Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

I've written before about OfficeMax pulling out of the Columbia market. I had forgotten that they had the store on Two Notch as well as the one on Bush River Road until I drove by and saw that a new tenant was going in.

I don't have any problem with a Haloween store, per se. I don't know that it's happening as much around here, but in some places at least, Haloween is becoming quite the big adult party holiday. I remember spending one Haloween in DC, and taking the Metro to Dupont Circle for supper. Now, I won't say the escalator into the Dupont Circle station is long, but I will say that after you're on it for a while, you expect to see an Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here sign. Of course, what goes down also comes up, and being on that escalator behind 20-somethings costumed as naughty nurses and "wicked" witches is, um, inspiring.

So, anyway, I'm fine with a Haloween store, but I do have to cavil a bit about the timing. I mean, come on Haloween is the last day of October -- that's two and a half months from now! If you're in the mood to pick out a Haloween costume now, you're probably one of those annoying folks who already have all your Christmas cards written..

And oddly enough, this was the second Haloween store I saw today. There's one setting up on US-1 out near I-26 as well!

"I got a rock".

UPDATE 11 March 2011: Updated the closing date based on the comments. Also added full street address.

This Winn-Dixie was located in a hard-luck strip mall on the "troubled" Decker Boulevard corridor. Prior to the store's locating there, the physical plant of the building it went into had really been in bad shape since the long-ago departure of its predecessor (whose name I can't recall right now). Winn-Dixie put a lot of work into the building, and it looked like the mall would come to life again as it attracted a few new businesses, including Columbia stalwart, The Book Exchange.

What my family found really notable about the store's opening was the blast of publicity they paid for: They mailed everyone in the area a custom produced 10 minute VHS casette to promote the store and all its features. That must have cost them a pretty penny (now I suppose they would just mail a postcard with their web-site address, though I suppose since that would be less notable, people would be less likely to actually follow it up..).

Out of curiosity, my sister & I watched the tape which had been sent to my father. I know the impression I got from the tape was that the store was very upscale with an extensive deli department. I was surprised when I actually dropped by the store to find that it was very average. There was absolutely nothing wrong with it, and I wouldn't hesitate to stop if I were in the area and remembered I needed something, but it was definitely less upscale than other non-FoodLion stores in the general area (Publix for instance).

Still, I think it did well enough, and was a solid tenant for the struggling plaza. Unfortunately, the whole Winn-Dixie chain got in big trouble in 2004 and completely exited North & Suth Carolina, leading to the store's closure, and the plaza started going downhill again. The Book Exchange in fact moved back to almost the same spot on Two Notch that it had moved from to begin with. Lately things have stablized a bit with the Comedy House moving (after a hiatus) from its Saint Andrews Road location into half of the Winn-Dixie, and a bingo operation subsuming the other half as well as the Book Exchange spot and several other spots
on the other side. At this point only the huge sign behind the old store remains to say that Winn-Dixie was once there. (Though that itself is a bit unusual: Chains that are still operating usually take care to remove their branding from failed locations).

UPDATE 11 March 2011: Updated closing date to 24 August 2005 based on here.

UPDATE 28 August 2018 -- There is now a plasma center in the left part of the old store that was Bingo. (The Comedy House is still in the main portion):

The Movies at Polo opened and closed while I was living in Aiken. I can't recall specifically that I ever saw a show there, though I was in town more weekends than not. I think this place is another example of Pat Berman's underfannied theory of the Columbia movie market. There are simply not enough fannies-on-seats week-in-and-week out in Columbia to support the number of theaters we used to have. Of course in this case, it probably didn't help either that a new theater was in the offing at the nearby Village at Sandhills, though I'm pretty sure The Movies at Polo gave up the ghost before that multiplex opened.

Unlike the Capiton Centre Theatre we can't see with any specificity which movies actually closed this operation, but there has been no lack of bombs in recent years. I like to think it was Son of the Mask.

