Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

I read somewhere that as World War II drew to a close, businesses took internal bets as whether that meant "back to the Depression" or "victory boom". Montgomery Ward decided on "Depression" and adopted a cautious, defensive strategy. Sears Roebuck bet on "boom" and started a post-war expansion strategy.

I don't know this for a fact, but it seems to me that the old Sears on Harden Street must be a "boom" store. Even though Main Street was still the big shopping destination, Sears bet on suburbia and ample free parking to cater to the fact that every family in their market (the middle class) now had a car.

This store was still going strong when I was a kid, and was huge. I believe that it encompassed the entire strip mall that now stands there (with the possible exception of the Offce Depot). I guess we went there most often shopping for clothes, but since that was an activity that I purely hated, I would always wander off in the hardware and camera sections.

In fact, I got my first camera at that store. I think I still have it in a storage box from two moves ago, though I can't put my hands on it right now. It was an off-brand, cheap one, and I think I actually used my own money to get it. I remember that it used "127" film, and that I had carefully checked (I was obsessive about some things) that it would take slides that could be projected on my aunt & uncle's projector though in the event I never took a single slide on it. Come to that, I don't think I ever took a roll of color film either -- those were different days! I also got my first (well, only, come to that) enlarger there. It was a cheap plastic contraption that had a pretty crummy lens and haphazard focus, but it was a $20 way to make prints bigger than "contact" size (a 127 negative was bigger than a 35mm one but not as big as a 120 one, so contact prints were really too small -- now 616 film made nice contact prints!).

Of course for kids, the biggest thing Sears had going for it was The Wishbook. This was their Christmas toy catalog, which we would be sure to leave lying about the house opened to strategic pages all during the holiday season. The selection and prices were also good for several months into the new year, which led us to possibly the stupidest thing we ever bought.

We had some sort of club, which I believe we called the YPS club (S-P-Y backwards..) dedicated to solving the (nonexistent) mysteries of our neighborhood, and for some reason, even though the club only lasted a few weeks, never had any meetings or even any missions, we decided we must have a typewriter to take the club's (nonexistent) meeting minutes. My parents had a typewriter, but they (wisely) considered it too delicate for our hands so we searched The Wishbook minutely and found a toy typewriter which would actually type for a surprisingly good price.

Our parents looked at the picture and description and tried to talk us out of it and to explain how the machine actually worked, but we were fixated and would have none of it. In the end they threw up their hands in a "ok, but let this be a lesson for you" manner and ordered it. I was so excited when it came in, and we went down to Sears to pick it up. The excitement lasted about half the way home until I got the thing unboxed and figured out how it worked. The "keyboard" which had looked so impressive in the picture (though not to adult eyes) was actually one piece of metal with pictures of seperate keys painted on it. So to "type" you dialed a Dymo-Embosser-type head to the right letter and mashed the "keyboard" which would imprint a capital letter on your paper. I suppose you could get 1-WPM on it if you were good..

Another thing I remember in particular about that store is that they had an automatic foot-sizing machine in the shoe department. No, this was too late for the infamous X-Ray foot sizers, but it was till pretty neat. You took off your shoe, put your foot in a rectangular box, and the walls would close in on it like a James Bond death-trap until they hit your foot on all sides. I used to stick my foot in it even when I had no intention of getting shoes.

Sears missed the first wave of suburban shopping malls in Columbia (ie: Dutch Square), but decided that they were the future and became (and remained) an anchor store in the new "Columbia Mall" being built in Dentsville. When that store was ready to occupy, they closed down the Harden Street location, and for many years that new mall store was the only Sears in town. I think the old store was vacant several years then was redeveloped into the current strip (with several face-lifts and a total rebuild of Food Lion after a fire). I'm not sure if any of the original Sears building is still present -- I rather doubt it.

Sears had a good post-war. Starting more or less at parity with Montgomery Ward, it saw MW out the door as its bets paid off and theirs didn't. By that time however, it was clear that Sears had missed the next bet and had no idea how to cope with Wal-Mart or even Target. It will be interesting to see how they come out of the current recession, or if perhaps the "new" store will have to be redeveloped too.

UPDATE 21 June 2011: Added a picture (at top) of the old Sears building from a vintage Chamber of Commerce promotional book.

UPDATE 29 February 2020: Add tags, full street address, map icon. (I used the '1001 Harden' address of the current Food Lion).

I probably would not have noticed this small consignment shop coming and going except that it is in the same building as the final location of Forest Lake TV about which I had done an earlier post. Driving by from time to time, it seemed to have gone through several phases. In the first phase, it was open during "normal" hours. Then it was open "by appointment" and finally it was difficult to say from the store-front if it were still in business or not. I suppose even now, it could be, but it's been a long time since I saw a car there, so I'll say not.

