Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

Eating at Moes on Main today, I was struck by the sign at University Corner (the small strip mall at the corner of Devine & Main), and how it harked back to an earlier era. Of the businesses listed on its directory

Carolina's
Stuffy's
Bits & Pizzas
Smoothie King
Varsity BIlliards

only Varsity Billiards is still actually there (and to my memory has been there forever). Apparently the wi-fi coffee shop that was there last year didn't last long enough to make it onto the sign, and apparently they are holding off on putting Firehouse Subs up there..

UPDATE 8 Feb 2010: Took the opportunity tonight to take some pictures of the lighted Varsity Billiards sign as it's a classic design (From the same school as the old Redwing Roller Way sign).

Ponderosa Steak Barn,
Meet Your Friends There!
Where Good Eatin' is a Family Affair!

Ponderosa was in Trenholm Plaza more or less where Holey Dough & Heavenly Ham are now, and was one of the first wave of steakhouses (that I can recall) to come into Columbia. We went through a period of eating Sunday dinner there more often than not. They had a Western theme, both in the names of the menu items and the decor. The Western motif extended to the seating. I think there were booths around the walls of the restaurant, but the seating in the middle of the place was polished wood benches and tables. They weren't quite "picnic" tables because the benches were free-standing, but it was pretty rustic. Aside from the standard steak and burger offerings, they also had a salad bar, which was something I hadn't seen before. As an 8 year old, I had no interest in it, but I think it impressed my mother. They also had "Texas toast" which did impress me, and since it didn't come with anything I ordered, I was always angling to beg it off of my mother or father.

As I said, all of the menu items had Western themed names, and I invariably orded the "Buckboard Burger", which was simply a hamburger (you could get it with cheese as well..). This item led to a 30 year misunderstanding between my father and me. Since I would always get the same thing (and since he would be doing the ordering), he would always ask in that way parents have of kind of "deviling at" their kids:

So, are you going to get the Buggy Burger again?

and then watching in amusement as I got all worked up about it:

It's the Buckboard Burger!

When we were reminiscing about it years later, we finally came to a mutual understanding. My father, who was born in 1915, knew very well what a "buckboard" was -- a type of horse-drawn buggy. I had no idea. He thought I was just being "prissy" about wanting to call the burger by the name it was listed under on the menu, while I always thought he was implying that the burger was made out of bugs!

Unfortunately, Ponderosa burned down sometime in the late 1960s (I think), and never came back to Trenholm Plaza. I believe there was another one in Cayce where we used to go sometimes (and ask to go to the Giant Slide), but that was a long drive, and it didn't seem as good.

Years later, I ran across a Ponderosa chain in the Kansas City area, but the menu items had different names, and I was never able to tell if it were the same operation or just a common choice of a Western name. It was OK, but nothing out of the ordinary. That chain came very briefly to Myrtle Beach (to the parking lot of the Surfside Kroger actually), but folded after a very short run.

During the 1970s, Dutch Square was a major retail hub for Columbia. Columbia Mall in Dentsville had not yet been built, and Columbiana Center in Harbison was not even on the radar. While Dutch Square thrived, the surrounding area thrived as well. Cookesbury Books did a good business across the street, Boozer Shooping Center was at its peak, and Sam Solomon dominated nearby Intersection Center.

At the time, I always assumed that Sam Solomon was a national chain, but I have since found out that it was a Charleston based outfit. As I recall, it had something of a hybrid floor-concept. There were a few "catalog" stores which had only sample items on the floors as opposed to the current nearly universal "all our merchandise is on the floor" sales model. In these stores, you would look at items, and take coupons to the checkout at which point your items would be brought from the warehouse and rung up. At Sam Solomon's, larger items were displayed as samples while smaller iterms were taken by the shoppers themselves to the checkout. Sam Solmon had a little bit of everything, though my memory is that it skewed away from clothes and towards jewelry. I didn't care much about either. Whenever I came, invariably in the company of my cousins making a power-shopping trip to Columbia, I would concentrate on the electronics and gadgets (which I couldn't afford) and the paperback books (which I could -- sometimes). I remember in particularly getting a copy of Asimov's The Stars, Like Dust and a number of "Kenneth Robeson"'s Avenger books.

