Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

Brookgreen Gardens is the famous sculpture garden established by Ann Hyatt Huntington just below Murrells Inlet in the 1930s. It has changed a lot the early days. For one thing the old style zoo with animals in concrete, steel-barred cages is long since reformed, for another it is no longer in the boonies, accessible from the South only by ferry, but is in the heart of a bustling tourist mecca.

I think that on the whole, the park organization has managed the change well while staying true to the Gardens' heritage. One of their most recent innovations is the holiday Nights of 1000 Candles which frames the Gardens' statuary and pools with light (candle and otherwise) and provides entertainment and dining among the magic settings.

These pictures were taken on the middle weekend of this year's Nights, Friday 12 December. The night was cold, though not as cold as two years ago and the skies were clear with a full moon. In the past, I have tried shooting ISO 800 film at the event with mixed results. Since I was happy with the way a lot of the 2008 State Fair closing-cam night shots turned out, I decided to try that this year. Some shots were interesting, but on the whole the results were fairly unimpressive: Neon is a lot better light than candles and pinlights. I've got a Panasonic DMC-LX3S to put under my tree this Christmas -- perhaps I'll try that next year.

Photos follow the jump.

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Forest Drive Church, or Forest Drive Baptist Church (I think the sign specifying the Baptist part had been covered for years before they moved), was at the corner of Forest Drive and Falcon Drive, just above A.C. Flora High School.

Earlier this year, the church sold at least part of its property to Gold's Gym which will be moving there from its current location in the old Columbia Athletic Club building. The church itself will be moving somewhere in the North East area, though they are now meeting in temporary quarters until their new home is built.

As you can see from the last pictures, the outbuildings below the church have now been knocked down. I missed what would have been a dramatic picture of them knocking down the small house-like outbuilding that faced on Forest Drive -- I was on my way to Walgreens when I noticed them starting in on it, but I was already past and on the wrong side of the road to stop. By the time I finished my errand and started back (about 20 min), they had already finished the demolition, leaving the rubble pile you can see here. So far the sanctuary itself hasn't been touched, though I presume it has been deconsecrated by now. The land behind the sanctuary is for sale, so I guess Gold's isn't getting the whole complex.

Update 10 May 2009 -- Work continues, and now they have the entire front side off of the former sancturary:

UPDATE 10 November 2009: Work continues apace as pictured below. Also added the street address to the post title.

The Top of Carolina opened in 1967 and was the first (and I think still the only) revolving restaurant in the Carolinas. The revolving platform was built from equipment donated after the 1964 New York World's Fair. I don't know if the Capstone domitory on which The Top of Carolina sits was originally planned with that end in mind or not.

I remember it was quite a big deal when the restaurant opened (I would have been 6), and although our "eating out" was generally reserved for Sunday lunch in fairly prosaic spots (The Russell House, McDonalds, Ponderosa Steak Barn, Frank 'n Stein), my parents made it a point to take us kids.

We were fascinated by the whole "revolve" thing, and at seeing Columbia in a panarama below us. The food however, at least from a child's point of view, left a lot to be desired. As I recall, the only choice available was a buffet, and it didn't have sandwiches or hamburgers or spaghetti or indeed anything I liked. I believe my parents were less than impressed with it as well, though I may be projecting my feelings onto them. At any rate, we never went back after that one time while the place was in its initial mode of operation.

At some point -- it couldn't have been long after The Tricentennial, if indeed the place lasted that long -- the Top of Carolina folded as a retail operation. I'm not sure of all the reasons. I believe USC had always owned and run the place, and I'm sure the college "industrial food" mindset didn't help. Also, as far as I can recall, there was never a parking lot dedicated to the restaurant which can't have helped matters either.

After that, the University would still (and do still, I think) rent the place out for banquets, and I believe I attended one such function in the 80s. I can still recall noticing, and being pleased by how many trees downtown Columbia still had as I looked down on them.

Often we used the word Capstone to invoke The Top of Carolina, but actually Capstone is the name of the building on which TTOC sits. During my tenure at USC, Capstone was a girls' dorm (one of my cousins lived there a few years) with one of the University cafeterias as the ground floor. I often ate there, and vividly remeber a particular meal when ARA acted out a bad punchline come to life. I had gotten a burger and fries, and the food lady told me:

I burned the fries, so I gave you some extra.

As the comic said, if there's one thing I like more than bad food, it's more of it!.

The Capstone cafeteria was also the site of an incident which put me off of my habit of drinking tea and reading a book after eating and before my next class, something I enjoyed quite a bit. The tables were not exclusive, but generally if there was space, nobody would crowd. I was a bit miffed then when someone sat down by me and started a conversation, especially as looking up I saw that there were plenty of empty tables, but he leveraged the title of the book I was reading, got me to tell him a bit about it and started making general chit-chat. I was annoyed, but figured he was a new guy trying to make friends and didn't want to be rude, so I made an effort to be courteous and talked for 10 or 15 minutes, at which time of course he dropped the "would you like to come to our prayer group" bomb. I'm afraid that for the rest of my time at USC I was pretty uncommunicative verging on rude to anyone I didn't know taking a seat at "my" table, and didn't take up lunch reading again until I started working.

I think Capstone is still a dorm, but I believe the cafeteria is now gone. I believe you can still have a banquet at The Top of Carolina though I would still expect the view to be better than the food.

UPDATE 3 Dec 08

Commenter Dennis sends the following notes and picture:

I was always very interested in this place because of my great interest in the 1964 World's Fair, but have only managed to get in and eat once. It is impossible to get information about the rare times it is open to the public. On USC websites it is referred to as the Top of Carolina Conference Center and it seems you can only rent the place for events, but they sure don't advertise or make it easy to get info.

Anyway, I found this dated April 2007. Don't know if they ever did this renovation:

In addition to receiving that report, the University's Buildings and Grounds Committee approved a plan to use about $700,000 in Sodexho dining services funds to renovate the Top of Carolina facility at Capstone in summer 2008. The revolving restaurant atop the 18-story residence hall has been an icon in Columbia since it was built in 1967. The facility was used for 32 Sunday brunches and 44 catered University events in the past fiscal year.

"We're planning to replace carpet, window treatments, and the heating/cooling system along with making the facility ADA accessible," said Rick Kelly, vice president for business and finance.

After renovations are completed, Top of Carolina will be the venue for catered events throughout the academic year, said Michael Scheffres, general manager of University dining services. Sunday brunch at the facility is open to the public during the fall and spring semesters.

The picture conveys what I didn't really note in my initial post. The "revolve" part of the restaurant is a circular band which orbits a non-moving core. Essentially, only the guest seating rotates.

UPDATE 1 November 2009: Open again!

The Boat House at Sesqui also used to be the Bath House. I didn't swim there too often since we had access to Bell Camp, but it was an odd little setup.

The park guys in the mid-section of the building (there is, or was a counter behind those wooden shutters) would give you a wire hamper and a honking big safety-pin with a numbered stamped metal tag. You would go into the Men's Dressing Room, strip out of your clothes and put them in the basket, put on your trunks, fasten the safety-pin through them, and hand the hamper to the park guys. They would put the basket with your clothes on a shelf inside and you would go swim. After you finished, you would turn in the safety-pin, they would match it to a wire hamper and give you your clothes back. Even at the time, it seemed a rather quaint and archaic procedure.

The Boat House / Bath House, like a lot of the original Sesqui structures, was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps. This was a Federal government team recruited during the Great Depression from the vast ranks of the able-bodied but unemployed. The CCC did a lot of great work on public projects, kept a lot of men off the dole and probably not coincidentally helped forestall any more Bonus Army-like incidents. I know they also built the main structures at Poinsett State Park and Florida Caverns State Park. Their work tends to have an identifiable style, and the Boat House is a good example of it. I suspect the bench alongside the structure goes back to that era as well.

I think that American youth have gradually been undergoing a "swimming wussification" over the last several generations. My grandparents' generation thought nothing of jumping into totally unimproved "swimming holes". My mother's generation were happy to swim in Hartsville's minimally improved "Black Creek". I, on the other hand, already didn't really like swimming in lakes. Bell Camp was fine since the swimming area in the section shallow enough to touch ground had had all the stumps removed and the bottom covered with sand. (Still some of my peers were irked at the way the water turned any swimsuit to yellow). The Sesqui lake was a bit too slimy for my tastes, and I didn't like touching bottom at all. I suspect the generations after me didn't want anything to do with lakes as far as swimming went. At any rate Sesqui banned swimming in the 90s, and I have to think falling demand for lake swimming had something to do with it. I read the news in The State and remarked on the end of an era though not one I had much partcipated in. I don't know if the ban was state-wide, but last time I went into Poinsett it applied there as well.

