Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

What does it mean to say a park is "closed"? Well, the land could be sold and built, there could be a fence to keep people out, or as in the case of Forest Lake Park, it could just have been abandoned by its owners, whoever they were.

Forest Lake Shopping Center is on the corner of Trenholm Road and Forest Drive, directly across Forest from Threnholm Plaza and has had its ups and downs. Originally, the center was anchored by Campbell's Drug Store which was directly on the corner. Down from Campbell's on the storefronts facing Forest were my longtime barbershop, a hardware store and a lot of shops I've completely forgotten. The hardware closed fairly early on (probably by 1970) and at some point a 7-11 moved into that row.

I don't remember much about the storefronts facing away from Forest except that there was a cloth shop at one time, and later some sort of clothing store where I was fitted for a suit once. Across the parking lot from Campbell's, was a small branch bank, denomination forgotten, where my mother often used the drive-through. Behind the bank was a creek, with a footbridge over it leading off into the adjoining neighboorhood.

The Campbell's block of stores was separated from another block by an access cut-through, and this other block was generally more important to us, as the main part of it (now Coplons) was a Colonial grocery store, my mother's favored place to buy groceries. I don't know exactly why this was, as even then, Columbia didn't lack for grocery stores, and there was an A&P right across the road in Trenholm Plaza. The thing I remember is that she was convinced that "Farm Charm" medium-sharp chedder was the only cheese worth buying (she convinced me as well) and "Farm Charm" was available only at Colonial or Big Star groceries. (There was a Big Star abuting the K-Mart on Fort Jackson Blvd). The block of stores with Colonial also held Forest Lake TV, where we had our sets repaired several times, and Sakura Japanese restaurant, which is still there, and must be the oldest Japanese restaurant in Columbia.

Colonial folded (I think) in the late 60s (leaving us to go over to Big Star for cheese..). I don't recall how long it was before Coplon's moved in, but I'm pretty sure it was there before they knocked down the whole Campbell's side of the shopping center (dispossessing my barbers) and put in the new First Citizens and Talbots there. The branch bank had closed by then, and its space is now taken over by a gallery/frame-shop with the outbuildings being sucessfully run by an enterprising garden store.

What does this have to do with the park? Well, my impression always was that the park was run by Colonial as a place for kids to go play while their mothers' shopped. (Yes, in those days, as long as it wasn't across a major road, you could send the kids out of sight to play!). When Colonial went under, the park stopped being maintained. Every now and then, there might be a minor repair, which I imagine the (mostly hard-luck by now) shops being dunned for, but in general there was nothing. The last major thing to happen was the carting off of the swingset, which had been swing-less for years.

Today, there are 3 fixtures. Here are two, the bench and the monkey bars:

Here's a closer look at the monkey bars:

I have a particularly vivid memory of these. Once, when my mother was shopping at Colonial, and my sister & I were playing in the park, I had one of those ideas that seems good at the time and decided that I could probably hang by my knees off of the bars across the top. As it turned out, I could. What I couldn't do, being little more athletic then than now, was get down again. After several increasingly anxious minutes of contemplating a drop onto the ground or the other bars, I sent my sister into Colonial to get my mother, who (the situation probably having been conveyed to her in a garbled manner to sound more alarming than it was) abandoned her cart and came racing around the corner. In the event, I had just figured out how to get down anyway...

Gills Creek forms the backdrop for the park, and I'm a bit surprised that no restaurant on either side of the creek has ever had a creek deck. It's rather peaceful and pleasant:

Here's Gills Creek on the other side of the bridge from the park:

Eightmile Branch forms the back boundry of Forest Lake Shopping Center and here's where it runs into Gills Creek:

Here is the park's third fixture, a merry-go-round:

Of course there is a drawback to having a park (or shopping center for that matter) bordered by creeks: Creeks rise.

Sometime back in the 90s, we had a 100 year flood in Forest Acres. At that point, a lot of Gamewell Drive was under water with parts of Sylvan Drive innundated as well. Given its position at the confluence of Eightmile Branch & Gills Creek, a good bit of Forest Lake Shopping Center was under water (most of the Garden Center area) as was all of the park. One of the local stations, I believe it was WLTX, had a crew in the parking lot shooting footage of the flood. I had to tell them they were looking at a park (I think I got on TV, but I can't recall for sure). At that point, the merry-go-round was completely invisible under at least six inches of water. For some reason, I was walking around in my flip-flops, having parked my car a good ways off. I considered wading out to the merry-go-round to ride a turn around on it to give them a good visual, but decided I wasn't going to risk my feet on who knows what washed up detritus without something more substantial shielding them. I know I took some flood pictures myself, if I ever find them again, I'll get them digitized and post a few.

Anyway, if you want to sit on a bench, climb the monkey-bars, or take a spin on the merry-go-round Forest Lake Park is still there for now..