At any rate, we can see that, as usual, it wasn't a shortage of parking that did the place in:

For restaurant buildings, the last stage is the "Asian Buffet" stage. For other retail space, the last stage is the "Self Storage" stage:

As an aside, The Movies at Polo was actually a rather misleading name, as the place is not that close to Polo Road. The Movies Near Sesqui would have been better.

UPDATE 11 September 2011 -- As mentioned in the comments, there has long been a sign indicating that a funeral home is coming to the property. In fact, the sign has been there long enough that it seems unlikely now. I guess there might be enough room in the old parking lot for such an establishment and its own associated parking, but it would seem rather crowded. The self-storage place mentioned above has been open in the old theater building, and several adjacent new buildings for a good while now.

Also, as indicated in the comments, commenter Andrew has pinned the closing date for this place as July 2005, so I have updated the post title to indicate that. Also added the full street address.

UPDATE 27 February 2014 -- Well, I'm not entirely sure what happened here. I always wondered how Shive's could possibly build a funeral home on this site given that Monster had the old theater building, leaving only the old parking lot open -- and funeral homes need lots of parking for visitation and organizing the funeral processions. At any rate, the sign proclaiming this as the new Shive's site sat there for years with no action, and it has finally been replaced with one saying that the new funeral home will be built on Trenholm Road Extension instead (but Monster's sign still welcomes Shive's..)

UPDATE 21 April 2014 -- Just for the record, Shive's has broken ground on Trenholm Road Extension & Dawson Road now:

UPDATE 7 June 2016 -- Either vandals, the wind or the property owner have done a number on the old sign:

UPDATE 22 March 2017 -- I see the parking lot has finally been sold:

I first became aware of this building when it was "Po Folks", and I think that was the original tenant. Po Folks was, the name suggested, a sort of fauxy-down-home type of place where they served "country cookin'", served the drinks in mason jars and wrote the menus in misspelled "Southern" dialect. That's not really a criticism; there's a place for that type of thing, and I remember the food as being pretty good. Certainly my parents liked it a good bit, and we ate there fairly often. I don't know exactly what happened to Po Folks -- they are still around as a chain, but apparently they have contracted a great deal and no longer have any locations in South Carolina. I do know that they continued to have a Myrtle Beach location for a while after the Columbia location closed, but it's gone now as well. Today the chain seems to be largely a Florida operation with a few other restaurants in Alabama, Arizona and California.

After Po Folks left, the building went through a long period of "musical concepts". I think next it may have been the original Fran's location (Fran's later opened "Little Fran's" on Forest Drive as a smaller second store, which became simply "Fran's" when the original Fran's closed and which itself recently closed). After Fran's closed, the building was vacant for a while prompting some distruntled former patrons to put up a "Bring Back Po Folks" sign on the property. I lose track after that, but at some point it was one or possibly two different night-clubs and then an urban-comedy club. The Jim Moore used car dealership has been there a couple of years now, so possibly the site now has a stable tenant, though it's doubtful they can supply you a Blue Ribbon Chicken Dinner.

UPDATE 22 June 2009:

Well, not that stable! Moore For Less is now gone. (Also added the street addres to post title above).

UPDATE 13 March 2011: The building has been knocked down. See the Moore For Less link for pictures.

UPDATE 29 June 2021: Updating the post title with more former tenants of this building thanks to commenter Paul's research and adding tags & map icon.

UPDATE 17 June 2025: Updating tags.

When Circuit City came to town, their first location (as I recall it anyway) was on Two Notch Road, by the first Columbia Mall entrance. I didn't go there very often because, in short, I had no money at the time. I also found that the salesmen, who worked on commission, were rather predatory, and it was hard to get a close look at anything without one swooping down. In the late 80s or maybe the early 90s, they changed their corporate direction to be a "big box" player, and moved out of their original store (which now houses Wes Bolick bedrooms) and around the corner, so to speak, into a large store at Capitol Centre.

