Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

A To Z Video was on Two Notch Road next to Dave's nightclub and almost across the street from the Aaro Rental Center. Although I never went in, I was under the impression at the time that the salient fact in the name was that 'X' was between 'A' & 'Z' -- however, looking at these pictures I notice "videogames" so perhaps I was wrong about that.

At any rate, the place did not last long, and sat empty for quite a while. I figured I ought to go ahead and take these pictures despite it being so drab and rainy as it appears that the building is about to go under construction and I expect to see something new here before too long.

UPDATE 12 September 2011 -- The building has been refurbished somewhat and is now up for lease, though the A To Z signage so far remains:

1306 Charleston Highway:

7007 Parklane Road:

Chappy's Fish & Chips was a constant media presence on the radio (and in The State as in the coupon from 10 November 1987 above), though I think the most common image I had of the whole "fish & chips" concept came from that English N'er-do-well Andy Capp.

The 2911 Two Notch location referred to in this ad is now the McDonald's at the intersection of Beltline and Two Notch, though I believe the original Chappy's building was demolished. I never ate at Chappy's because I don't like fish (or the smell of fish), and have never been to England, so I can comment neither on how good nor on how authentic the fish and chips were.

Though it's not mentioned in this ad, Chappy's was connected with a very similar (identical except for the name perhaps?) operation called Cedric's. At this remove, it seems like an odd strategy to dilute your concept into two brands, especially since as far as I can recall, the restaurants were a purely Columbia phenomenon. The Chappy's radio commercials used to end with an exhortation to Be sure and visit my friend Cedric too!. I think the stores had at least one English "double decker" bus that they used for promotions. Wonder what happened to that?

At any rate, I'm pretty sure the stores didn't make it through the 90s. I don't think "fish & chips" was ever going to be "big" (though the coupon suggests they were moving in a more Southern direction as well -- "hushpuppies"), perhaps it wasn't big enough to support that many stores, perhaps the owners wanted to retire -- whatever the reason I don't think you can get fish & chips at all in Columbia now. And "Andy Capp" has long since left The State as well.

UPDATE 18 November 2009: Added pix of the Charleston Highway location, made minor edits to the text and added the Charleston Highway and Broad River locations to the post title.

UPDATE 27 May 2010: Added newspaper ad from The State 19 Feb 1979

UPDATE 27 June 2010: Added pictures of the Parklane location.

UPDATE 18 August 2017 -- The Charleston Highway location is now a Cricket phone store:

I noticed a few months ago that this little building on Two Notch Road, at the bottom of the hill between Pinestraw Road and Pine Belt Road, was now a Nationwide Insurance office. I see this month that they are moving to another location on Two Notch, leaving the building vacant again.

Insurance is usually a pretty staid business (unless you are AIG..), but this location has a somewhat racier past. In particular, back in 1987, you might have found the address listed under Escort Services:

The next iteration was a perfectly normal used car lot, except I always found the name, still on the shed out behind the main building, just a bit ironic:

UPDATE 20 December 2011 -- The Tonya D. Parks Nationwide has now moved into this place, following the other Nationwide office:

I have written about Circuit City before. In particular, I considered the first and second locations of the Two Notch store here, and the second location of the Harbison store here.

I think the upshot of my thoughts on the chain was that I did not like their first incarnation, which had predatory salesmen (on commission, I assume) and a nosy checkout process (almost as bad as Radio Shack's old checkout process). I liked the business model they adopted with the moves to Harbison and the final Two Notch location a lot better. It was now a "regular" store, and you could get help, but the sales staff would mostly leave you alone until you asked for it.

For some reason, it wasn't enough. I don't understand why the consumer electronics market doesn't have room for a #2 store as well as #1 Best Buy (or number whatever Tweeter) but apparently it doesn't. On the other hand, I don't feel a real loss with Circuit City's demise the way I did with CompUSA's. When Best Buy drove CompUSA under, it was not an adequate replacement. Best Buy simply did not stock the depth of computer parts that CompUSA did. I recall several times needing a part in Columbia, and having either to drive to CompUSA in Augusta or mail order it because no store in Columbia had one. I don't see that as the case with Circuit City as Best Buy pretty well covers their entire stock.