UDPATE 3 March 2015: Added full street address to post title.

I only went in to Columbia Photo Supply once. I have an old Fujica ST-605 35mm camera that my mother bought me in tenth grade (75 or 76 I think) for photography class. Aside from a built in exposure meter, this is a completely manual SLR and had given me years of good service, and in fact I took a number of the older pictures on this site with it (for instance The Towers).

Unfortunately, the film advance started giving me trouble resulting in double exposures in some cases and missed shots in others when I could not advance and cock the shutter at all. With the closure of Jackson Cameras, I didn't really know of a full service camera store in the old sense (a store that might actually have local people that knew something about fixing cameras), but I decided to try Columbia Photo. I thought it did have a bit of that old Jackson atmosphere, and I enjoyed looking at all the paraphernalia like developer and stop baths that I hadn't come into contact with in years, but in the event it turned out that the camera was too old to get parts for, so I wasn't able to get it fixed.

Not too long after that, the store went out of business, and now Rogers Brothers Fabrics has moved from Trenholm Plaza into the old Columbia Photo building.

And the camera saga had a fairly happy ending. I went on ebay and got an identical ST-605 (which came from Australia with a roll of film showing some kid posing in his karate uniform with his pet rabbit..) which works fine and which I still use when I want to shoot something high-res (though that may change now that I have a new digital "closing cam 2").

UPDATE 27 July 2010: Rogers Brothers at this location has now closed

I'm not totally sure this is the storefront I want, but I think I remember that angled main entrance, and if it wasn't this building, it was somewhere nearby, but anyway when I was small, there was a pet store here.

I generally can't go in pet stores now, they make me too sad, but when I was a kid, I didn't think about the "big picture" and was just fascinated by all the animals. Pet stores were all over. There was one with puppies in Columbia Mall, one at Trenholm Plaza and even Woolworth's had fish, turtles and gerbils. If I recall correctly, the one on Devine had lots of fish, but the real reason we liked to walk down there after piano lessons at Haven's Music was because of the bird.

I'm not sure what kind of bird it was now, but it sat on a high perch just inside the front door, and could talk. Sometimes it would volunteer something as you walked into the shop, at other times you had to prompt it, which you could do by saying "Pretty boy, pretty boy" in a sing-song cadance. Generally after you had done this a few times, it would perk up and say "Awk! Pretty Boy! Pretty Boy!" back at you.

I don't believe the bird was for sale, I had the impression that he was the personal pet of the shop owner. From time to time I've wondered what happened to him. Given how long some birds live, he could still be "pretty boy"-ing up a storm somewhere in the midlands..

UPDATE: Commenter Dennis supplies the name of the place as "The Aquarium and Pet Shop II", so I'm updating the title of this post to reflect that.

UPDATE 31 March 2009: Added the 1970 Southern Bell Yellow Page ad (which does not have the "II" suffix on the name).

Dillard's started out as a Belk's when Columbia Mall opened in the 1970s and was one of the original anchor stores (along with Sears, Penny's and RIch's).

Since I considered Belk's mainly a "clothes store" and I hated shopping for clothes, in the usual course of events, I would not have gone there often. However in one of those odd little bits of department-store whimsey (nut counters, lunch rooms, hair salons..) that were common in pre-mall days and had yet to be abandoned, they had an area on the second floor near the kitchen-ware which was leased out to a local record store. I knew the name of it before I started this post, but I find it has completely escaped me at the moment. At any rate, it was a small area and the selection of regular LPs was not deep by any means, but they frequently had incredible finds for anyone willing to root through the cut-out bins. Being broke and somewhat obsessive, that was me. I know I still have a number of LPs from there, with the standout being a two disc Jan & Dean collection which had all the hits (which were otherwise pretty unavailable at the time) and a number of the tracks cut by Dean after Jan's accident under the names Laughing Gravy (a fun cover of The Beach Boys' "Vegetables") and The Legendary Masked Surfers (the infectious "Sunshine Music"). The liner notes promised that all the tracks were in "quasi-moto monaural" and if you experienced any problems to "take a shower with a friend".

Aside from browsing the record cut-outs (and kitchen gadgets from time to time) my other favorite thing to do in the store was to ride the small capsule-like elevator. This managed to look both futuristic and a bit art-deco at the same time, and allowed you to look out over the whole store as you ascended or fell.

