Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

I'm happy to report that Bobby's Barber Shop has successfully moved from Trenholm Plaza (in the Hooligan's/UPS wing, which is to be torn down) to Richland Mall, near the second floor entrance to Belks (on the Barnes & Noble side of the mall). Haircuts are still the same price!

I believe that over the years, I was only in Corma's once, to get some barley malt syrup for a bagel recipie. They had it, and I was saved a trip over to the Rosewood Market. What with the ongoing renovations to Trenholm Plaza, if you want that syrup, or some Flower Essences, you need to head towards the Fort a block or so and check them out in their new location, the site of the old Wally & Crumb cookie store next to Ed Robinson Laundry and Cleaners.

Well, it appears the ongoing renovations on Trenholm Plaza have claimed another casualty. I noticed on the second of September that Heavenly Ham has gone ahead and closed shop in advance of the demolition of that wing of the shopping center. Apparently they are not relocating, but are just referring customers to the HoneyBaked Ham store on Two Notch. (HoneyBaked bought Heavenly in 2002).

If you look closely at the picture with all the network cables, there is a "Best Of" award from The State in the category Ham Store underneath it all. I don't doubt that it was deserved, but I confess I find the category "Ham Store" a bit contrived. How many entrants could there have been? There's not even a Yellow Pages category for "Ham". Again, that's not a criticism of the store, which as far as I know really did have good ham.

UPDATE 18 Feb 2010 -- The site (extensively remodeled) is now a Chipolte:

Another casualty of the Trenholm Plaza renovations. (Have you noticed all the new palm trees going in?)

I've always been an Electrolux guy myself, except that I figured out a few years ago that I just don't have the cleaning gene at all, got maid-service and never looked back..

UPDATE 30 Jan 2009: This is their new location a few blocks down Forest Drive in the Forest Park plaza with the Piggly Wiggly.

UPDATE 14 May 2012 -- The store has now changed its name to All Vacuums:

Does the phone number 252-6341 mean anything to you?

If you were here when the whole state's area code was 803, it probably does. Certainly there were many times I dialed it to set my wind-up watch to the dulcet tones of Standard Federal Savings & Loan's time of day service. That was a time when you couldn't turn to CNN and get the time off the bottom-scroll, or get it to within a second over the Internet. Around here, it was pretty much wait for the NBC news-tone at the top of the hour on WIS or call Standard.

I don't know much about the early history of Standard. Apparently it was founded in the aftermath of the Panic of 1907 and weathered WW-I, The Great Depression, WW-II and the 70s. Up through the 50s and probably into the early 60s, it was known as Standard Building & Loan. You can see from my first passbook here that in October of 1962, they had just put a paste-on label reading Standard Savings and Loan Association over whatever had been printed there before. My guess is that they had just switched from Building & Loan given that the inside of the passbook and the coin-banks their kid members got still bore the B&L verbiage:

The passbook cover notes the association's two locations, Washington Street & Trenholm Plaza. The Trenholm location had to be pretty new at the time, given that the area was a golf course into the mid 50s, at least.

In that era, the way savings & loans worked was that you would bring your passbook with you to the bank (OK, technically it wasn't a bank..) whenever you made a transaction, and your passbook would be run into a printing machine (similar to the way checks are still sometimes handled at supermarkets) which would print the day's transactions on seperate lines. (I'm not sure how long it had been since the teller's actually wrote in the passbook, but there still seemed to be a lot of hand-inking involved.) If you didn't have any actual transaction, the bank could still compute your interest (dividends) and enter that for you.

On 12 October 1962, I had $396.36 in my passbook -- very likely the first money I had ever had in my own name, though as I was probably more concerned with learning to walk, I doubt I really thought on it much. I did enjoy later visits as the Trenholm branch had a magical coin machine into which the teller would dump all your coins and it would sort them out and give you a total after much pinging and whirring.

By the time 1973 rolled around and I got my second passbook, you could see that the intervening decade had been good to Standard:

With five locations in Columbia and new branches in Newberry, Orangeburg, Sumter, Mount Pleasant, Charleston and Myrtle Beach, they were obviously an institution on the move.

This was even reflected in the passbook itself, which had moved from being strictly utilitarian to a design with some panache, embossing and even gold-leaf for the text.

You could see the effects of inflation too in that the FSLIC guarantee had been raised from $10,000 per account to $20,000:

At some point in the 1980s, Standard started offering checking accounts as well as passbook accounts, and that's were I got my first checks. They were also fairly early into the ATM market, and though they never had many, the Trenholm location was convienient while I was living in town. (It was a walk-up, and I can distinctly remember thinking, I hope I'm never so lazy that I need to use the ATM without getting out of my car).

In 1985, I took my first real job and moved to Fayetteville NC. I kept my Standard accounts, but as there were no branches up there, mostly dealt with the (now defunct or subsumed) Southern National Bank. While I was living out of town, the S&L crisis of the 80s struck.

I know it's a complex issue, but I think it can be boiled down to the following: Gradually the state and federal governments took the position that George Bailey could go head to head with Mr. Potter -- and kindly, befuddled Uncle Billy was in charge of the new direction.

Standard was far from the only solid-seeming institution to dig its own grave at the time, but it was still a shock to me. I'm sure the taxpayers, en-masse, took it in the shorts as usual, but the government handled it pretty well from a member perspective. There was no panic, just an orderly takeover of the bank. It went so smoothly in fact, that my father decided he wasn't going to move his money and would just keep it in whatever institution ended up with the assets. At this remove, I can't remember what bank that was. It may have been NBSC. They certainly have the location at Trenholm Plaza which used to be occupied by the Standard Branch (which was a much smaller building, and was torn down when the current NBSC was built).

