Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

Surprisingly, given its location at the corner of Two Notch & Faust Street, this building was apparently once connected with a church or some sort of religious personage. I can dimly remember seeing the Merita store there, and Titlemax seems to have been the most recent tenant, showing up in the February 2007 phonebook, but not thereafter. According to Richland County the place is currently owned by Midland Holding Corp who are apparently trying to sell it.

The lot is also home to a 30 Sheet Poster billboard, and if you click that link, you can see the place with the Merita store in operation, and a different paint job.

Well, the relocation of this title-loan company from Arcadia Lakes Shopping Center answers the question of what will next go into the old Carolina First Bank building at Columbia Mall.

I'm not sure it's a more accessible location, but the building is certainly classier.

UPDATE 20 December 2011: Originally stated the name of the strip mall as Arcadia Lakes Plaza which was wrong. I have corrected it to Arcadia Lakes Shopping Center.

I suspect that all three of these businesses were the same operation as the name still posted on the building Ca$h-N-Da$sh and went defunct at the same time.

Curiously, this nice old brick house is directly adjacent to another vanished quick cash operation: Title Doc at 2819 Broad River. It's interesting that both operations would see this as a good place to set up shop, and both of them be wrong (although, of course, conditions were a lot different before 2008).

UPDATE 13 March 2023 -- Well this place has been razed:

Also adding map icon and updating tags.

This little house on the west side of Broad River Road near the old George's Book Exchange really deserved better.

I can imagine that back in the day, before the road was widened, it would have been a nice place to settle down and start a family.

The construction permits are dated November 2009, and list First Community Bank as the owner, so Title Doc must have been gone by then. Curiously, the house next door, which I'll do at some point, was also a title-loan type place.

Here, next to Rudy's Upper Deck in The Shoppes At Meeting Place is another of Columbia's many defunct personal finance storefronts. Of course, in these times, it helps to be too big to fail..

Here's another defunct cash advance place, this one on Knox Abbott Drive just down from Tony's Pizza. As is a fixture on (fairly) newly closed businesses this time of year, you can see the new, uncollected, phonebook in a bag by the door. (The same is true for Master Tire if you look closely.)

Here's another of the Columbia area's many car title loan businesses that have gone defunct over the past couple of years. The sign says simply Car Title Loans but online I've seen both of America and of South Carolina tacked onto the end. Whatever the name, I don't believe it was was there all that long -- I have noticed this building off and on over the years, and I think that for a long time it was some sort of mobile-home & camping service center with propane and repair parts.

I've always thought of Huddle House as a downmarket Waffle House, which is saying something, but it almost seems like the way Hardee's and Bantam Chef used to be related -- you saw the second in places that couldn't support the first. I'm pretty sure I've been in a Huddle at one time or another, but I have absolutely no reliable memory of such an occasion right now. I am sure I was never in this one which sits at the intersection of Rosewood Drive and Kilbourne Road.

The LoopNet listing suggests that the follow-on operation, one of Columbia's ubiquitous (but not apparently very lucrative) title pawn operations, has been closed at least since mid October 2010.

UPDATE 12 April 2012 -- It's now a Marco's Pizza:

UPDATE 17 August 2023 -- Update tags, add map icon.

This vintage looking building, which almost has to have been an old gas station originally, sits at the point where Sunset Drive ends, River Drive jinks west and Clement Road fails to become either of those. It's across from Edna's, Great China Chinese Restaurant and the old A & P in Sunset Shopping Center.

I know that going back into the 60s there had to be more, but currently I am able to google three former tenants, all auto related. I'm using June 2010 as the closing date for Cash Loans for Car Titles because that seems to be when the building went up on the realtor's web site.

I like the building and hope the next owner keeps it. The curved endcap reminds me of the KC Customs building on Augusta Road.

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You can see that this Citifinancial was still in business back in December of 2009, when I took these pictures of Gooney Birds. I know they still operate several locations in Columbia, including one whose mail I always get.

This is another bit of churn in the Westland Square strip mall, which also had Gooney Birds as noted above and the Burnette's Cleaners/ Palmetto Fine Cleaners / Dasini's Hotspot"> shuffle in the corner spot.