Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

Hops is a brew-pub chain which underwent a near death experience in the early 2000s. The chain was bought by the same owners who took over another near-to-dead chain, Don Pablo's, but both Columbia locations closed, and in fact, I don't believe there are any Hops left in South Carolina.

Curiously enough, though I ate at this Hops a number of times, I never did try the beer. My father, sister and I used to stop for Sunday lunch from time to time, and I recall the food as pretty good. They had the standard list of burgers as well as chicken and pasta, but their "branding" item (aside from beer, of course) was the croissant. They would bring out a plate of criossants almost as soon as you sat down, and though I don't know what a Frenchman would make of them, they were warm from the oven and drizzled with frosting and I found them quite good.

I always meant to try the beer some time, but beer doesn't really fit into my meal routine. I like un-sweet ice tea with my food (lots of it actually), not beer (nor soft drinks for that matter though I did notice that they actually had in-house brewed root-beer as well as regular beer).

I think cold closings are more the rule for restaurants than the exception. For every one where the owner announces that he's retiring and gives you notice to come in before its too late, there are ten where you show up one day and the place is empty. That's how it was for Hops.

The place was empty for a while, then Hooters moved in, and as far as I can tell, is doing a good business (though that's what I thought about Hops as well).

Walking through The Russell House this fall, I was struck, looking at the Russell House Theater coming attractions, how much the place had changed in focus.

When I was at USC, from 1980 through 1985, the theater was mainly a classics house. Sunday through Thursday, they would play a different film every night, and I probably averaged three or four movies a week, and ones I probably never would have seen otherwise. In particular, I recall Lost Horizon, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Lolita, The Pound, Cinderella Liberty, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, Double Indemnity, Farewell, My Lovely, The Magic Christian, Singin' In The Rain, Citizen Kane, The Philidelphia Story, Bringing Up Baby, Sahara, Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, Captain Blood, The Private Lives of Elizabeth & Essex, Kiss Me Deadly, The Man With the X-Ray Eyes, The In-Laws, Stagecoach, Rio Bravo, The Quiet Man, The African Queen, Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, The Lady Vanishes, The 39 Steps, The Birds, The General, Intolerance, Wings, Advise & Consent, and The Best Years of Our Lives -- to name a few!

I was a bit disheartened that as far as I could see from looking at the lobby placards, the theater is apparently no longer functioning as an exposure to cinema, but more as a second run dollar theather. Granted anyone who wants can always rent or buy all the pictures I saw, but there's still something about sitting in a theater with a bunch of people and a good movie, or a fun movie, and there's something about serendipity -- sitting down to a movie you never heard of because it's just a buck, and it beats studying and finding against the odds that its something you'll remember for the rest of your life..

At one time, the side of the lower Intersection Center strip mall that faced Service Merchandise was something of an Indian complex, with a grocery, a clothing store and the Touch of India restaurant. I'm guessing that there was probably common ownership involved, but I don't really know.

Touch of India is the one Indian restaurant in Columbia that I haven't eaten at yet (though the one across form the Bush River Wal-Mart has changed ownership at least twice since I stopped there, so perhaps I shouldn't count it anymore). I always meant to stop, but the place was tucked away out of sight and mind and I never got around to it. They re-located last year out of the dying Intersection Center and onto Garner Lane, the hotel access road at the I-20 on-ramp off of Broad River Road. I've driven by the location a few times, and actually stopped by once when it happened not to be open. The new location looks a lot better, but they've traded an unattractive location for one that's hard to get to, at least if you're coming from Forest Acres. Still I'm going to make it eventually.

UPDATE 13 September 2009: Finally got some pictures of their new location at 1321 Garner Lane, #C:

UPDATE 15 March 2010:

Well, I finally did make it to Touch of India a few months ago. The menu was quite a bit different from The Delhi Palace where I usually go (or did before they moved). I thought the dosa (if I have that right -- the pancake-like things) were pretty good.

Unfortunately, they closed shop on Sunday the 14th. Eva's story in the Free-Times says business was down, and in my opinion, the location can not have helped there -- As I said in my original post above, Garner Lane is just hard to get to, and some people simply aren't going to "go against" Interstate on-ramp traffic.

UPDATE 16 May 2010: Added the full street address for the original location, tags.

UPDATE 20 May 2011 -- The place is now a strip club. More pictures later, but here is the start of the facade change:

UPDATE 22 January 2020: Add map icon (for Intersection Center location) and update tags.

I've written about Sounds Familiar before, as the chain has been contracting ever since the digital age started. This particular store, in Myrtle Beach a couple of miles above Myrtle Square Mall, was my favorite location. It was not as large as the Rosewood or Parklane stores, but for some reason, the selection seemed to skew slightly more to stuff that caught my eye than other SF locations. For one thing, this store seemed to be the boldest in the chain as far as stocking "import" CDs went. I know I bought a number of Beach Boys / Brian Wilson "imports" there over the years including the imfamous Pet Sounds stereo sampler. Also, as might be expected for the Myrtle Beach store, they had a very good selection of "beach music" (which has no connection to The Beach Boys [other than a Carl Wilson solo song "What You Do To Me" having a brief run on the beach music charts]). In fact the whole chain had excellent beach music sections due to owning the Ripete record label, but beach music in the Myrtle Beach store was always stocked in depth.

One of my favorite touches at this store encapsulates both why I liked the place, and why the chain eventually failed -- someone had taped a faded cartoon to the cash register there. It probably came from a record-store trade magazine originally, and had a customer asking a record-store counter clerk Can you special order this out of print record for me? with the clerk responding Yes! And I can raise the dead as well.

