Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

I thought I had already posted this one. I distinctly remember taking a bunch of pictures of the vacant building, but apparently I never go around to uploading them and making a post.

Anyway, this Chinese restaurant moved from its rather delapidated building up the street to 5432 Farrow Road. In the meantime, between when I took the original, missing, pictures, and when I took this one in January 2011, Pari Mini Mart & Deli has moved in. This makes (at least) two non-Chinese places with Chinese decor in town. (At least three if Grandma's hasn't changed their sign yet).

UPDATE 10 January 2012 -- A better picture of the new location:

Golden City is listed in this year's (Feb-2010/Feb-2011) phonebook, so it can't have been closed for too long. I find it a little interesting however, that Loopnet describes the place as "recently renovated" while work is clearly currently ongoing.

I'm not sure how long Golden City was there. Without going to the library, I can confirm that it existed in 1998, but not in 1976. Again according to Loopnet, the building was built in 1970, so there must have been other operations there over the years. And, speaking of the building -- it's rather an interesting one. The back part is fairly standard looking, but the trapezoid in front is quite unusual.

I wonder how accurate the English name is. If each Chinese glyph equates to a word (or idea) then there are four words getting squoze down into the two word "Golden City". Can anyone translate?

A couple of people have mentioned this former KFC building on Rosewood Drive. According to commenter Beth, it closed as Taste of China Hut about 3 years ago, and is still owned by the same folks. I see that there are still Taste of China Huts on Decker Boulevard and Main Street.

This setup is interesting in that the dumpster alcove is freestanding and brick. I came up on it from behind and couldn't figure out what in the world it was until I got to the other side.

Notice the sign for Football Parking stowed behind the building -- It seems like a long way to walk from there to the stadium, but if you're crazy enough to brave a game day anyway, I guess it's not out of the question.

(Hat tip to commenter Beth, and some others I've forgotten..)

UPDATE 11 July 2014 -- This building is gone:

I believe this Chinese restaurant on a Decker Mall outparcel has been there in one form or another ever since Decker Mall opened, making it much more durable than any of the stores inside the mall.

I'm not really sure when it closed. I was driving by today around noon and noticed that there were no cars in the lot, which I thought was odd, so I stopped to take a look. There is absolutely no indication that it is closed, other than the fact that it was not open. There was no "Sorry, Thanks for X Wonderful Years!" sign or anything like that, and all the fixtures still seem to be in place as well as third party items such as the gumball machines.

I'm saying "Jan 2010" then since that is recently enough to look fresh but far enough in the past that the phone being disconnected (which it is) makes sense.

This place is almost across the street from the old Jumbo Asian Buffet which is also defunct, but there is another Chinese restaurant just up the hill on Decker a bit, so the neighboorhood is not totally bereft.

UPDATE 19 Feb 2010: Added "China City" to the post title based on the comments.

UPDATE 5 June 2012 -- Somebody has been working inside this building recently after years of no activity at all:

UPDATE 12 July 2012 -- Open again!

UPDATE 14 November 2019: Updating the post status to "closed again". As I mention in the comments, I had taken new pictures and actually updated this post at one point to reflect the second closing, but lost it in a database crash. The pictures at least I should be able to dig up again if I remember to make an effort. Also updated the tags and added a map icon.

UPDATE 28 February 2020 -- Here are some pictures I found from 12 April 2015:

UPDATE 17 May 2024 -- It looks like this building may finally be about to meet the wrecking ball:

UPDATE 18 June 2024 -- Still no sign of demolition, I think they are just tearing the parking lot up for infrastructure work:

I'm not really sure when this KFC closed, but the property looks so distressed that I'm putting it in the early 2000s rather than the last couple of years. I've never been a fan of chicken (or any other bird, come to that), so I have no standing to criticize the chain, but I always felt it was rather pusillanimous to change the official name from Kentucky Fried Chicken to KFC: You sell fried chicken! Stand up for it! (I also didn't like the commercials with the animated Colonel -- I remember the real Colonel in commercials, and it seems disrespectful of your founder to make a cartoon out of him now that he's gone..).

The only other thing I have to say about KFC in general is that every time I see the "Livers & Gizzards" signage up, I think 'Lewis Grizzard'.

It seems a bit odd that there seems to be no attempt to sell the property, or at least I saw no "For Sale" signs in evidence.

UPDATE 7 Jan 2010: Comments say I was wrong about the closing period, so I have changed the post title date from 'early 2000s' to 'late 2000s'.

UPDATE 30 January 2016 -- It's now China Wing Basket:

I first wrote about this former steakhouse when Crazy Buffett folded, but it now appears that the second Chinese buffet operation in the building is history as well. I'm not sure why -- it seems like a decent location with good visibility and plenty of traffic passing by and I can't think of any other Chinese buffets in the area. There's the second Eggroll Station on Sunset, but that's not a buffet.