I forget all the details, but at some point in the late 70s or 80s, Belk left the Columbia market for a while. I think it might have been a family inheritance struggle over management of the chain, but it's very fuzzy. At any rate, after the store space closed as a Belks, it reopened as a Dillards.

I can't say very much about Dillards -- it had no music section so I think I only went in there a few times and found nothing that struck my fancy. I'm pretty sure I never purchased an item there. The chain has been hurting in recent years, and though I don't find any news suggesting the chain itself is in danger, they have been closing underperforming stores, one of which was apparently the Columbia Mall store.

I recall a story in The State mentioning the (then) upcoming closing and interviewing the mall owners who allowed that you (approx) "seldom had the opportunity to replace two anchor stores" (Steve & Barry is also leaving). I was reminded of the old Pogo quote:

We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities!

I took these pictures in October. I would have taken more, but one of the floorwalkers politely inquired as to what I was doing, and it always sounds pretty lame when I try to explain it. Jan & Dean in "Submarine Races" mode would have been much more persuasive!

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This post comes from reader Dennis. I know of the building, but that area wasn't really in our orbit growing up, and I don't think we ever stopped at Ailes':

I took these photos today. Not really a timely "Closing," just some nostalgic rambling.

This building at 3123 Beltline was Roche Brothers last summer, and is now Taste of Jamaica, but it will always be Ailes' Market to me. I lived about two blocks away from about 1967 to 1979, from ages 10 to 22, and Mr. Ailes lived right around the corner from us. My mother didn't drive, and didn't have a car even if she could have, so I was almost daily sent to Ailes' to get something or another. I didn't mind at all. It was a chance to get out of the house, and Ailes' had a wonderful candy aisle. It was understood that when I went on a errand there, some of the change would get spent on candy. We also did a lot of wash at the laundromat that was directly across Beltline; same building that is now a sad looking office center. That laundromat was dim and dirty, loud and hot (no A.C.) but only a block from the house.

Ailes' was a typical general store/gas station of the time, before giant national conglomerates put a Fast Fare or a Pantry (like the one to the left of it now) on every corner. Also before I-77 was even thought of, so a LOT of big semi-trucks rattled down Beltline day and night. Mr. Ailes alone decided what he would sell, and he had a little bit of everything. Rat traps to onions. Velveeta to plastic model kits. Spark plugs to tampons. Of interest to a kid like me, in addition to the candy, was the fireworks he had, the excellent comic book rack, the baked snacks like Little Debbie's and Mickey's and Sweet Sixteen donuts that were always fresh and delicious, not like the awful mess you often get today.

Mr. Ailes held court at the front, on the left as you came in, on a wooden bar stool behind his cash register. He had an anti-burglary shotgun prominently displayed on the wall behind him, right next to that sign about "We made a deal with the bank - they don't sell beer and we don't cash checks." There was also a board of shame displaying checks written to the store that had bounced, and of course the faded Polaroids of regular customers holding fish they had caught using his worms.

On the other side of the counter, also on wooden bar stools, were three or four men who were either unemployed or retired or had the greatest unsupervised jobs in the world, because they were always there, chain smoking and drinking beer. I guess one of them was his gas attendant. On the counter was the requisite gallon jar of homemade pickled eggs and a clipboard with a college football parlay card on it. One dollar per square. Also on the counter was this big can-opening device that pierced two perfect triangles in steel beer cans (I know -- I'm old.) The beer came out of one of three big, old, heavy coolers with solid steel lids. If you opened one and "shopped" too long you'd get yelled at to close it. In addition to popsicles and the menfolks' PBR and Old Milwaukee, they had ICE cold Coke, Pepsi, Mountain Dew (in the green glass bottle with the hillbilly moonshiner on it), Nehi, Fanta, Patio, and Crush.

Next to his seated entourage Mr. Ailes had three or four old fashioned pinball machines -- not fun games with flippers, but just a bunch of holes for the balls to fall into. If you won you got 5¢ (or was it a penny?) per point right out of the cash register. I never understood it and it was clear that they were for adults only.

Speaking of adults only, while I was in the right front corner reading comics, and MAD, and Cracked, and Sick, and later National Lampoon, (He didn't care how long I loitered in the store) I soon discovered a section of the trashiest, sleaziest black & white smut magazines imaginable, which he would yell at me not to look at, but of course many times I did anyway. Warped for life.

In the back left corner was a snack bar that had decent fries, burgers and dogs, cooked up by a nice little old man with the sweats and the shakes who was clearly a struggling alcoholic. We went there on hot summer days after swimming across the street at the Bradley Terrace Pool (Restricted -- Whites only) which was where that small nursing home is now. I remember seeing my first microwave oven at that snack bar.