I don't know the story of Sam Solomon's demise, but have found a New York Times story dating its bankruptcy and takeover by Service Merchandise to 1982. By that time, the Dutch Square area was already losing its luster, and Intersection Center was particularly badly hit. Apart from the vacuum cleaner store at its entrance and Service Merchandise, the anchor, I think every store there turned over or went empty. By that time, I was driving and had a little money, but Service Merchandise never really had anything to interest me. For a while they billed themselves as "America's Leading Jewler", but they were already in decline when they lost that title to Wal-Mart. The last time I went in, it was rather sad. Most of the store was empty except for the central part where they were running a retail operation no bigger than a typical drugstore. I was a little surprised, googling later, to find that they had lasted until 9/11 when the retail crash took them out for good.

Intersection Center never even came close to recovering. I believe about the only operation left there is an ethnic grocery of some sort, and currently the whole tract is up for sale.

UPDATE 5 March 2010: Finally remember to add Service Merchandise to the post title.

UPDATE 16 May 2010: Added full street address, tags.

UPDATE 30 Sep 2010 -- Well, with the ongoing work at Intersection Center someone has (possibly unintentionally) got the Service Merchandise sign illuminated for the first time in 8 years:

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

Well this was a bit unexpected. I had been planning for a while to do a closing on Quncy's, but when I went there today to take the picture, I found the successor business, Stiletto's strip club had just closed down as well.

Quincy's Family Steakhouse was part of the second or third wave of steakhouses to hit Columbia, and at its peak, the best of breed in my opinion. The first wave consisted of places like Ponderosa Steak Barn about which I mean to do a post someday, while the second wave (or late first, I haven't decided) was places like Western Steer & Western Sizzling.

Quincy's was a very appealing operation for family Sunday lunches, and we ate there almost exclusively on Sunday for a number of years. You would go in, get in line, pick out your silverware and make your order which would be brought out with reasonable promptness. I thought they had a very good burger (which fewer places do well than you would expect), and their salad bar was unquestionably the best in Columbia. The waitresses were all friendly, and came to know and greet "the regulars". The only fly in the ointment was that whatever mechanism they used to wash the silverware wasn't very efficient, and you always ended up having to go through several knives and forks before coming up with unspotted ones.

I liked Quincy's well enough that when my employer started sending me to various cities around the South East, I would take the little list of "Our Other Locations" that used to be in a stand by your way out, to have somewhere familiar to eat when I travelled. (In practice, it would usually work out that either I didn't get to pick where we ate, or we would end up working so late that it was Denny's or nowhere..). I started noticing too that all Quincy's were not alike. The one on Two Notch was definitely the best one in Columbia, much better than the one on Forest Drive, and a bit better than the one off I-26 & US-378. The one in Surfside Beach was very good, the one in Florence, not so much.

Naturally like any chain with a generally winning concept, they started to tinker with it. First, the salad bar started to decline. They took the large wedges of chedder and pepper-jack cheese off, and would start skipping very basic things, like onions, more and more often. Then they decided that the "honor system" had to go. The initial concept was you got your ticket and paid on your way out. The new system was that you had to pay at the end of the ordering line. I suppose it reduced shrinkage some, and obviated the need for another employee and register stand at the door, but it also slowed up the line, and made it seem that you weren't quite trusted to pay for your food. Real decline set in after this, and the chain obviously realized it with their somewhat desperate ad campaigns for The Big, Fat Yeast Roll. The rolls were actually pretty good, but you want to think several times before launching a restaurant ad campaign in which the words "big" and "fat" play prominent roles.

I think the Forest Drive location was the first in Columbia to go, with Two Notch being the last. I believe the chain is still in business and has a few stores left, but I haven't seen one in several years.

I forget what moved into the Two Notch building after Quincy's, but it didn't last too long, and I think the building sat vacant a while before becoming Stiletto's. That brief-lived operation had a sign with a very shapely set of legs, the feet adorned with the aforementioned footware. I'm pretty sure I saw the sign as recently as last week, but I can't say for certain. The sign also mentioned that, like Quincy's, they had steaks on the menu, but I suspect "the sizzle" was more their stock in trade.

UPDATE 9 May 2008: New construction is going on at the old Quincy's/Stiletto's

Looks like it will be a "Harbor Inn", which either means that there will be two Harbor Inns within a mile or so of each other on Two Notch, or that the one in front of Bi-Lo (in the old Ryan's building) will be moving here.

