drive, just past Richland Mall heading towards town). The site is now either Miyo's or Leapin' Lizards -- I can't recall exactly which space it was. Growing up, we shopped for shoes in a number of places, including Gerber's at Trenholm Plaza and the shoe departments at Sears and other department stores, but I think Jack's is where we most often ended up.

I remember in particular, that Jack's was the place I got my first pair of Sebago Docksides, a shoe so comfortable that I have worn them ever since and that would be over 30 years now. In fact, that was about the only place in town I could find them. Now I either have to get them in Charleston, or order them from amazon.com (which is OK since my feet stay the same size now).