Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

I've written about Waldenbooks at Columbia Mall, and the other book store at Dutch Square Browz-a-Bit, but I've not said anything about the Dutch Square Waldenbooks, which for several years was my main book store.

Waldenbooks actually had two different locations in Dutch Square. The first one was sort of odd in that it was behind the corner of the main corridor and the first crosswalk, but not on the corner. There were two entrances to the store. One was on the crosswalk corrider before coming to the corner (where the Great Steak & Potato Co is today) and the other was on the main corridor just below Tapps (now the theaters), but the actual corner, Steak & Potato slot was another store.

The main corridor also goes markedly up hill from the crosswallk to Tapps, so the Walden's was a split-level store. If you call the crosswalk entrance the "front" (and that makes sense as they later closed off the exit to the main corridor), then the front of the store was on the ground and the back of the store was built on a platform that was, I believe, two steps up from the ground. My main interest was the science fiction rack, which was parallel to the main corridor and butted up against the raised platform forming the back of the store.

For at least one year, possibly two, I would spend one afternoon a week in the Dutch Square area while my mother would take my sister to piano lessons a couple of miles away. I had only a $0.60 weekly allowance, supplemented by $3.00 for mowing the lawn, so any actual purchase was a matter of careful deliberation and agonized tax calculation and penny counting (though it certainly helped that mass market paperbacks were still under a dollar in those years). In my hour or so of time, I would sometimes walk down to Boardwalk Plaza to peruse the Book Dispensary, but mainly I would circulate between Walden's and Browz-A-Bit trying to make up my mind.

I have strong memories of some of the books I bought at this Walden's (and in fact still have the books themselves in most cases). I recall in particular getting all of Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, one at a time, with awful 70s covers, and Pyramid editions of all of Doc Smith's Skylark and Lensman books (with bad [what was it with the 70s and loss of design sense?!] but better covers as well). Covers aside, I must have read each of those books at least 20 times.

I also liked the humor section though I rarely bought anything there. One book in particular made a great impression on me as a 13 or 14 year old. I was amazed that it sat right out there in the open, and always wished I had the courage to pick it up. Buying it was out of the question, of course :-)

Later when I could drive on my own, Columbia Mall became my book hangout of choice what with Walden's on one end and B. Dalton on the other. I sort of lost track of the Dutch Square Walden's. I did know they had moved down the main corridor from their original location. The reason I heard was that the split-level store was not ADA compatible, but I don't know if that is true or not. At any rate, I found their new location less interesting than the original. What with that, moving out of town and the advent of "big box" bookstores, I doubt I was in the new store more than a dozen or so times. I didn't even hear about it when the store closed.

After Walden's, Fashion's Unlimited went into their slot, and I find it amusing to see how they stock the men's dress shirts in the old Walden's magazine display rack.

In my mind, Hardee's has been going down hill since they got rid of Gilbert Giddyup & Speedy McGreedy, not to mention "charco" grilling. For years though, the real reason to stop at a Hardee's when you got off the Interstate rather than McDonalds or Burger King, was for the ice.

There are a number of different types of commercial ice makers for restaurants. Some make lenticular spherical sections, others make partially hollow cubes, and some make "chewy" ice. Honestly, I don't know why a restaurant would want anything but the last kind, but some do and did. Hardee's though could be counted on for the chewy ice for years and then in a fit of madness, they gave it up. Next they started emphasing chicken such that I couldn't even go into the stores any more because of the chicken smell. Finally they were bought out by Carl's Junior wandered aimlessly for years but of late seem to have grabbed onto a workable concept with the "thickburger" line (though I have yet to sample one).

Anyway, that's all besides the point to this pair of local playground changes sent in by commenter Melanie. The "before" shots come from her, and I took the "after" ones last weekend:

The tall metal man was the playground at the Hardees beside Dutch Square before they tore it down. I think this picture was taken 1995 give or take a year.

and:

Hardees ditched another of their coolest playgrounds sometime in the new millenia. Here is a pic taken in 1995-6 of the Hardees playground from Garners Ferry where I77 goes over. They had this playground at least since I was born because I remember it always being there.

The metal man is indeed way cool. I can only speculate that either the insurance became too burdensome, or playgrounds don't really fit in with the Carl's Junior conception of Hardee's.

UPDATE 21 April 2009: Added "Dutch Square" to the post title.