UPDATE 22 March 2010: Added full street address (and some tags)

When I was small, going to a movie always meant going downtown. We didn't do it often, but Main Street had at least four theaters and Five Points had one. The way I remember it, this all began to change with the opening of the Richland Mall Theaters (which deserve their own post). By the time I was in high school and college, the action had mostly left Main Street, with Dutch Square, Spring Valley, Richland Mall and Columbia Mall all having multiplexes (Columbia Mall effectively had two multiplexes).

The Jefferson Square Theater was the last theater downtown to play first-run major movies after the rest of the Main Street theaters had either switched to kung-fu, hard-R grindhouse or closed their doors entirely. "Jefferson Square" itself is still there, more or less at the end of the old Main Street shopping district. The theater building is still there too, though I don't know what's in it today. The last movie I remember seeing there was "Fame" in 1982. Even at the time, it was unusual to go downtown, and we had trouble parking (another part of what killed downtown theaters). I recall being impressed with the setup, which was on a larger scale than a typical multiplex. There was even a balcony, though it was closed at that time. We all enjoyed the movie (it seems to have fallen off the cultural radar now, but was quite a sensation at the time) and agreed that it was a nice place to see it, but we never went back, and I saw some time later that the theater had closed its doors.

I understand now that the Columbia Film Society is trying to move their Nikleodeon Theater from Main Street behind the State House to one of the shuttered theaters on Main in front of the State House. I don't believe that they are talking about Jefferson Square, but it will be nice to see a downtown theater of any sort again.

UPDATE 4 May 08: Added pictures of the current Jefferson Square courtyard.

UPDATE 12 September 2009: Added the Jefferson Square ad for "Two People" from the 15 April 1973 State paper.

UPDATE 21 April 2013 -- Commenter William sends in the picture below saying:

The current tenant DHHS leveled the floor by pumping truck loads of self leveling concrete. I am sending you a pic of the old projection room from about 2 weeks ago [circa 1 March 2013 -- Ted]. When I first went up there parts of the projectors were still there and you could see out the "windows". But as you can see in this pic they have been removed completely and windows blocked.

UPDATE February 16 2014: Finally add the full street address to the post title.

Applegate's Landing was on Decker Blvd somewhat behind Zorba's and the current Chik-Fil-A location. At least that's the way I remember it, though it's hard to visualize it there looking at the land today. Applegate's Landing was a sort of semi-upscale casual restaurant, on the order of Bennigans, though I don't believe it was part of a chain. I think it opened sometime in the 70s while I was in high school, at least the only two times I went there, it was with high school friends (though the second visit was some time was after our graduation).

As I recall, their main claim to fame, at least the one which made it into most of their advertising was that their salad bar was set up in the bed of a Ford Model-A pick-up truck. I'm pretty sure it really was an authentic Model-A, though it was mostly gutted. As well as the standard steaks, burgers and pasta dishes, they also had pan pizza, which they would bring to your table still in the pan. I liked my first visit well enough, but the prices were a bit high for me at the time (considering that I had no job..), and I didn't bother to go back until several years later. I had myself all set for the pan-pizza that second time only to find that they had revamped the menu and dropped that item. After that, it was again some years before I suggested the place to a group only to be informed that it had gone under. I'm not sure if this was for Applegate's specific reasons, or if it was the harbinger of the decline of the Decker corridor. At any rate, the building sat there for several years with no longer any clear way to get to it and was finally torn down. I don't know what happened to the Model-A..

UPDATE: I originally had the name of this restaurant wrong as "Appleby's Landing". I have corrected it to "Applegate's Landing" based on the comments. Thanks!

UPDATE 14 Feb 09: Commenter Midnight Rambler sent in a scan of an old Applegate's coupon, and I have posted it above.

UPDATE 12 April 2010: Added full street address to post title.

Julie's was a small Columbia restaurant chain with a Bennigans-like concept. There were two in town, one on the frontage road at the Broad River Road/I-20 interchange, and one on Garner's Ferry Road near the old Woodhill Mall (about where Hampton Hills Athletic Club is now, but closer to the road).