UPDATE 15 May 2010 -- Here's a pointless quicktime video of the merry-go-round in motion from 26 Aug 2009

And here's Forest Lake Park in the snow from 13 Feb 2010:

UPDATE 10 Feb 2011 -- In April 2010, someone cut down a honking big pine tree, and put the segments around the merry-go-round:

UPDATE 4 April 2013: Tragedy!

I'm guessing that with the continuing renovations at the old Dobbs House/Forest Lake Spirits/Carolina Paws building, somebody noticed the park and the merry-go-round and decided it was a huge liability issue. At any rate, both remaining park fixtures, the merry-go-round and an old park bench have been torn out and the park is now just an empty lot except for the ring of buried bricks around where the merry-go-round used to be:

Here's two shots from my first and only TV interview at the park on 1 March 2011:

UPDATE 25 June 2017 -- Changed the merry-go-round video to a youtube embed rather than a hosted .mov file.

First of all, for me, it was the "Columbia Science Museum" with the "Art" part very much a secondary non-issue. Which is the opposite of the actual situation as in retrospect, the Science Museum was almost an afterthought in the combined enterprise.

There was a small lot behind Gibbes Planetarium where we would generally park, and take the brick walkway around the planetarium to the Science Museum front door. Right inside was the greeting desk which doubled as a gift kiosk. The only thing I can definitely recall being on sale there were Radiometers which were essentially light bulbs with solar-powered windmills inside. They also had various brochures and free premiums. The one I remember best, and which I am sure I still have an example of around somewhere was a small wallet card which had a table giving your weight on all the planets (and the sun).

If you walked past the greeting desk straight down the hall and steps all the way to the back door, you would come out in a small arboretum, no bigger than a couple of patios, planted with a variety of local plants, all described with placards. I think there was also a small pond, though I don't recall any fish.

If instead of going all the way to the back, you turned left, you would be in the main hall of the museum, which had a number of exibits, some semi-permanent, and some which changed from time to time. The semi-permanent exibits were a mad scientist's Jacob's Ladder, and a Foucault's Pendulum in a lucite cage which demonstrated something or other about the rotation of the earth. The jacob's ladder was my favorite, as it was "interactive" in the sense that it had a button you could push to turn it on. Watching the sparks climb the gap, and hearing the distinctive sizzle was something I found endlessly fascinating.

Off of the main hallway to the rear, was the museum's nature area where they had a bank of glass fronted cubicles with live examples of various South Carolina snakes, lizards and bugs. They also had a charmingly low-tech teaching device which had some sort of electrical wire, which if you toched it to the right answer to the wildlife question would illuminate a small bulb.

If at the front desk, you turned right, you would be in the small planetarium wing of the museum which housed the entrance to the planetarium, and a few other exhibits most of which changed from time to time. One which didn't change was the computer. I call it a computer, actually it was a piece of a computer, the "front panel" and some other parts if I recall correctly. Now the computer on which I'm typing this is much more powerful than the Science Museum computer, even if they had the whole thing there and running, but it's not nearly as impressive. The Science Museum computer was positively resplendent with cryptically labeled lights and toggle switches, and they let us flip any switch we wanted to! You know how in any old movie with a computer they always show the lights blinking on and off and a tape drive moving back and forth? They may not have had a tape drive (which were miserable to work with as I learned painfully later), but the lights and switches made up for it. In fact, I suspect on some level that my fascination with that partial computer combined with a number of other factors led me into programming..

If you walked down the main hall at the Science Museum past the nature room, you would come to the entrance to the Art Museum (or you could enter the main Art Museum door from the street). The Art Museum was basically the place your mother made you go after you had seen the Science Museum. It was set up in an old two story house with a fairly large one story addition on the back side. Since I didn't care much, my memory is pretty hazy, but I think they had a core collection with various exhibits on loan rotating in from time to time. I seem to remember that the bulk of the displays were in the rear, with the upstairs being reserved for especially uninteresting stuff like doll collections. Of course there were always a certain number of statues and paintings of naked ladies which were nice, but at which you could only glance briefly if with your mother. They always seemed to have some antique chairs, carefully roped off to keep them from being sat on, and enough nooks and crannies to do some running and hiding.

I can recall being interested in a particular show at the Art Museum only twice. Once they had part of the King Tut treasures as a visiting exhibit, something that drew huge crowds, and another time when I was in high school, they had a hologram exhibit which became a class field trip for most of the city schools (and was a rare good use of the upstairs space). Apparently it was a bit premature to call holograms an art form however, as they have kind of fallen by the wayside as a true "artistic medium".