By this time, I had a real job, and a little money, so I would go browsing a bit more often. They always seemed to have a lot of interesting electronics (and appliances, which didn't really seem to fit with the rest of their concept). I found that if I stayed away from the TVs and large stereo systems, I could generally look unmolested by staff, but that checkout was now a big pain. At one time, Radio Shack had the most annoying checkout experience in electronics retail, belying their supposed tech savy by writing everything down on a pad by hand and running a total with a calculator and then nosing about your phone number and address. After Radio Shack reformed, Circuit City seemed to take up some of their nosiness, and I recall on a day when I was in a bad mood anyway, and just wanted to pay cash for a $10 tape for data backup that I rebelled when they started digging for all my personal data, and ended up boycotting the chain for about 5 years.

In that interval, they fell upon hard times. I think part of it was the DIVX debacle. Back when it was clear that technology was advancing to the point that VHS would be obsolete and that the next medium for distributing movies to retail would be some sort of CD sized disc, there were two contenders. One of these was, of course, DVD, and the other was DIVX (which has nothing to do with the current video codec called DivX, btw). The difference between the two formats (from a consumer perspective) was that DVD was "forever" while DIVX discs could only be played for a limited time period before expiring (making each purchase essentially a rental). Circuit city backed DIVX in a big way, and apparently shaded the truth in a lot of their sales-floor pitch, earning a lot of consumer bad-will.

In the meantime, Best Buy was challenging them with even bigger stores and more tech choices, and they have never completely recovered. None of that, I suppose, has anything to do with the move of this particular store from Capitol Centre to their current location out on Two Notch near Sandhills -- that was just the combination of the decline of Capitol Centre and the general flight from the Columbia Mall/Decker Blvd area out towards the north-east. (Once again, we can see that it wasn't lack of parking that did it.. :-) I ended my boycot years ago, and have been in their new store a number of times. It seems to me that Best Buy is still better at computer stuff (though neither compares to the late, lamented CompUSA in that regard), but that Circuit City is better than it was. Certainly they seem to have done away with commissions and you can generally browse more comfortably now, and the last time I bought something, they didn't ask for my phone number at all.

Don Pablo's seemed to be an up-and-coming Mexican restaurant chain in the Southeast during the 90s. They had this location at Columbia Mall, a location in Charleston on Rivers Avenue, one in Augusta off of the Bobby Jones expressway and several in the Atlanta and Charlotte areas.

I have always enjoyed "chain" Mexican restaurants more than "authentic" ones, but Columbia has always seemed to have a problem attracting and keeping them. We had Garcia's (on O'Niel Court, I think) but only very briefly, and never had a Chi-Chi's, Chevy's, Rio Bravo, or On The Border, and my favorite Cucos lasted only a few years. El Chico (which I do like) seems to be the only national player with staying power, but at the time, I didn't see any reason Don Pablo's couldn't be a second.

They had a very comfortable interior, with plenty of booths, and I enjoyed several of their menu items quite a bit. In particular, the cheese & onion enchiladas were very tasty and were covered with a nice brown sauce and the chile rellenos were really good as well. The standard salsa was a bit bland (though better than the completely kickless tomato gunk at "authentic" places), but they had a "macho" salsa which was a bit embarassing to order, but which was a bit more interesting. My father liked the place too, and we often ate there with my sister on weekends when I was in town (I was living in Aiken and working in Augusta at the time).

Unfortunately, the place came to exhibit several of the Signs Your Favorite Restaurant is About to Close including cutting back their hours. I mentally put Don Pablo's on the critical list, and sure enough I came by one evening, and the place was dark and empty.

I was disappointed, but there was still the Augusta location and the Charleston one which I could visit when I went down to see The Have Nots. I recall I was in the Augusta location on Election Night of 2000. On my way out (probably about 11:00), I passed by a TV in the bar and recall thinking very clearly something like "Man, this is going to be a squeaker!" -- little did I know..

Shortly after that, the Augusta location closed, while I was eating in the Charleston location, I noticed the Augusta manager making his way around the dining room, checking on the customers. He recognized me, and said he had always wanted to live in Charleston, and he considered himself lucky because the spot opened up just before the word came down that the ax was falling in Augusta. I guess his luck ran out soon after that as the Charleston location closed. (It's a "Wild Wing" now).

I don't go up to Charlotte very often, but I did find a Don Pablo's up there once, by chance but it was gone too the next time I stopped by.

I just spent three weeks working in the DC area (restaurants up there are very iffy on ice tea!) and found a DP still in operation at the Ptomac Yards mall on Jefferson Davis Highway. After several years with no experience of the place, it was a mixed bag. I think I went there three times, and once it was average, once it was very greasy, and once it was as good as I remembered. Looking around on the web, it seems that they had a corporate "near death" experience and have been bought by a new parent company at this point (which also seems to have "Hops", which still exists up there). We'll see how it works out.

In the meantime, the old Columbia Mall location now hosts The Charleston Crabhouse, and I wish them well, though I tend not to darken the door of seafood places.

UPDATE 17 July 2012 -- Below are some neon pix of the Don Pablo's logo from the streetside and front door signs at the Greenville Don Pablo's across from Haywood Mall. I've been there twice in the last month, and it was pretty good (as were the ones in Orlando and Atlanta that I've visted over the past year):

I should probably also mention here that the Charleston Crab House has closed.

As I wrote in my post on Robo's Video Ardade, nothing says "80s" like an arcade. But perhaps an even better example than Robos is the arcade which was at Two Notch & I-77 (although actually I-77 wasn't completed to that point at the time).

This arcade was a spec-built freestanding building located a good ways from any customer base, or foot-traffic. Robos was across the street from the University, other arcades were in malls, this one was meant to be a destination in itself, and it worked for a while...

I remember that in the summers while I was in grad school, I would drive out to Bell Camp (to be the subject of its own post someday) for an afternoon swim and drive home via Two Notch with my hair still drying in the breeze from the car window to make a stop at the arcade. I recall that the set of games skewed a bit from my favorites, but I still found enough I could play that I could drop a few dollars and spend an hour or so.

Soon after that, the arcade phenomenon crashed and arcades all over town closed down. My memory is that the next occupant of this building was some sort of carpet store, and that there may have been another before its current tenant, a golf center. I do know people who like golf, but I'd still rather visit an arcade.

UPDATE 16 July 2010: Finally updated the post title from "Video Arcade" to "Galaxy World", and added the full street address.

UPDATE 7 January 2014: Fix street address from 7813 to 7184.

Mr. Muffler was a very low-key, "We only do one thing" auto shop on Two Notch. As far as I could tell walking or driving past the place, they were never overwhelmed with work, but never wholly idle either.

"Mr. Muffler" himself was a cheerry 1950s looking cartoon guy who had a big smile as he carried a muffler. In the picture, you can see where he used to be, but the cut-out itself is gone. That makes me think that Mr. Muffler must be a chain with some other locations. Chains like to take all of their branding down from defunct locations while one-off stores don't really care.

This shop was located next to a sketchy trailer park, and all around the park are now signs warning that the park is closed and there is no tresspassing. One of those signs has been affixed to the Mr. Muffler store, making me wonder if a developer bought out the park & Mr. Muffler to mark this whole corner of Two Notch & Pinestraw for development.

UPDATE 30 Jan 2009:

Here's the "Mr. Muffler" cartoon character from the Earl's Mr. Muffler on Sunset Boulevard in West Columbia. (Note that he is facing in the opposite direction from the one which was taken down from the Two Notch store building).

UPDATE 17 March 2010 -- I've added the full street address to the post title. Also, the building has been boarded up now:

UPDATE 11 January 2012 -- More pictures (27 August 2011) of the place boarded up:

UPDATE 30 September 2011 -- at some point someone has torn down the plywood window sheets. I'm thinking this was a break-in, or just random vandalism as they have now been put back up:

UPDATE 10 January 2012 -- As this picture from a few days later (1 October 2011) shows, the property owner has put up stakes around the parking lot to keep people from driving in there. I noticed 18-Wheelers in particular using the lot as an inpromptu pull-off:

UPDATE 28 August 2017 -- Looks like as of 15 August 2017, this place is destined for a tax sale:

UPDATE 13 November 2024 -- Lots going on here, though I'm not sure what or why. Perhaps it's related to the ongoing road work in the area, but but the building has been broken open. I would say partially razed as well, but it's not clear how much was there from the initial cleanout of the building plus the years of neglect. Also taking this time to add a map icon and update the tags.

UPDATE 11 February 2025 -- I suspect most of the new damage was somehow incidental to the road work, which crews seem to be using the lot for storage and porta-potties, but nonetheless the property owner, whoever it is at this point, is under warning for numerous violations:

UPDATE 10 July 2025 -- As mentioned in the comments, it's gone:

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)

I recall that when I was around 6 or 7, Midlands Plaza ran a promotion to get shoppers out during the weekend. There was some sort of ride to entice the children, and the whole thing was promoted on WIS radio. Midlands wasn't where we normally shopped, but I bugged my mother until she took me out to experience the much ballyhooed kiddy-ride. I can't remember what it was now except that it was small, groundbased and freestanding (to make it easier to transport from promotion to promotion, I suppose). I have the impression that it was supposed to hop around the parking lot, but really it didn't matter, because they could not get it started. Apparently there was a gas motor in there somewhere, because they kept pulling on a lawn-mower-like starting cord, and occasionaly the thing would sputter a few strokes, but it would never fire up. And that is a metaphor for the history of Midlands Plaza.

I don't know if this is actually the case, but Midlands Plaza seems to have been conceived as a sister site to Trenholm Plaza (perhaps even the reverse was true?), with a Post Office and A&P anchoring a choice corner site with easy access from major roads, but for some reason the place exhibited a failure-to-thrive for most of the period I can remember. Certainly it was in bad shape by the 70s, bottomed out in the 80s, and has currently come to terms with a post-retail mode of operation.

It is rather appropriate that A&P was the anchor store for Midlands, since that chain itself underwent a similar experience during the same time period. It used to be the case that you could find A&P's distinctive, steeple capped, stores all around Columbia and other area cities. You can still often find the buildings, but the chain itself has withered away. I think part of it was the fact that while grocery stores were getting bigger and bigger, A&P was entrenched in small sites, and didn't make any effort to build bigger until they had finally been leap-frogged by newer chains. Of course for that to happen bespeaks a certain complacency at the management level, perhaps best exemplified by the last A&P advertising campaign that I can recall: A&P: Putting Price & Pride Together Again. It's always risky to run a "we were wrong" campain, and much more so to run a lame "we were wrong" campaign.

After the failure of that campaign, and the closure of the stores at Trenholm & Midlands Plazas, the only other A&P activity I saw in South Carolina was the attempt to establish a "Supercenter" in North Myrtle Beach, something that might have worked if they had done it before Kroger and other big stores moved in, but which in the event went under after no more than a few years. So, with over a hundred years in business, the legacy of A&P, at least in South Carolina, is the (confusing to youngsters, I'm sure) reference in the Waitresses classic "Christmas Wrapping":

A&P has pride in me with the world's smallest turkey..

The store at Trenholm Plaza was torn down and replaced with a Publix, the store at Midlands Plaza became, for a time, Giant Food World (invoking nightmare images of boxcar sized potatoes, and Sequoia-ish brocolli), then I think became a furniture store and finally became empty (but the steeple and wether-vane have withstood the ravages of the years..)

UPDATE: Added picture of old A&P on Sunset Drive.
UPDATE: Added picture of old (but re-roofed & de-steepled) A&P on the Charleston Highway

UPDATE 4 April 2013 -- Well, I wish I had made totally separate posts for all the old A&P buildings, but I was still kind of feeling my way along way back in 2008. That aside, the Midlands Shopping Center A&P building is now gone. Below are pictures from mid 2012 and then March 2013: