Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

This storefront on Parklane across from K-Mart, started as a Chappy's Fish & Chips, but after that, I don't believe there was ever another restaurant in it, and the place took an automotive turn, a trajectory which it is still more or less on. Given the number of car lots that have come and gone along the Two Notch Corridor over the years, and the way title-loan places pop up everywhere, I wonder if turning cars into money isn't a more stable business model than turning money into cars..

I've written about this building before, both in a closing for Steak & Ale (the original tenant of the whole building) and in one for House Brand (a furniture store which used the east side of the building after it was divided).

I see now that since the House Brand signage has been off the east side of the building, the previous Buster's Bistro sign is again visible.

I don't know much about Buster's other than it was the first tenant in the newly subdivided building and that according to several commenters on the Steak & Ale closing, the chef, Sig Buster, started at Fresh Pastabilities in the Forest Park (Piggly WIggly) shopping center on the other side of Trenholm, and opened Buster's Bistro after closing that.

The place is not listed in the 2008 phonebook, and so would have closed during or before 2007.

UPDATE 16 June 2022: Adding tags and map icon.

Along with White's and Parisian, Bonwit Teller was to be one of the anchors of the new Richland Fashion Mall which was to rise phoenix-like from the ashes of the original open-air Richland Mall.

It is somewhat typical of that snakebit project that all three chains are now gone. Bonwit Teller was a very upscale store, which, according to Wikipedia was founded in the 1880s. When the RFM store opened, the chain was new to South Carolina, so I went there once to check it out. I quickly determined that it was not a "guy place" at all, and I suspect that even for middle class women, there would have been a hint of Are you sure you are Bonwit Teller material? attitude.

At any rate, the whole chain (17 stores strong at the time) went bankrupt in 1989. Apparently since then, two attempts to revive the brand have come to naught.

After Bonwit Teller went under, the space was taken over by an operation called Blacklion, which apparently still exists in some form. They put up a number of billboards around town (I recall one in particular by Za's on Devine) touting a "Revolutionary new concept in shopping!" (that's not an exact quote, but the spirit is the same). Again, I visited the store once, and as far as I could tell, their revolutionary new concept was an upscale flea-market. The place seemed to be a collection of botiquey little indivdually owned kiosks selling upscale crafts. Interestingly as this 2006 press release details, one of them, Mountain Manor Gifts, did in fact move from Blacklion to the Barnyard Flea Market out on US-1. There was also an Italian lunch sandwich operation in Blacklion whose name escapes me right now, but they moved out of Blacklion to a vacant counter-equiped storefront on the second floor on the other side of Belk's and carried on for another couple years.

After Blacklion closed, there was some talk of turning the space into apartments for an urban village like the condo space at Sandhill. You can see in one of these pictures, the treatments at the end of the Blacklion building that were mocked up for that idea, but like many of the plans for Richland Mall nothing came of that either.

UPDATE 23 June 2010: Added Dillard's and The Department Store to the post title based on the comments.

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I suspect these are not the right pictures as the address I have for The Book Place is 3129, and this little plaza is 3121. However, numbers sometimes change and walking this stretch of Millwood, I can't find any place numbered 3129, and I remember The Book Place being in a strip like this where you had to watch carefully before backing out into Millwood. If this is the right spot, the The Book Place would have been in the center slot.

OK, regardless of all the above, the way I remember The Book Place is that it skewed a bit more to rare and antiquarian books than the other used book shops I frequented. There were also very few paperback books. As I recall it, the shop was run by an older gentleman, and he was usually carrying on a conversation with someone at the front desk. I don't know if these were friends who dropped by, or if they were customers, but it seemed the conversation topics were usually either literary or historical in nature. I think there may have been a bookstore cat who stayed around the front desk, but I couldn't now swear to that.