UPDATE 18 December 2012: Changed the location for the "Garners Ferry" Hardees from 7942 Garners Ferry Road to 120 Veterans Road. (The Hardee's in question is not actually on Garners Ferry, but a side-street, and the Garners Ferry Address is another Hardee's entirely).

UPDATE 10 April 2019 -- This location has now closed, the closing is here. Also updated tags and added map icon.

Browz-A-Bit was the "second" book store in the old Dutch Square, with Waldenbooks definitely being the "first". I'm a little hazy on the exact location of the store, but it was on the Bush River Road side of the mall, and I think was a bit up the "hill" from Woolworth's.

In the early 70s my mother would often drop me off at the mall while she and my sister went off to do something different. I guess I would have been around 12 or 13, old enough to have stayed home alone, but I always liked the Dutch Square experience. At the time, I had a weekly allowance of $0.60, and could earn $3.00 mowing the lawn, so I would have a few dollars in my pocket to hit the bookstores.

Sometimes I would walk down to the old Book Dispensary location in Boardwalk Plaza on Bush River Road, but mostly I would hit Waldenbooks and Browz-A-Bit. While Walden's had the "legitimate" book trade cornered, with hardbacks (which I would never be able to afford), some depth in stock and the current New York Times bestsellers, Browz-A-Bit tended more towards "men's adventure" (Doc Savage, The Destroyer, Nick Carter etc), TV tie-ins, the sensational (they seemed to be big on "Edgar Cayce: The Sleeping Phrophet!") and the non-book: Hallmark cards, little gifts, the Weekly World News etc..

While I can still remember very well some of the exact books I bought at Walden's during those days, I can't do that for Browz-A-Bit. I feel sure I would have gotten some Doc Savage books there (and if you only saw the cheesy 70s movie, you should seek out the original pulp adventures, the best of which are cracking good yarns).

If I recall correctly, the store was set up with two rows of wire books racks on the left side of the shop with the greeting cards and knick-knacks on the right side of the store and tabloids by the cash register, which was in the middle-front of the store.

I'm not really sure when or why Browz-A-Bit closed, but I think it was in the 80s, well before the big box bookstores came to Harbison (or indeed to Columbia at all). Maybe it would have helped to have called it Buy-A-Bit instead..

I suppose I shouldn't do two Eckerd Drugs posts so close together, but writing about the one on Taylor Street made me think about the one at Dutch Square, and I already had the pix, so why not?

The Eckerd's at Dutch Square is the only Eckerd's I know of which had a lunch counter. Even at the time Dutch Square was built in the early 70s, drugstore lunch counters were on the way out, but I suppose they figured they had a captive audience and plenty of foot traffic, like an old downtown, plus there was no food court at the time (I believe Chik-Fil-A, Annabelle's and a cafeteria were the only restaurants in the mall).

The layout of this store was a bit unusual. I have taken the pictures catty-cornered because that was the way the store was oriented. You can see that the current tenant, The Dress Barn has an entrance on both the main up-and-down corridor of the mall and on the cross corridor leading to a mall entrance on the Dutch Square Boulevard side of the mall. So did Eckerd's, with the lunch counter being situated crossways such that if you walked in through the main corridor entrance and out through the cross corridor entrance, you would have walked across the whole lunch counter space parallel to the counter.

Between the lunch counter area and the main store proper, there was a silver turnstile which only allowed passage in not out, which I always considered an unfriendly touch, but I suppose it helped with shoplifting since there was no store checkout on the lunch counter side (the store entrance with registers was on the cross-corridor near the mall door).

There was also an Eckerd's in Columbia Mall, and I'm unsure which store packed it in first, but I'm pretty sure the Dutch Square one did not make it out of the 1990s.

UPDATE 10 August 2020: Add map icon, update tags.

At one time, the side of the lower Intersection Center strip mall that faced Service Merchandise was something of an Indian complex, with a grocery, a clothing store and the Touch of India restaurant. I'm guessing that there was probably common ownership involved, but I don't really know.

Touch of India is the one Indian restaurant in Columbia that I haven't eaten at yet (though the one across form the Bush River Wal-Mart has changed ownership at least twice since I stopped there, so perhaps I shouldn't count it anymore). I always meant to stop, but the place was tucked away out of sight and mind and I never got around to it. They re-located last year out of the dying Intersection Center and onto Garner Lane, the hotel access road at the I-20 on-ramp off of Broad River Road. I've driven by the location a few times, and actually stopped by once when it happened not to be open. The new location looks a lot better, but they've traded an unattractive location for one that's hard to get to, at least if you're coming from Forest Acres. Still I'm going to make it eventually.