If you went outside to the right there was a pretty nice two chair barbershop way in the back corner of the building (see the door in the photo?). The building next door was Diamond Xanthakis' liquor store, or a "red dot" store to us.

A Hess station was built on the other side of the store, overnight it seemed, and as you might expect it killed Ailes' gas sales and he got rid of his two pumps. Not sure what year Mr. Ailes sold the store. It struggled on for a long time as a out of date convenience store.

Thanks, Dennis -- Ted

This building, at the entrance to Trenholm Park and now apparently a hair salon called Hair Works once housed a small independant convenience store. I am nearly sure it was called Campbell's, and I think it was the place to go for kids wanting a snack coming in or out of the park. It had all the standard soft drink, pork rind and motor oil options as well as magazines you wouldn't take home to mom, but there were no gas pumps.

I am guessing that it pre-dated the nearby Covenant Road Piggly Wiggly since otherwise it's hard to see what market it served, especially since (unless I'm recalling wrongly) it wasn't open particularly late at night. I imagine that the decline of kids coming and going unescorted as childhood as we knew it disappeared didn't help, but the final blow had to have been the opening of a chain store across the street (now a BP) with all the same stuff, chain purchasing power and gas pumps.

Well, given the events of last Friday, I suppose it's time to do a closing on South Carolina's biggest white elephant. That's the date that Hard Rock Park "chose" to move from Chapter 11 reorganization to Chapter 7 liquidation. Why?

The park, which said it was worth $400 million when it opened in April, was unable to attract any bidders willing to pay at least $35 million for the park at a Dec. 15 auction, according to court documents.

I find that amazing, even with all the other financial beef-wittery that has come to light lately. The Sun News's stories on the park are filled with comments from the locals to the effect that they could have told the owners what was going to happen, although it also appears that many people did tell them. One of the articles (which I don't have a link to right now) detailed the park's origins: Apparently the pitchmen were thrown for a loop when they were told that the Hard Rock empire was approachable for branding the rock-and-roll park they were pitching. The problem was that they weren't pitching a rock-and-roll park, but a "standard" amusement park, and weren't planning to pitch to Hard Rock, but they brainstormed some rock-related ride names on a lunch napkin and sold the concept. That's the kind of story that becomes a legend if a venture succeeds, and a cautionary tale if it doesn't...

In the event it seemed that the owners were better at promoting to corporations than to tourists, and aside from the unforseeable blunder of trying to launch a venture in the annus horribilis of 2008, they priced tickets too high ($50 + $10 parking), didn't advertise, and didn't promote with local hotels.

I had two chances to visit the park. The first was on the Fourth of July 2008, when I was taking pictures of Waccamaw Pottery. As I was standing in the parking lot, I could see the Led Zeppelin roller-coaster running in the distance, but it was about lunch time, and after that, I ended of taking a helicopter ride over the beach instead. I also had a week to myself at the beach in August, and thought about taking in the park then, but it was hot, I didn't feel like getting on 501 in tourist season, and I figured it would be better in October, but that was not to be as the doors closed in September.

Oh well, it's only rock and roll!

UPDATE: Here's a link from commenter "Beach Guy" that has the origin details I mentioned.

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The French Quarter Deli was the replacement restaurant at the original location of The Keg O'Nails Deli. I'm still not entirely sure I understand the sequence of events that led to the Keg moving and The French Quarter being established, but it was a big brou-ha-ha and made the paper several times back in the day. You can read some comments at the Keg O'Nails closiing made by people who know more about it than I do.

At any rate, while I did finally get around to eating at the Keg after it moved, I never did get to try The French Quarter before it closed. I'm not sure why it closed either. It is in an odd little section of Rosewood, rather removed from where you would expect a restaurant. I know I would hesitate to fire up a cook stove next to Jim Casey's!

These two green spaces, one beside the Russell House on the east side of the Thomas Cooper Library reflection pool, and the other on the west side of the pool were once USC parking lots. It was almost impossible to find a spot in either lot, but if you could, it was your best shot for actually being able to park "near" to the library.

The parking situation at USC has always been fluid, and it is not unusual for a lot to vanish, but it is unusual for said lot not to be replaced with a building. There used to be a parking lots behind and in front of the Welsh building, for example, but they have all now been built over.

I believe the lot by the Russell House vanished first, perhaps at the time Green Street was closed. I think the west lot lasted a good bit past that. At any rate, if you have checkout privileges at the library, you're going to be be toting those books a couple blocks in most cases!