I liked the attitude that pasted up that cartoon -- willing to poke a bit of fun at customers without the fear that someone's nose would be put out of joint. But the fact was that by several years before the store closed, any customer could special order an out of print CD from Amazon or elsewhere, and the record-store business model just didn't make sense anymore.

This building, at the intersection of Broad River & Saint Andrews Roads is apparently Mr. Bingo now (it seems to have an attached strip with a number of little businesses as well), but I'm pretty sure it was originally a skating rink, and I believe it was the last place I put on a pair of skates. This would have been in 1979, when I was a senior in high school. I distinctly remember going out with a group of friends to a rink somewhere near Irmo. I had never been before and didn't go again, so I can't absolutely say this was the place, but it seems to fit.

I had never been much of a skater because I never figured out how it was done. Oh, I could put on the skates, and "walk" around in them, but the "knack" of it -- actually using leg sweeps to move had always escaped me until this particular night, when I finally figured it out. Maybe that's why I never went back -- after figuring out the whole "propulsion" thing, what else was there to do on skates?

I think the building went through a number of incarnations after the rink closed. I seem to remember both a strip club and a C&W bar there, and some signage on the corner seeems to indicate it was a "Smoke House" restaurant as well.

UPDATE 18 Feb 09: The post was initially titled "Skating Rink". Tom in the comments identifies it as a Red Wing, and I have chaged the post title to reflect that.

Welcome Facebook users 11 July 2017: I see a lot of hits on this old page from Facebook today. Welcome to Columbia Closings. Normally this site focuses on Columbia South Carolina, but there are some other Fernandina pages you may be interested in:

A1A Gas Mart, 816 South 8th Street (Fernandina Beach FL)

Amelia Con 2014, Fernandina Beach Florida

Amelia Con 2016, Fernandina Beach Florida

Island Cinema 7, 1132 14th Street (Fernandina Beach FL)

Kmart, 1525 Sadler Road (Fernandina Beach)

O'Kane's Irish Pub And Eatery, 318 Centre Street (Fernandina Beach)

Sonny's Real Pit Bar-B-Q 2742 South 8th Street, Fernandina Beach FL

Topsy's Downtown Gulf, 710 Centre Street (Fernandina Beach)

A1A Gas Mart, 816 South 8th Street (Fernandina Beach FL)

Indian River Fruit Stand, A1A (Yulee Florida)

And check the Alphabetical Closings page for other Florida references.

And now back to the original post:

Well, I'm on the road, and didn't get all the pictures I wanted to take done beforehand, so I'm going to throw in a few ringers this week.

Read the rest of this entry »

Some of my google hits give the name of this place as Casual Male XL, but the majority seem to go with Casual Male Big & Tall. Anyway, this place was on Two Notch Road in Dentsville, between the Hess station and FedEx-Kinkos. As I hate to shop for clothes, it was never really on my radar, but I noticed sometime after New Years that the storefront was vacant. I kept meaning to get a picture, but somehow never made it to the area at an opportune time, so finally when I found myself driving by one night, I decided I might as well get a shot then or forget about it.

This section of Two Notch has been iffy for several years, with the Wendy's and Shoney's buildings still vacant, and the recent departure of Floor It Now. On the other hand, the old Quincy's just got a nice new tenant, and Lowe's and Best Buy do bring a good bit of traffic to the area.

UPDATE 3 March 2012: I happened to notice that I had a fairly decent daytime picture of this place still in operation in the background of a Wendy's shot I took, so I am putting that at the top, over the original nighttime-only pic.

I had done a closing on this building, already operatiing as Shane's Rib Shack to remember it being a Pizza Hut and a Rising High.

It now appears that a third restaurant has gone under in this spot. I'm not 100% certain that it's gone for good, and there is a bit of room for hope in the fact that the phone has not been disconnected. The sign suggests that the closing is intended to be temporary, due to a gas leak, but I would say that more than enough time has gone by to correct that, so we'll have to see. I never ate at Shanes as ribs are yet another taste I didn't acquire, but I heard a number of people say good things about the place.

Thanks to commenter MB for the heads up.

UPDATE 7 Oct 2010 -- Zazby's is now open in this building (and has been for a while):

OK, does anybody know if this is right? Google suggests that 3601 Two Notch Road, which is in the block starting at Cushman Drive and going towards Dick Dyer was Carolina Parts Company, and I have a vague memory of a junkyard type place (which the Beware of The Dog sign would support).

However, I had noticed the lot as vacant several times driving and walking by in the past year or so -- except for a battered sign. The lot is apparently being cleared, and the sign is now gone, before I could get a picture of it, but my memory is that it was not a junkyard type sign. The name of the establishment had been obliterated but I think the top part of the sign was for Coke as if it were one of those Coke-subsidised signs you used to see all the time for restaurant names. Does anyone remember a restaurant, or anything that would have a Coke-sponsored sign at this site? Possibly from before Carolina Parts?

Just for fun, here are the recent traffic statistics for columbiaclosings.com. These are given in requests, and my understanding is that a page with multiple pictures will be ranked more highly since each request for the page generates a separate request for each picture. In each case, the most recent data is not accurate since the day, week, or month may not be over yet.

Daily Traffic:

Weekly Traffic:

Monthly Traffic:

For some reason, October was a very good month, and you can certainly see the impact of my three week vacation at the end of July and the start of August.

As to what draws people to the blog? Well, Godaddy's report claims that if a search engine gives query data, they list it in the report. I'm not sure what that means in terms of whether this includes google or yahoo or MSN or what. I particularly like numbers 10, 24 & 29: