Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

Here's an old country store I ran across recently just south of where Bluff Road (SC-48) ends at US-601.

The sign claims it was founded in 1856, which would make it a fairly rare atebellum business still in operation until fairly recently. I think this particular building is much newer than that however -- to me it has kind of a 1920s look. The nearest landark I can find an actuall address for is St. Luke AME Church at 4990 McCords Ferry Road (US-601) which is probably about half a mile south of here.

I don't know when the place closed, but it is now surrounded by a fence so clearly there has been no customer access for a while.

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I was not aware of this little roadside market on Assembly at Ferguson until commenter Matt mentioned that it seemed to be closed. That does in fact seem to be the case as the signage has been taken down, and the inside looks fairly hollowed out. You can see a nice picture of the place in full operation here. Also, the webpage is still up, but seems not to have been updated since March 2013.

I enjoy stopping and poking around in this type of place and am sorry I missed it. Often I manage to convince myself that I actually will use some honey or salsa *this time* and end up buying a couple of jars, though in fact it always ends up in my cabinet for years. Given the move of the State Farmers Market from Bluff Road, I can't think of another such market in the nearby vicinity.

(Hat tip to commenter Matt)

It's back to Cherokee Lane today for this little Western Wear shop which lists under two names. I have to say the building looks the part.

It looks like their move was to the old Piggly Wiggly #102 location at the Southwest corner of Saint Andrews Road, just as it kinks to the North.

UPDATE 22 May 2014 -- Here is their new location:

Here's another Pig closing from last year. This one is on the East side of US-1 not too far from the Barnyard flea market. Interestingly, the address is Lexington, though I did not think Lexington started that far South.

Though several recently closed Pigs have become Bi-Los, there is no sign of another tenant for this one yet.

(Hat tip to commenter Andrew)

UPDATE 1 March 2016 -- As mentioned in the comments, this is now KJ's IGA:

UPDATE 21 September 2022: Adding map icon. Updating tags.

Tony's Party Shop was on Saint Andrews Road in a Seven Oaks Shopping Center outparcel (not far from the former Irmo K-Mart).

Commenter Homer noted the closing, and sent in a set of pictures here. I took these two sets of pictures several weeks apart. The property is currently up for sale as shown in this listing

(Hat tip to commenter Homer)

UPDATE 27 April 2014 -- An earlier version of this post assumed the owner had passed away. Happily that seems to be wrong.

UPDATE 8 February 2017 -- These photos are from commenter Homer, who says:

I've attached 3 new pictures from Tony's Party Shop. I thought they were
getting ready to demolish it but it turns out they have gutted it to the
bare walls and have been working on the inside of the part that used to
be the actual liquor store. There's no signage anywhere so I have no
idea what may be in the works.

I don't often drive the stretch of Alpine between Two Notch and Polo Road, but when I did last week, I noticed that Franklin D. Plumbing & Gas Co. Do It Yourself Center had closed (apparently after a final yard sale). I don't know how the restaurant equipment angle factored in, but if I had to guess, I would guess that this type of store has been hard squeezed by the big-box (and nearby) Home Depot and Lowe's stores.

Jobs destroyed? Check!

Suite rent no longer being paid? Check!

Local custom driven to The Internet? Check!

It's a trifecta!

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The date was, I think, 1983, at about this time of year, and pretty much everything was right with the world. The Carter years were over, I was at USC and had, after a bit of flailing around, found something I liked and was was good at that I figured I could spend the forseeable future doing. It was springtime and I was taking a fun elective, "Introduction to Cinema", or some such course title.

I can't now recall the professor's name, but he was quite entertaining and well versed in the material. I remember in particular one of his theories, probably not 100% serious, that people in the first few decades of the 20th century lived their lives much more dramatically than we do now. This would explain, he said, why silent movies look so over-acted to us, but yet when he went back to the original period newspaper reviews of the features, he invariably found praise for the naturalness of the performances. At any rate, we screened many of those silent classics as well as more modern flicks into the French New Wave period and beyond. The kicker for the course was that for the final project, we would split into groups and make our own short films.