Apparently the Art Museum had been feeling cramped for quite a while, and with the closing of most of the Main Street retail district, a lot of prime real estate became available downtown. In 1998, the Art side of the museum moved to Main Street, and the Science Museum and planetarium were simply closed with the buildings eventually being used by the USC Campus Police. There's probably an old warehouse somewhere in Columbia with a box labeled "computer parts" holding the marvelous space-aged Science Museum computer front panel..

UPDATE 21 June 2011: Added two pictures [at top] of the Science Museum from an old Chamber of Commerce promotional book. First kids queueing by the planetarium and then kids learning about nature in the back garden.

Gibbes Planetarium was part of the old Art & Science Museum at Senate & Bull. I'll do a post on the museum at some point, but the Planetarium was, in my mind, its own entity. The Planetarium was a small round brick structure with a domed roof, and from the outside looked tiny, but on the inside was quite spacious (I believe it seated 55). One of the zombie web-sites mentioning the Planetarium says it was established in 1959. I don't remember that far back of course, but we started going in the mid 1960s when it still had the original equipment. You would walk in through a short hall from the Science Museum, and there would be two rows of bench seating wrapped around the room with this black, very boxy looking contraption on a pedastal in the middle. In the 1970s or 1980s they did a major upgrade, and the black boxy projector was replaced with an almost medical-imaging looking projector full of lenses and servo motors, all controlled from a space-age console that looked to me like it belonged on the bridge of The Enterprise. Not only did the new projector whir and piroutte, it showed a vastly more numerous field of stars, and had a number of built-in special effects.

The Planetarium was open on the weekends, and that generally was when we would go. If we had cousins staying over, it was practically mandatory. They ran a number of different shows during the year. They would almost always have some sort of "identify the local constellations" show, and they would have special topic shows on black-holes, supernovas and space exploration. Part of the equipment upgrade in addition to the new star projector was the installation of remote-controlled slide projectors all around the rim of the roof, so they could script elaborate shows with non-star images projected on the different sectors of the ceiling. During the Christmas season they usually had a show speculating on what astral phenomena could have been interpreted as the "Star of Bethlehem", and during later years they did several shows dramatizing classic science fiction stories. I remember in particular, their production of Asimov's "Nightfall", about a planet lit by a number of different suns which had never experienced darkness until one fateful day..

The experience of sitting in the Planetarium as the lights went down was always special. Whoever the presenter was always had a very smooth voice, and as the stars came out, and he spoke, I was always struck by an almost physical wave of sleepiness though it passed quickly.

When the Art Museum moved into bigger digs on Main Street in 1998, they dropped the "Science" part of their mission. I had hoped that the Gibbes Planetarium might carry on on its own, but it was not to be, and now the building houses part of the USC Campus Police, and the Planetarium is apprently used as a simple auditorium. I don't know what happened to all the equipment, it's not like you can use a planetarium projector for anything else -- I hope it found a good home.

UPDATE 18 October 2009: Well, I am sorry to report this, but I went by the Planetarium on 9 October 2009 during business hours, hoping to get permission to take some pictures inside. The front desk folks of the Campus Police were very friendly, but told me that the old Planetarium space was not in fact in use by them, as I had assumed, but was closed off with no access, and that they thought the interior was falling apart. Although it has only been 11 years since the space was in use, I suppose this is possible if there are leaks or mold or whatnot. I find this quite sad.

On the plus side, I have added 11 more high-res shots of the exterior.

UPDATE 21 June 2011: Added picture [at top] of kids queueing outside the planetarium from an old Chamber of Commerce promotional book.

I'm more than a litte hazy about where the giant slide was. It was definitely in the West Columbia/Cayce area. If I had to guess, I would say it may have been on Airport Blvd near what's now the I-26 interchange, but it could have been further out on the Charleston Highway.

At any rate, it was clearly an economic boondoggle which didn't last more than a single season, which was a real shame. The way I remember it, it had a large number of sliding "lanes", possibly as many as a dozen. You would get a piece of some sort of fabric to slide on, possibly a carpet patch, or a burlap sack, walk the stairs to the top, pick a lane, get on your fabric and slide down. The whole thing was built on a metal frame, and I think the lanes were fiberglass. I have the vague impression that different lanes may have had different colors. I don't remember the price and whether it was "per ride", a time limit, or per visit. At any rate, it wasn't so exorbitant that my parents wouldn't take us.

As I say, it didn't remain a going concern for very long, but it sat there, defunct for at least several years. We kids didn't quite understand the concept "out of business". The slide was still there, surely if we kept going, eventually we would catch it when it was open. Our parents, I'm sure, rolled their eyes and tried to get the concept into our minds, but eventually every time we were in Cayce for Sunday dinner, they would give in to our pestering and drive us out to the slide afterwards. I can't remember exactly when the slide was finally torn down, but I think it was gone by the Tricentennial.

UPDATE:

In the comments, Jaby Baby says the slide was called The Magic Carpet and was on Airport Blvd. Thanks Jaby!