Still it's sad to see anything go under. I'm going to put a break before the bulk of the pictures so the page won't take forever to load if you're not interested, but there are, I think, five different sets there. First is the Harbison store at night just after the closing was announced. (The discounts weren't particularly good that night, though the store was very busy. I heard one employee say to another: We had lots better discounts during the holidays -- where were all these people when it could have helped us?). The second set is daytime shots of the Harbison store on Saturday 7 March 2009 -- the penultimate day of operation. (I went inside and found most items gone, except for racks and racks of USB cables for some reason..). The third set is night shots of the Two Notch store just after bankruptcy was announced. The fourth set is night shots of Two Notch taken, I believe, on 1 March, a week before closing, and the fifth set is exterior and interior shots of the Two Notch store taken today, 8 March 2009 -- the final day of operation.

Actually "operation" is stretching it -- all merchandise was gone, and they were selling off the store fixtures only by that point. I wouldn't have minded having a "media cabinet", but I have no place for it, and it was till a bit pricey for my liking.

Oh well, hopefully H. H. Gregg and Wal Mart will continue to keep Best Buy on its toes because as of today, Circuit City is unplugged.

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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.

Here's another casualty of the recession, or at least that's my guess. Floor It Now has been, I think in this strip mall at the corner of Two Notch Road and O'Neil Court for at least several years. (It's hard to say for sure since I've never been in the market for flooring).

Unless people are actually falling through it, replacing a floor is pretty much an aesthetic deciscion, and right now, I'll bet that floor with all the scuff marks and old paint splatters doesn't really look that bad.

UPDATE 13 June 2009: It's now a Kim's Enterprises Beauty Supply

River City Cafe is a Murrells Inlet institution. Located on the creek side of US-17 business, it is a very casual burger joint with license plates all over the walls, peanut shells on the floor and graphitti carved into the tables. They make a good burger, and keep malt vinegar on the tables for your fries. The restaurant is part of a coastal empire called The Divine Dining Group which includes River City, Bovine's, Ultimate California Pizza and some other brands I forget. Anyway, in the 90s, or it could have even been the late 80s, they decided to try to expand from the coast into Columbia. They opened two River City Cafes in Columbia that I am aware of. One was on Greene Street near the train tracks and the other was this building on Two Notch Road. I'm not sure why neither store prospered. Sometimes I think that when a local chain gets large enough that the owners can't just casually drop by any given store to see how things are going, quality suffers. At any rate, neither my sister nor I felt the Two Notch location was as good as Murrells Inlet (I never tried Greene Street), and both stores closed fairly quickly. The Greene Street store became The Salty Nut Cafe, and this one became Yesterday's.

I don't go too often, but I've always enjoyed Yesterday's in Five Points. They have a good combination of down-home food plus stuff like lasagna and mexican-inspired dishes. The Two Notch location was only open long enough for my sister and I to go once, and we both agreed that it was considerably lower in quality than Five Points. I remember in particular ordering the chips & salsa appetizer and having a dish of round Tostitos with about a tablespoon of frigid salsa in a sealed plastic container being plopped onto the table. The presentation was bad, and the quality was, um, lacking.

I believe the current tenant, Micato, was the next venture in the building, and it has been there some years now, so I would guess they actually know what they are doing, though I have never eaten there.

River City at the beach remains good, as does Yesterday's downtown. I guess they just couldn't find the talent to replicate the experience.

UPDATE 26 May 2011 -- Commenter palmettopanic sends in this 1989 ad for another restaurant in this building, one that came before RIver City and Yesterday's and one that I had never heard of (or at least can't remember having heard of): "Bird's":

Also, I haven't mentioned it on this entry yet, but the follow-on in this building Micato has been gone for some time.

It's hard to remember at this remove how revolutionary Apple's McIntosh was. As I recall, I was starting grad school when the big roll-out came. Through being in computer science, I was somewhat aware of Xerox's PARC work, and of Apple's Lisa which ripped off built on Xerox's concepts, but I had never actually seen a GUI environment, and didn't expect to any time soon either. So when there was a big Apple expo down at The Coliseum, I didn't really know what to expect, but walked down anyway.