Well, as it happened, one of my Computer Science friends was in the course with me, so we formed a group of two for the project. I had, from somewhere, a Super-8 camera with an attached flood, so we were good on the technical side -- all we needed was an idea and script.

Now, one of the films we had screened was Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal. I don't know what I would think of it now, but at the time, I believe we both thought it a bit pretentious, and more importantly, a good subject for parody (which could only be helped by the fact that everybody in the audience would have seen the film recently too). I recall very few of the details, but the key fact is that a robed avatar of DEATH was going around taking lives with visual metaphor of a candle going out. We figured that with modern medical technology and life support, HIS job might be a bit less easy. We kicked it around a bit and figured we could get a usable 10 minutes from the idea easily.

Since I had the camera, and there were only two of us, it was obvious that my friend was going to have to be DEATH. It was a bit of a problem that she didn't look at all spooky or dangerous, but she had some ideas for that. Now, she was from North Augusta, so I have no idea how she knew more about this piece of Columbiana than I did (other than I rarely paid attention to anything outside of a book in those days), but she walked us down to the Vista (which was not called that at the time) and into Bluestein's Dry Goods. I had only a vague idea what a "dry goods" store was and certainly would not have automatically included sheets in that category, but she easily found a good sized, inexpensive sheet, and we were out the door. Next we stopped at the grocery for some black Rit dye, and mixing that up in my mother's washer (I have no idea how the next load of clothes came out), we dyed the sheet black.

Wound in black sheets, and with a bit of white makeup, my friend was a perfect DEATH. Next we made some cardboard signs saying "Life Support", and got some trick birthday candles. We put the signs up over the end of hall double doors in LeConte College (the CSCI building at the time), and our tracking shots had DEATH wafting through the corridors of that building and through the doors into the "Life Support" ward. At that point, the idea is that we would cut to the trick candles, and that everytime DEATH would snuff one out, it would re-light. Finally, he would be so frustrated he would break the 7th Seal (on a bottle of Seagrams 7..) We planned the shoot for well after hours (there was no building security in those days) and everything went perfectly without a soul present to ask what in the world we were doing. We got enough footage that we figured we were golden and wrapped up.

Next, I had the film developed, and it was time to edit the movie together. At that point I was suddenly stricken with pollen season allergies like never before and never since. It was non-stop sneezing, and my eyes were watering so badly I literally could not see to use the Moviola. In the end, my friend had to take it and set it up in the downstairs computer remote in the (as we called it at the time, Physical Sciences building) and she edited the movie together completely on her own during her late night shifts as the computer operator there. She did a great job of it, and the film was a hit with the class, we got good grades and moved on to the next semester. As far as I know, she still has the reel somewhere, but I'm sure it's better in memory that it would be watching it again now...

And that's my Bluestein's story!

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Another day, another Piggly Wiggly.

This store, at the corner of Clemson and Hardscrabble Roads, looks like it was a pretty nice one, though I can;t ever recall going inside. I might have thought that it would have benefitted from the closing of the Food Lion across the street, but in this case the ongoing woes of the chain seem to have outweighed any additional traffic from displaced Food Lion shoppers.

The closing of this store started rather oddly, with an "inventory reduction" sale. Since there is no reason for a grocery store to ever have such a sale in the normal course of events, this seems to have been some sort of signal that the store was closing before the management was able to say that officially.

This closing will be a big hit for Magnolia Pointe, as The Pig was the only anchor in the main strip of the shopping center. There is a CVS in an outparcel region, but that won't bring shoppers in to the shopping center proper.

(Hat tip to commenter ken holler)

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Commenter James points out that this recreational equipment and fixture store on US-1 near I-26 has closed. I have to admit that it was never on my radar screen as I can't imagine buying anything along those lines. I guess this was not a sentiment unique to me..

(Hat tip to commenter James)