Notice how the left side of the building still proclaims it to be a "restaurante", a bit of signage remaining from the Mexican incarnation of the place..

UPDATE 16 May 2013 -- As mentioned by commenter Andrew, this place is being knocked down:

I first wrote about this building back on 10 April 2009 when I was doing a closing on Kester's Bamboo House, and China Garden may have been closed even then, at least I don't recall seeing anyone inside, and from the pictures I took then (two of which open this closing), there already appear to be signs of work around the front door.

I'm not a big fan of Chinese food, and this wasn't one of my mother's favored places, so I never ended up eating here, but China Garden has certainly been a Five Points landmark for many years. The building has been there so long that when the fatal Harden Street renovation reached China Garden, they went under the sidewalk to shore up the foundations and found there were no foundations. This caused the street work to stall in front for an inordinate amount of time while they figured out what to do. Presumably that is all fixed now..

Anyway, it's definitely closed now, and it appears that it will reopen soon as a place called Grandma's, which I expect will no longer be Asian cusine. If they keep the "pagoda" sign as it appears they will be doing, we will have two non-Chinese restaurants in town with Chinese-themed signage. (The other is Bombay Grill.

UPDATE 24 June 2019 -- Add tags and map icon.

It appears that China Dragon restaurant on the corner of Farrow Road and Beltline Boulevard is gone. When I took these pictures, it was after the return date stated on the vacation sign, but the phone had not been disconnected, so I held off posting. Now the phone is cut off and when I drove by this evening, there were a couple of cars there with people who seemed to be looking at the property (though there is no "For Sale" sign).

I never ate at China Dragon but the building has been there forever, and stuck in my mind as a kid because of the rocky exterior. Since we went down that way so seldom, I had a poor mental model in my mind of exactly where it was, and would always be surprised when I saw it again.

The building design is clearly the same as this much restauranted building on Decker Boulevard, so going by the comments there, it was probably originally a Popeye's Chicken.

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Kester's Bamboo House occupied the spot on Harden Street now held by China Garden and Jungle Jim's. The first (rather unflattering) image comes from the 1963 Southern Bell directory and the second from the 1970 one. I'm not sure when the place closed, but I suspect it was sometime in the 1970s. I'm pretty sure I recall hearing about it as a child, but don't recall seeing it after I began to drive myself. A posting to a genealogy website says that the original Mr. Kester passed in 1966, but I don't know if the business stayed in the family after that or was sold at that point.

I also don't know if 724 Harden was split into two businesses at that point, or if Kester's occupied the whole space by itself, though the 1970 Yellow Pages ad claims banquet seating for 100, which seems larger than the current China Garden capacity. At any rate, I'm pretty sure the current China Garden building was at least part of Kester's and does date back to that era, and is somewhat responsible for the closing of The Parthenon.

As I remember it, the story in The State was that when the interminable Five Points road work of a few years ago reached The China Garden a snag developed. As the work crews went to replace the infrastructure under the building's foundation, they found that the building had no foundation! The front wall was basically supported only by the sidewalk, so before they could go under the building to work, they had to shore everything up and this took a lot longer than they expected -- and all the while they were there, access to The Parthenon was very difficult.

UPDATE 24 June 2019: Add tags and map icon.

I like to take pictures in the afternoon, because it seems to me the light is best then (leaving aside the fact that I rarely get my act together before 1 or 2pm anyway if I don't have to..), and so since I happened to be out in the Intersection Center area one Saturday afternoon recently, I decided to walk the whole place and take a bunch of pictures. I think I've already used some, and others will show up from time to time.

This former Chinese restaurant really caught my eye because of the life-sized cut-out figure still affixed to the front wall. I wouldn't call it fine art, but someone put a good bit of work into it once upon a time and it's a shame that it will probably go under the wrecking ball sooner or later. I was going to get a lot closer to the building and do my standard trying to look into the doors etc, but as I turned the corner, I saw a Highway Patrol car sitting beside the next defunct business. I believe there was a major drunk driving crackdown on at the time, and I suppose they were watching Broad River for people they could pull. I know I wasn't doing anything wrong, and I know the Highway Patrol could care less about most non-car related shenanigans, but it made me a bit nervous, so I made sure to flourish the camera very ostentatiously, and tried to look very much like I was not "casing the joint"...

I don't know what happened to Chung King. I think a lot of Chinese restaurants are family run and operate on a shoestring. Perhaps the place put the kids through college and it was time for mom & pop to retire. Perhaps being in a dying strip mall meant there was too little drive by traffic. To me it seems like the place has been closed forever, so I'm saying 1990s in the tag line, but apparently it was open recently enough that one of the online restaurant sites thought it was worth entering in their database -- something that does not give me a great deal of confidence in the rest of their listings!

UPDATE 22 January 2020: Add map icon, update tags.