Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

I noticed this building a few weeks back as I was coming out of the USC credit union on Pulaski Street. You can see a smallish picture with the Harrison sign still up in this Loopnet listing. It also notes that the facade is stucco.

This Allpages listing says the firm was in the "Hydraulic Equipment & Supplies, Hydraulic Equipment Repair & Service, Tools & Hardware Supplies" business.

Finally, this listing includes an aerial shot, and notes that the property is

located in the heart of the Innovista Master Plan

which to me at this point is rather like saying it is located convenient to Hard Rock Park..

UPDATE 14 July 2014 -- This building has now been demolished:

You can see that this Citifinancial was still in business back in December of 2009, when I took these pictures of Gooney Birds. I know they still operate several locations in Columbia, including one whose mail I always get.

This is another bit of churn in the Westland Square strip mall, which also had Gooney Birds as noted above and the Burnette's Cleaners/ Palmetto Fine Cleaners / Dasini's Hotspot"> shuffle in the corner spot.

I'm not quite sure about this spot on the West side of Sunset Boulevard between I-20 and Pizzaeria Uno. The street number on the trailer at the back of the lot is 4845, which comes up as Graceland Buildings of Lexington. This makes sense given the two outbuildings set beside the trailer. The place may even still be in business though if so, the stock is pretty limited.

However, the sign by the road does not match up with the Graceland listing. Most of it is obscured by a realty paste-up now, but it cleary says something like South Carolina ****** ***** LIquidators **** and the verbiage at the bottom of the sign sounds like it was a sales lot for reposessed mobile homes. Trying reverse lookups on the 359-2989 phone number doesn't return anything useful.

Curiously, the South Carolina state flag homage on the sign has the moon on the wrong side of the palmetto..

I noticed this one last week when I was heading over to Atlanta Bread to see if they had pumpkin soup this year (answer: apparently not). Pioneer Machinery was on the West side of Sunset Boulevard in-between I-20 and I-26.

From the looks of the roadside placard, there were apprently several other businesses in the building, or at least suites for several other businesses.

I don't know anything about Pioneer but they were apprently in defense contracting and won contracts as recently as 2007.

If you click through to the high-res picture, you can see a lost-dog poster on the phone-pole. Hope he got home.

For Sale By Bank the sign reads at this colorful strip mall on Knox Abbott Drive.

It appears that Sandy's Famous Hot Dogs is pretty much the only business left here, and I'm sure they will probably continue under the new owners when and if.

I'm not exactly sure why this place didn't prosper. I find it rather attractive, with all the bright colors, and it's not particularly hard to get to, or to get in and out of.

I don't believe the Taco Bell building on the west side of the plaza is officially part of it, but its re-incarnation seems to have gone wrong, leaving it empty as well.

UPDATE 27 August 2011: The plaza has been sold and Sandy's is gone.

UPDATE 5 April 2012 -- The Chinese immersion charter school is up and running:

This interesting little building is on Sunset Boulevard just south of the chicken plant. According to LoopNet it's now off the market, though the realty sign was still out front a few days ago when I took this picture. (The picture at LoopNet still has the WPC signage up).

I don't know anything about First Source or WPC Engineering or what happened to them, but apparently the town of West Columbia offices are also at 130 Sunset. I'm not sure if that means in the back of this building, or somewhere else on the lot. The utility-sounding West Columbia filtering plant is supposed to be at 130 as well.

UPDATE 5 Nov 2010: See the comments -- It was also the Free Times building for a while, so I've added that to the post title.

UPDATE 7 May 2012 -- This place is now Kickstand Studio a wedding and commercial photography studio. Looks like they got the kudzu or whatever off the building and power pole too:

Westland Square is just East of Grecian Gardens on Sunset Boulevard, and is a fairly typical Food Lion anchored strip mall. This unit, just up from the former Gooney Birds was a Burnette's Cleaners when I left town. Apparently sometime thereafter, it converted into another cleaning operation, Palmetto Fine Cleaners and then into a night club, which apparently closed this year.

If I'm reading this LoopNet listing correctly, Westland Square is not currently for sale, but was recently as a package deal with "Waterway Plaza (Little River, SC), St. George Plaza (St. George, SC), South Square (Lancaster, SC), and Clover Plaza (Clover, SC)". That's a pretty geographically diverse set of properties to bundle!

UPDATE 6 June 2012: I was in error in stating above that Palmetto Fine Cleaners took over this spot. I was relying on the fact that PFC had a street address of 2250 Sunset Boulevard, but as it turns out, they were at 2250-A, the other end of the strip mall from this suite at 2250-M. I have removed Palmetto Fine Cleaners from the post title for this closing, and have given them their own closing.

As usual, I got to the library about 5 minutes before closing time, and was trying to look up several things. One of them was old City Directory listings for Trenholm Plaza. In the event, I got two, one for 1964, when I would have been three years old, and perhaps dimly conscious that we were going to the same places a lot, and one from 1970 when I would have been nine years old, and looking forward to Western Auto visits to window shop at all the "hobby batteries" and bicycles.

I'm pretty sure Trenholm Plaza was a golf course not too many years before 1964, so that wave of stores is probably pretty close to the original list:

While many of those stores lasted for years, the USPO is the only original tenant left.

There are a lot of hold-overs in 1970, but a good bit of turnover as well:

Interestingly (to me), I can't for the life of me recall a Gene's Pig 'n Chick in Trenholm Plaza at all, and I would have thought it would have stuck in my mind. I don't recall those dentists either, and in fact am a little surprised by seeing non-retail there.

Of these TP stores, I've done closings for:

A&P (sort of)

Edisto Farms Dairy

Liggett Rexal

Standard (Federal)

Tapps Twig (sort of)

UPDATE 11 October 2013: Look at this great 1979 picture of Trenholm Plaza. Be sure to zoom all the way in, and pan around. Thanks to commenter Dennis for finding this!

1108 Knox Abbott Drive does not seem to exist anymore. I believe that this SCB&T at the corner of Knox Abbott and 11th Street is the successor location, but I could be a bit off on exactly where the demolished Putt-Putt center was.

The last listing for Putt-Putt Golf & Games was in the Feb 1985 phonebook, so apparently they closed down sometime in 1985, just about the time I was leaving town for my 20 or so years of sojourning elsewhere. I can vaguely recall seeing the place, but I never got around to visiting it -- In my mind, minature golf was something you did at Bell Camp or the beach, and I had enough, or more than enough, video games closer to the University or closer to home to keep me busy.

Putt-Putt had a number of locations in Columbia for years, including Percival Road, Devine Street and Saint Andews Road. Those all closed and then, some years later, one on Sparkleberry opened, but didn't last long at all.

UPDATE 7 Nov 2010 -- OK, there seems to be a general consensus that the picture above is the wrong location for the former Putt-Putt. Some say it was about where Kenny's is:

Others say as far up as Preciscion Tune:

I've written about this building before since it was once "that building that looks like a car radio" and make the "Sounds Real Good!" commercial.

I'm not sure if Cash-N-Dash was the immediate next tenant in the building after Continental Sound, but I think they were. Sadly, they un-radioized the building though you can still see signs of the old design (the stars were the knobs, and the windows were the radio tuner readouts, I think).

I'm not exactly sure when this place closed shop, but I'm pretty sure they dashed sometime this summer.