UPDATE 13 September 2009: Finally got some pictures of their new location at 1321 Garner Lane, #C:

UPDATE 15 March 2010:

Well, I finally did make it to Touch of India a few months ago. The menu was quite a bit different from The Delhi Palace where I usually go (or did before they moved). I thought the dosa (if I have that right -- the pancake-like things) were pretty good.

Unfortunately, they closed shop on Sunday the 14th. Eva's story in the Free-Times says business was down, and in my opinion, the location can not have helped there -- As I said in my original post above, Garner Lane is just hard to get to, and some people simply aren't going to "go against" Interstate on-ramp traffic.

UPDATE 16 May 2010: Added the full street address for the original location, tags.

UPDATE 20 May 2011 -- The place is now a strip club. More pictures later, but here is the start of the facade change:

UPDATE 22 January 2020: Add map icon (for Intersection Center location) and update tags.

Well, the spot doesn't look like much now, but this Dutch Square storefront just outside of White's was once the home of The Barrel O' Fun video arcade, and was a pretty hoppin' place. The 80s were the heyday of the video arcade, and Barrel had all the standard ones like PacMan, Galaga, Defender, BattleZone, Tempest, Gorf, Space Invaders, Asteroids, Space Invaders, Joust, Missle Command, Dig-Dug, Galaxian and Phoenix. My memory is very hazy, but I think it had some of the less common ones that I really liked such as Qix, StarCastle and Pengo. That last was a very "cute" but nonetheless creative game where you (as a penguin) would kick ice blocks around the screen to crush the killer Sno-Bees. You could also keep them from hatching if you kicked their ice blocks before they emerged. I think probably a lot of guys were embarassed to play it because of the "cute" factor, otherwise it would have been huge.

Of course you could find the games, even the uncommon ones, elsewhere, so what really made Barrel O' Fun distinctive was it's polished wood entranceway. This was done up as a cross-section of a huge wood plank barrel, was very eye-catching and gave the place a bit of class. Even after the arcade closed, you could see the entrance for a number of years, draped with some sort of plastic. I'm not sure when they totally blanked out the storefront as they have now done, but it wasn't too many years ago. I'm not entirely sure when the place closed. The last time I can specifically remember going there was after I walked out of a movie at Dutch Square Theater in 1987 and killed some time there while my sister and her friend finished the show. Dutch Square itself was clearly in decline by then, as were video arcades, so the two factors together probably finished the place, and I don't think anything else has ever gone into that slot.

UPDATE 24 Aug 2010: I have posted two photos from commenter Trey above. One is of the Barrel Of Fun sign in his workshop, and the other, entitled "Inside Coin Booth", seems to be of the old round entrance to the arcade. Also, given this evidence, I have updated the post title from Barrel O' Fun to Barrel Of Fun

Thanks Trey!

When I was small, Cromer's P-Nuts used to advertise locally a good deal, and their ear catching slogan, Guaranteed Worst In Town! certainly made an impression on me though we never shopped there that much.

The first Cromer's store I was aware of was on Assembly Street at Lady Street, where this building now stands:

My mother took us there a few times on downtown shopping trips, and I recall being impressed with the wide array of merchandise that included items I never saw anywhere else. A lot of these were carnival type "prizes", and indeed the store seemed much more focused on school fair fare than on peanuts. You could rent sno-cone and cotton-candy machines, cart mounted popcorn poppers and sets of helium cylinders for floating baloons. It was a fantastic assortment of stuff for which I would never have a need but which nonetheless fascinated me.

The Assembly street store was there at least into the late 1970s. I started driving alone in 1977, and I can recall taking a classmate of mine all the way from Polo Road to Cromer's on Assembly so we could buy some sno-cone cups for a science project. As I recall, the idea was to cut the tips off of them at different distances from the tops, giving a selection of different sized holes in the bottoms. We were then going to time how fast it took to drain a full cup in each case and relate that to some formula or other. Honestly, it was mostly an excuse to be away from school on a nice spring day (with permission) as much as anything else. My guess is that would have been 1978. Shortly after that, the downtown store burned down.

The downtown store wasn't the only Cromer's in town however. They also had a store inside of Dutch Square. It's hard to say exactly since the interior of Dutch Square has been remodelled since then, but I think the Cromer's was more or less in the spot now occupied by Trendz.