The Book Place wasn't on my regular bookshop rotation because they didn't have much in the way of science-fiction, and their prices tended to be a bit out of my reach. What they did have was a great vintage humor section, and over the years I picked up a number of volumes of classic cartoons by artists like Peter Arno, Charles Addams, and James Thurber. I also picked up a number of the hard to find collections of Walt Kelly's Pogo (Which is supposed to be issued in a complete collection by Fantagraphics "real soon now").

I'm not sure exactly when the place closed. It's in the 1998 phonebook, but I believe by the time I had moved back to Columba circa 2003, it was gone.

These photos are courtesy of Becky Bailey, who writes of the El Roco Club:

Around the corner [from the Fountain Bleu Club] (sort of) on about the same latitude on North Main Street was a place called the El Roco Club, which was the white counterpart. That’s where the country bands like Ira Dimmery and the Hired Hands played.

and

It was actually closed at the time I took the pictures, but glad I did. Has since been taken over by a church and the signage is all gone. Took these in July 2002.

There is apparently an active El Roco Club in Columbia right now on Koon Road, but from what I can tell it has no connection to the old club. The only other information I have found online about the old club is a general word picture of the times in an online appreciation of local entertainer Nicola Domenico Pizzuti:

Music entertainment was lively in Columbia during the late 40s and 50s. These were happier times and local musicians were hungry for the opportunity to play live. There never seemed to be a lack of bookings for small combos, and there was always need at the last minute to "grab a musician and go". Public and private clubs about town were rocking and reeling in those post-war days. Nicola was right in the thick of it and, you may have been in the audience when he played! Throughout the years, he played at various popular public and private clubs, where big band dance music was the "music of the day." He teamed up with other local musicians, all of whom either played to fill in where called upon or were members of a combo. Nicola played with local musicians Jay Pace, Greg Bissell, Don Davis, Tom Isbull, Neal Alltee and Sam Cantrell. Occasionally, he filled in and played with combos where the late Paul LaRosa crooned. He also filled in a time or two with the late Jimmy Farr’s small group. In those days, most musicians in Columbia booked gigs anytime and anywhere and many times actually did "grab a musician" en route to a booking. He played many times at the El Roco Club, and Ft. Jackson Officers’ and NCO clubs, Retired Officers’ Club, Columbia Country Club, and Forest Lake Country Club.

(Big thanks to Becky Bailey!)

Curiously enough, just as I started to write this post, a palmetto bug (or as I like to call them, our state bird) landed on my sleve and freaked me way the heck out. To make matters worse, I was barefoot, and didn't have stomping gear immediately available. Nonetheless, I can report a confirmed kill, and it's still better than the time I woke up with one nestled in my palm..

This building sits just up the hill from Bayview Baptist Church and across the access alley to the defunct Few Acres trailer park from the old Mr. Muffler at Two Notch and Pinestraw.

The whole corner is potentially valuable property, but whatever is going to happen to it seems to be taking its time. There usually seems to be some sort of truck activity at Few Acres, but nothing seems to get demolished. The same goes for the Mr. Muffler building, and indeed this building seems to be undergoing a gutting rather than a knockdown.

The business names are clear enough for the exterminator and barber shop to say what they were -- the third business, Bonnies Treasures is a little less specific: Gifts & Tools?. At any rate, I think it has been many years since any of these operations were in business. Google, in fact, pulls up very little for "5308 Two Notch": just the barber shop and a late 2006 delinquient property notice from The Columbia Star.

Whatever the fate of the various businesses, the building itself seems very solidly built, and I hope it is, in fact, refurbished rather than torn the rest of the way down.

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This ad from the 1974 Southern Bell Yellow Pages is similar to other ads for the Flaming Pit that I have seen in that it never gives a real street address for the place. That, and a complete lapse of mind that let me confuse I-20 with I-26 led me to originally post some pictures of what was certainly the wrong building for the place!