The downtown building is still there (it was obviously remodeled or replaced after 1908 if that was the original location), with its distinctive landmark clock beside it. My memory is that when Standard was at its peak, the building had one wall which was a waterfall -- that now seems to be gone. I have no idea what happened to the other branches either in or out of town.

The 2 August 1991 date for the closing comes from an online lawsuit which references the RTC takeover.

And that little coin-bank? It still has some change in it.

The Time At The Tone Will Be: Too Late

UPDATE 23 March 2010 -- Here are two pictures of the old Trenholm Plaza branch. They were taken inside another Trenholm Plaza store where Standard just happened to be in the background through the window, so the quality is not high:

UPDATE 21 June 2011 -- Here is an older picture of the Trenholm Plaza branch from a Chamber of Commerce promotional book:

The Holey Dough Cafe started out as Manhatten Bagel and had been a fixture in Trenholm Plaza for probably around 20 years. In our family, whenever we faced an early-morning out-of-town trip, the saying was This is a bagel situation, and we would fuel up with bagels and coffee (or soft drinks) on the way to the Interstate. I used to go in there frequently on early Saturday afternoons as well, and there were always the same two customers there, very elderly men whom the staff took care to see got in and out of the store OK.

In 2006, the store dropped it's Manhatten Bagel affiliation. I'm not sure why. Perhaps given how well established the place was, the national name cost too much without providing enough extra value. At any rate, they changed the name to "Holey Dough Cafe" and redid all the signage (including that on the bagel van) and menus. I couldn't tell any difference in the bagels; they still seemed quite good to me.

In recent months, I had become aware that the store was opening a new branch downtown somewhere. I'm still not sure of the exact location, but I would see sidewalk signs near Gervais & Main. I presume, and hope, the new store continues after the main store's closure.

I suspect the proximate cause of the Trenholm store's closing is the ongoing renovation of the Plaza, which will involve tearing down that whole wing of stores. (The Oreck store is primed to move to the Piggly Wiggly plaza). As to why not just move it a bit up or down Forest Drive, I think the recent opening of Bruegger's Bagels across from The Happy Bookseller has changed the local bagel market. An established store could tough it out, but a new location would have to fight for mindshare with Brueggers.

Roadtrips won't be the same.

UPDATE 2 November 2009: When Holey Dough moved from Trenholm Plaza, it set up shop at 1200 Main Street suite 102. I'm not sure how long it was there, but it was certainly less than a year. Jumpin' Jacks Giant Jersey Subs now occupies the spot.

UPDATE 11 Jan 2010: Added "Manhatten Bagel" and full Forest Drive Street address to post title.

There's a classic cartoon panel from the 70s. The setting is a doctors office. A female patient is sitting on the table and the (male, which rather dates the cartoon) doctor tells her:

I'm sorry Ms Johnson, but we're all out of birth control pills, please wear these Birkenstocks instead.

Whether the shoes got better looking, or men just don't look down that far, the brand is still around.

It's not around Trenholm Plaza anymore though. I don't know if the ongoing renovations cut traffic, or if they had decided to decamp before that, but I noticed when I went to Starbucks the other day that the Birkenstock store was gone.

I wonder what the deal with the palm tree in back was?

When I first saw Coldstone closed last week, I wasn't going to make a post on it because it seemed clearly temporary, but I was puzzled when the down-time stretched into this week. What kind of high-tech equipment does an ice-cream store have that can't be fixed by a commercial refrigeration repairman in a few hours?

I hope it is temporary, but this is similar to the way the Bruster's closing started. Coldstone is pretty good too, though they make it very embarassing for both the customer and the staff to tip there.

Update 10 June 08:

Well, it's pretty much as I feared. The "equipment problem" signs were disingenuous as closing signs often are. Based on what I see inside the store now, it's gone.

This is the second upscale creamery that Forest Acres has lost recently. Luckily there's still old reliable Baskin Robbins up the street and Zesto's chocolate dipped soft cones (umm!) across from Richland Mall..

UPDATE 21 April 2010: Added full street address to post title.

It seems to me there have always been fabric stores on this part of Forest Drive. Even with Rogers Brothers move to Divine, there's still Forest Lake Fabrics across the street near the former Frans. I do think there are fewer in general nowdays though. I suspect people (and to be non politically correct, women mostly) who can sew are a declining breed. When I was little, a fabric store was about the lowest place on the food chain of "stores my mother drags me to". Maybe paint stores with their endless color chips were lower. I haven't been in a fabric store in years, so I don't know if this is still true, but at the time, all the dyes on the fabrics were somewhat volatile so that your eyes would start to tear up almost immediately as you walked in. I don't know how people worked there; I guess they developed immunity. About the only thing to do while my mother looked at bolt after bolt of fabric, was to play under the tables, which for some reason generally seemed to all have a raised platform under the table top. In the cases where the table also had a skirt, you could go under the skirt and sit on the platform and pretend that you were in a little fort. There were generally also a number of yardsticks to play around with, but in the end there was still only so much you could do to keep away the thought that you were in a store with NOTHING BUT CLOTH and that your eyes were watering.

The move of Rogers Brothers adds to the recent loss of Tuesday Morning and leaves Trenholm Plaza with two vacancies. In general the place has either been lucky or well managed over the years, and vacancies have always been made good (even after the fires at Ponderosa and Fresh Market. I hope that continues to be the case.

UPDATE 27 July 2010: Rogers Brothers has now closed after their move.

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.