The mall store was smaller than downtown, but it had something downtown didn't have: Monkeys!

That's right, the entire back of the store was a glassed-in monkey-habitat, and there were always several monkeys there swinging around or doing things less salutory. I don't know exactly what the reasoning was -- The store didn't sell monkeys. It was purely a publicity gimmick, and as such I suppose it worked. Certainly it got kids who otherwise had no intention of buying anything into the store, and I would guess that once in, a certain number of them were going to spot something that caught their fancy.

I'm pretty hazy on when the Dutch Square store closed, and whether it was before or after the downtown store burned down, but I'm pretty sure it did not make it into the 80s.

In the same general time frame, Cromer's branched out to the Grand Strand, and opened a large store on US 17 just below Myrtle Beach in the general area of the Air Base (above Kroger and below what is now the Flea Market/Food Lion plaza).

I went in several times, and what I remember most is the "mongoose". It "lived" in a hollow stump-like construction with a trap-door lid over the top, and was fronted by a sign describing the mongoose with an emphasis on its speed and visciousness. The text ended with an invitation to view the magnificent creature by carefully raising the trap-door. By this point, nobody (other than a very small kid) would think there was an actual mongoose in there, but you were curious and you raised the trap. At which point there was some sort of recorded roar, and a spring-loaded beast would jump at you, like one of those snakes in the nut can, but worse. It never failed to get a few people to gasp, and for the rest of the store to wait in anticipation of the next person to fall for it.

I don't think the Myrtle Beach store made it into the 90s, and the place is now some sort of Harley Davidson shop.

In the meantime, Cromer's in Columbia regrouped, and opened a store on a small side street of Bluff Road near the Farmers' Market. I'm not sure when it opened, but it was there as late as 2005 as I finally needed one of those helium cylinders for baloons. At that point, it seemed to me that, given the non-foot-traffic location, Cromer's was focusing even more on event supplies than before, and that straight retail customers were not the norm.

Sometime between 2005 and now, Cromers returned to downtown. I suppose you could debate that, as it's not in the old downtown "shopping district", but I would say 1700 Huger Street (the corner of Huger & Blanding) counts. The new location shares a building with Cogdil Carpets.

Along with the new building, they now have a web site, but since I've never been in, I can't tell you if they have a monkey or a mongoose.

UPDATE 1 Aug 2009: This link has a picture of the Assembly street store burning down. It was taken by Robert Busbee of the Columbia Firefighters Association. The date given for the fire is 8 December 1993. A number of other historic fires are pictured on the Firefighters website. (Hat tip to commenter Brian).

UPDATE 21 April 2013 -- Commenter Melanie sends in this picture of the Dutch Square location *with monkeys*!

UPDATE 26 March 2018 -- The Huger Street location has now moved to North Main, see here

OK, this one makes me doubt my memories. (I'm sure more of these closings should do that..)

This is the store where I bought my sister a vacuum cleaner back in the 1980s. I can't remember what kind it was -- some sort of off-brand canister model that seemed fairly solid, I think. It lasted more than ten years for her, and if that's not Electrolux longevity, it's not bad.

The thing is that I was dead certain the place was called Intersection Vacuum Center, which made sense because it was located at Intersection Center. However, clearly at the time this place moved to Lake Murray Boulevard (where it still is), it was called Vacuum Mart. Further, there is an Intersection Vacuum Center in Columbia, but it's apparently on Two Notch near Columbia Mall.

The only sequence of events that would make my recollection correct is if this building was Intersection Vacuum Center which at some point moved out and was replaced by another vacuum store. Anyone have a better memory about this?

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

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

Here's another now empty store-front in Intersection Center. In this case, the business is still around and appears to have a nicer, free-standing facility now.

According to their sign, they've been moved for almost two years at this point, and I believe Intersection Center itself has been on the market for at least that long. I'm sure that wanting to present a more upscale image than a run-down strip mall allowed was a big factor in the move, but I wonder if they also expected that the place would sell and be demolished long before now. I'm a little surprised it hasn't, but I guess nobody is going to bet on redeveloping a struggling retail corridor in this economic climate. The few places still hanging on there are probably safe until the buildings are actually condemned.

Wonder how the Yard Sale turned out?

UPDATE 21 July 2011 -- Here are the school's new digs off Sunset Boulevard:

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.