I think these two started in the heyday of restaurants like Bennigans and Tuesdays 1865 (though those chains never came to Columbia for some reason), but never updated after their initial opening. I was more-or-less unaware that they existed until a group of friends ended up going to the Garner's Ferry location one night. Along with the standard burgers, steaks and pasta dishes, they also had a few Mexican items on the menu, and one, quesadillas was something I had never had (Mexican food was not very common at the time) and sounded interesting. In the event, I enjoyed it, but ended up with food-posioning from bad sour cream, and spent two days flat on my back (when I wasn't racing for the bathroom). I felt so low that I was unable to get up from the couch where I was lying in order to turn off the TV when one of my all-time most hated shows, The Scarecrow & Mrs. King, came on.

Needless to say, I never went back to Julies, and both locations closed sometime in the late 80s, the I-20 one after Woodhill. I don't recall anything else going into the building at Woodhill; I think it was torn down soon after Julie's closed, but I believe the building of the I-20 location did house something else before it too was demolished.

Update 30 May 2008: Added pictures of the doctor's office now on the old Julie's lot.

UPDATE 30 July 2012: I believe this building was the Julie's off I-20.

Dixie Used Furniture was on Gervais Street below Assembly. If you were heading down towards the river, it would be on the left hand side of the street in the building which I think became the Vista's brew-pub and now houses some other restaurant.

Dixie was a type of store which was once fairly common but is now almost gone: The real "used furniture" aka "junk" store. To walk into Dixie as a child was to enter a world of wonder. The building was not air-conditioned, so there were always big fans keeping up a running chatter, and there was dust on pretty much everything. There were a few hanging light fixtures under the high ceiling, but parts of the store were always in shadow.

Although there was used furniture to justify the store name, it seemed to me that the main business was used appliances, and the center aisle was lined with rows of more or less decrepit refrigerators, stoves and washers. There were sometimes old vending machines too, and I think for a time the owners kept operating a Coke machine which had a manual crank like a Model-T. You paid the owner, then turned the crank, and a cold bottle came out the bottom.

My favorite part of the place was the bookshelves. These were alongside the left (closest to Assembly) side of the store, and could have absolutely anything that had ever been printed on them. The books ranged from gems like copies of the original Tom Swift books (Tom Swift and His Sky Train, Tom Swift and His Giant Searchlight etc) to semi-current hardbacks (a copy of Philip K. Dick's The Galactic Pot Healer [man I ended up hating that book!]) to old pulp magazines and trashy 60s & 70s paperbacks. After that, I liked to walk the aisles of junk: from old kitchen gadgets, toasters juicers and the like to odd electrical items I couldn't figure out.

My only problem with Dixie and other used furniture stores was that my mother was really into the "furniture" aspect of them, and it took her much longer to peruse that than it did for me to scour the shelves and sift the junk, leaving long periods of boredom after the initial excitement. The space race was on during the years of her heaviest visitations, and I recall clearly a dream in which I was on a rocket to the moon which she demanded stop at a used furniture store on the way..

As the years went on, the category of "used furniture store" gradually went by the wayside. I think that part of it was growing affluence and the migration of the best pieces of furniture to "antique" stores, the other part may have been the value of the real estate vs the value of selling junk. I very much suspect that was the case for Dixie with its gentrifying Vista location. At any rate, I think it and its sister store closed sometime in the 80s. Too bad. It sounds like they're considering "improving" our washing machines like they improved our toilets. A place with a row of used top loaders might not be so bad..

Rosa Linda's was one of the first out-of-town places I became a "regular". Once I had a job, and car, my comings and goings from the beach came to depend more on my whims than elaborate family vacation plans, and when I was on the coast alone, I could always choose a place I liked. At the time (and still to a large extent), what I liked was Mexican and pizza.

Rosa Linda's billed itself as a Mexican/Italian restaurant, a combination which seems natural to me, but which I have seldom seen elsewhere. Of course, it wasn't authentic Mexican food, and the menu would cheerfully admit as much, but it was Mexican food prepared in a way which seemed very natural to me as a South Carolinian, and I quickly became addicted to the chips & salsa, which were almost my first experiences with "hot" food. I realize now that the salsa which seemed so amazing at the time was in fact Pace Medium, but it was certainly better than what was (and is) served at Mexican run Mexican restaurants, and the chips were made on-site, and were excellent. The pizza was prepared in a brick oven, and was the best single item on the menu. The crust was thin, but not anexoric, and firm but not brittle. It was also great for dipping in any of the salsa you might have had left over.