I remember vividly that there was a booth with the original 128K Mac and an Apple guy demo-ing it. He had MacPaint up, with the, at one time ubiquitous, black-and-white stylized image of a Japanese Geisha combing her hair. I was completely blown away, but tried to be skeptical by asking the guy what good such fancy graphics were if you couldn't print them out, at which point he fired up the original ImageWriter dot-matrix printer and gave me a copy of the picture then and there. It sounds primitive now -- it is primitive now, but I had the strong feeling I was seeing the future.

Not long after that, I got to interact up-close-and-personal with one of those 128K Macs as I was assigned to port an experimental computer language interpreter to it. The code was in "C", and the first C compiler had just been released for the Mac -- it was a nightmare. This amazing computer of the future did not have a hard drive. It did not even have two floppy drives as many PCs (A: and B:) did. It had one very slow floppy drive, so the process of compiling a program was something like: Insert the program disk, double click, insert the first compiler disk, insert the second compiler disk, re-insert the program disk, re-insert the compiler disk, re-insert the second compiler disk, re-insert the program disk. You get the picture. You could easily go 45 minutes and 30 disk swaps before getting your error messages. At which point you had to start swapping in and out the editor disk. Not to mention that the compiler didn't really support standard stdio calls and that 128K was just not enough RAM to support the runtime recursion that the program wanted to do once you actually got it compiled. I never did finish that assignment.

Anyway, another feature of the Mac floppy drive was that it initially only supported very special and hard to find floppy disks. I believe they were pre-formatted, though I may be wrong about that. In order to get anywhere I had to have a couple of boxes of them (which I still have somewhere) and the only place in town I could find them at first was a store in this office complex on Two Notch behind a small pond, across from The Impulse Club and next to Hi Line Imports.

The computer store (then) was on the second floor in the central piece where you can see the wooden rails. The complex as a whole has never seemed to prosper, but never fails either. According to some signage by the road, there is still a computer store there, but the original one is long gone.

The image that rocked my world is still a classic though:

UPDATE 13 February 2023: Add full address to post title. Add map icon. Add tags.

This small multiplex was located in the Spring Valley Commons strip mall on Two Notch Road. I believe the complex has a strong grocery anchor, but the rest of the place has been pretty transient.

I can only recall seeing one movie at this venue, the baseball comedy Major League in 1989. Through an odd sequence of events, involving a teenager, my father had become the semi-involuntary weekend host of a USC Japanese exchange student who spoke no English. (I wonder from time to time how that whole "go to college in a country where you don't speak the language" thing worked out for him). At something of a loss as to how to entertain the guy, my father recruited my sister and me to take him to a movie. As it turned out, the movie had a Japanese grounds-keeper character who spoke only Japanese, so at least the kid was able to understand a few words of the movie.

The theater itself was fine, not memorable in any way, but certainly OK. It was a pretty volatile time in the cinema market though, and I don't believe the place made it more than a few years into the 90s. The space is now one of the ubiquitous "self storage" operations.

UPDATE 23 October 2012: Add full street address and tags.

I believe this is the Zesto that was on Decker Boulevard. I don't have a lot to say about it other than it didn't last long after moving. I'm not entirely sure why as there should be lots of traffic back-and-forth past it as people drive out to the new retail areas of Two Notch. Spring Valley Commons, the strip mall of which it is part is not in great shape, but I wouldn't expect that to influence Zesto's traffic too much (after all, think of Rush's at Decker Mall). I find it a bit amusing that the space, now a matress store, still has a drive-up window with intact order board:

I'd like one Queen, extra firm, two Kings and a twin please!

UPDATE 6 Jan 2010: Added McDonald's to the post title, also the full street address.

UPDATE 3 June 2010 -- Hola Mexico Mexican restaurant is now in the process of relocating here. They finally have the name on the building:

UPDATE 4 June 2024: Update tags, add map icon.