We never went to the Flaming Pit, though I seem to remember radio commercials that made it sound like a very exotic place. (I didn't do "exotic"..). I'm not exactly sure what "Open Hearth Charcoal Cookery" is, but combing that with the name of the place, I envision a large central grill in the middle of the dining area (hopefully very well ventilated with charcoal involved..) where your orders were cooked as you watched.

I'm a little surprised that the bar was The Wells Fargo Lounge given that Wells Fargo is, in addition to its evocative history, still around and presumably trademarked..

UPDATE 15 June 2010: Removed incorrect pictures, and corrected the text in which I was completely wrong about the location!

I've writen before about The Shrimper on Knox Abbott Drive. This was the chain's other location, on Two Notch Road in front of Atlantic Twin Theater and more or less across the street from Dick Dyer Toyota.

The Southern Bell ad is from 1974 -- I'm not really sure when The Shrimper closed; 1980s is just a guess, but it seems like quite a while ago to me. The building was split into two storefronts after that. I'm not sure about the one farther from Beltline, but the end towards Beltline has been a copier store at least since 1998, and probably before (though it looks to have had some trouble lately).

I note that the ad offers Calabash Style seafood. It seems to me that that's a selling point I see mentioned less and less in recent years.

UPDATE 9 June 2010: Added "Lum's Restaurant" to the post title base on comments (and the 1970 Yellow Pages).

UPDATE 18 September 2020: Here is a Shrimper cup I found at my sister's house:

Also updating tags and adding map icon.

This motel is a landmark which has existed for all of my life, but which I never (in memory) saw until 2006. This motel is on the east side of US-17, just south of Gullie's Shell station, and north of the Georgetown credit union. To say that by 2006 I had driven this stretch of road more than a few times understates it a bit, but I never had the least clue that there were buildings just off the road -- the whole place was so overgrown as to be completely invisible. Apparently the lot was partially cleared late in 2005, and when I was down that winter, I had quite a What the heck did I just drive by? moment as I passed by the first time after that.

Graphitti in a concrete slab at the old office building dates this place to early 1956, and the fixtures all have that mid 50s look as well. In fact, the bathroom tile looks a good bit like what I have at home which is almost exactly the same vintage. I have no idea what happened to the place. It certainly wasn't (and isn't) uncommon for Grand Strand businesses to fail, and the south strand was very isolated and non-commercialized for quite a while. For years the abandoned cabins of another motel sat at the South Causeway of Pawleys Island, more or less where the Food Lion now is. In fact for years, the only motel south of Murrells Inlet was the Quality Inn Seagull -- most people then and now rented houses to vacation in the area.

The whole area is being further cleared now, all the way back to the marsh. I suspect work would have started sooner after the initial clearing of the motel except for the economy. At any rate, I suspect the whole thing will be houses before too long, and I fully expect the motel to be knocked down before the year is out. (I've already got my shower handle, to go with my other one from Douglas.)

If anyone knows what the motel was called, when it closed, or why it closed, sound off!

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Actually, I don't remember this place as a Caribbean restaurant at all, but that's what google is turning up for it. Apparently it was an attempt at doing well by doing good, as this 1999 ABC permit hearing decision notes:

The permit was granted despite some misgivings by a neighbor business, but as far as I can tell, the restaurant did not last long at all. I have not verified that by any phonebook research, but note that the only "Five Points Association Member Sticker" in the window is for 1999. The building certainly has not seen much if any work since then, and appears to be in a fairly advanced state of disrepair.

Now, despite not finding any online evidence for it, what I remember this place as is some sort of night club which used the roof as a deck. You can see the hutch that presumably terminates a staircase from the ground floor, and the roof is also directly accessible from the side street as the building is more or less cut into a hillside. I can remember thinking that it was pretty neat though I never visited the club.

I did find this 1998 zoning board minutes which implies that the place was some sort of restaurant in 1990 which was forclosed on at some later point, but no other details are offered..

I think I also remember some sort of drumming studio here as well.

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