The wait staff was uniformly friendly, and they became so used to seeing me there, that they gave me their "locals" discount card (despite the fact that I was living in Fayetteville and then Aiken at the time) and membership pin. Supposedly, if you wore the pin, you would get seated first if there were a line. That didn't seem quite fair to me, so I never wore it, but I didn't hesitate to take advantage of the discount card which got you 10% off everything except bar drinks for the whole party. Being in the program also meant you got a postcard every year on your birthday with some sort of free food offer. I'm not sure I still have the pin or card. I know they were in my '85 Camry when it was totaled, and I'm not sure I've seen them since.

I was very upset when I came down to the beach one spring and found Rosa Linda's closed. I'm not sure I got the complete story from a lady in another local establishment but it seemed to boil down to family issues, and maybe moving somewhere outside the country to retire rather than to a failure of the business.

There were originally two other Rosa Linda's locations, each run independantly, but with the same menu. Once was in Myrtle Beach near the old Myrtle Square and the other was in North Myrtle Beach almost across from Barefoot Landing. The Myrtle Beach location was subpar. I ate there a few times, but it was never as good as the other two, and it closed before the Murrells Inlet location. The North Myrtle Beach location was as good as the Murrells Inlet (but too far a drive to become a "hangout" for me), and soldiered on until they lost their lease and were unable to find another location. A new Olive Garden restaurant was opened on that lot.

After the Murrells Inlet location closed down, no other operation was able to make a go of the location. The first to try was some sort of chain Mexican place whose name I cannot now recall. That lasted about a year and was followed by a Mexican run Mexican restaurant, which didn't last much longer. That was followed by The Royal Oak a faux English tavern operation which had a formidable number of different beers on tap, as well as burgers and pizza. I tried the pizza, and found it inferior to Rosa Linda's by a good bit. The pub folded last year, and the building is now vacant again. Oh well.

UPDATE 7 July 2009: Added scan of Rosa Linda's loyalty card above.

The Royal Oak was replaced by Spencerz's Sports Pub, which is now "closed for remodeling".

UPDATE 7 October 2009: Added the first picture, which shows Rosa Linda's with some wind damage after Hurricane Hugo in the fall of 1989

UPDATE 26 October 2009: Added the picture of the building's current tenant, Spencer'z Sports Pub (the pizza is 'ok', not nearly as good as Rosa Linda's).

UPDATE 22 Jan 2010: Well, looks like the Rosa Linda's folks are going to have a reunion (see the comments). Maybe they can rent their old building -- because Spencer'z South went under this week..

UPDATE 3 June 2010 -- Well, after 30+ years of being a restaurant, it appears the building will now be a golf shop:

UPDATE 12 April 2011 -- Good news! A new Rosa Linda's will be opening in the old Hoof 'n' Finz:

UPDATE 14 May 2011 -- The new Rosa Linda's is open!

I went by the other night, and am very pleased! They don't have a pizza oven because of structural limitations in the building, but the enchiladas taste exactly as I remember, as do the chips and Mexicana Mud.

I'm more than a litte hazy about where the giant slide was. It was definitely in the West Columbia/Cayce area. If I had to guess, I would say it may have been on Airport Blvd near what's now the I-26 interchange, but it could have been further out on the Charleston Highway.

At any rate, it was clearly an economic boondoggle which didn't last more than a single season, which was a real shame. The way I remember it, it had a large number of sliding "lanes", possibly as many as a dozen. You would get a piece of some sort of fabric to slide on, possibly a carpet patch, or a burlap sack, walk the stairs to the top, pick a lane, get on your fabric and slide down. The whole thing was built on a metal frame, and I think the lanes were fiberglass. I have the vague impression that different lanes may have had different colors. I don't remember the price and whether it was "per ride", a time limit, or per visit. At any rate, it wasn't so exorbitant that my parents wouldn't take us.

As I say, it didn't remain a going concern for very long, but it sat there, defunct for at least several years. We kids didn't quite understand the concept "out of business". The slide was still there, surely if we kept going, eventually we would catch it when it was open. Our parents, I'm sure, rolled their eyes and tried to get the concept into our minds, but eventually every time we were in Cayce for Sunday dinner, they would give in to our pestering and drive us out to the slide afterwards. I can't remember exactly when the slide was finally torn down, but I think it was gone by the Tricentennial.

UPDATE:

In the comments, Jaby Baby says the slide was called The Magic Carpet and was on Airport Blvd. Thanks Jaby!