The lake is still available for fishing and walking around, but like many lakes, it has been so overtaken by filthy waterfowl, that even if you liked lake swimming, you would hesitate to thread the feces-laden-minefield from the boat house to the water's edge. Even if you could still get a hamper and pin.

Well, it was bound to happen, but now they're knocking down the "Cinderella" Howard Johnson's motel on Knox Abbot Drive. This place's claim to fame (aside from being Cayce's first "national" motel) was the whimsical Cinderella-inspired pumpkin carriage that sat in front of the lobby. This was a Cayce landmark, and the site, I gather, of innumerable high school prom pictures. In fact, in the end, I believe more people cared about what was going to happen to the carriage than cared about the motel going under, per-se. In the end, the carriage was saved and moved to City Hall, leaving the spiral staircases (which you can see in a couple of these shots) as the only touches of whimsy left in the buildings.

I'm titling this post with HoJo, since that's what everyone remembers, but in fact if I recall correctly, Howard Johnson pulled out years before the actual closure of the motel, leaving it as one of those anonymous low-budget national chains that exist only for reservations purposes.

I don't go down Knox Abbot that often, so I missed the start of demolition, and it appears that they have already taken down the lobby/office. I'm a bit concerned that the lot has been bought by CVS. To me that throws up a big question mark over the future of the CVS (the former Parkland Pharmacy) in Parkland Plaza -- The plaza really can't afford to lose that anchor...

UPDATE 31 March 2009: Added Yellow Pages ad from 1970 Southern Bell phonebook.

UPDATE 24 June 2009: The CVS built on the old HoJo site is now open:

UPDATE 7 Jan 2010: Here is the Cinderella pumpkin carraige now at the Cayce City Hall complex:

Also added full street address and full hotel name.

This is one I've gotten several requests for, but about which I can really say very little -- hopefully some good comments will take up the slack here..

Gene's Pig & Chick was a Five Points landmark for a good part of my life. I'm not sure when the place was established, but it seemed to me that from the very earliest days that I can remember going to Sears on Harden Street, Gene's was there.

Unfortunately, from a point of view of actually having real memories of the place, I was a very picky eater when I was a kid, and I had decided very early in life that I didn't like chicken (I made a partial exception for Campbell's Chicken & Stars soup, though I still tended to pick the chicken pieces out of it) and that I didn't like barbecue. I'm not sure exactly when I made the barbecue "decision", since that wasn't something my mother (or anyone else in the family) made, but the chicken aversion survived a decade -plus campaign by my mother to force me to eat it. Ultimately, she gave up, and even when I was a kid, she knew better than to make one of our infrequent "eating out" trips into an unpleasant experience for both of us.

So the upshot of that is, that whether she would have wanted to stop at Gene's on a Five Points shopping trip or not, we never did.

Still the place was a constance presence, and while I don't remember quite when I found out that it was gone, I do remember being shocked and sad. The original building has long since been torn down, and the lot is now the site of a self-service Shell station, which I have also never been to.

UPDATE 14 March 2009: Added 1963 Yellow Pages Ad

UPDATE 17 June 1020 -- Becky Bailey sends in this photo of the old North Main location:

and writes:

I'm also sending a funky shot of the former Gene's Pig and Chick on N. Main Street. Probably could have defined its orientation a little better. It's near the intersection of Confederate Avenue and N. Main Street, up the street from the former Doug Broom's, and directly across the street from the present It It's Paper. Looks kinda sad, now, but in its day, there was a rooftop studio and lots of action! Doug Broom's, of course was demolished 20 years ago, I'm guessing.

UPDATE 2 Sept 2010: Added the 1970 Yellow Pages ad.

Like Martin's Coffee House, Edisto Dairies first turned up in a comment thread, and seemed to have a number of people who fondly remember it, so I'm copying those comments here, and making a full-on Edisto post...

Grocery shopping has changed a lot in just my lifetime (I'm closing fast on 48..), but in the lifetime of someone like my father, it changed immensely. First of all, when he was growing up in the 1920s in Fernandina Beach Florida, how you went to the store was different. You probably walked most of the time. Sometimes you might take a horse cart. For one particular store, my grandfather would put a handcart on the local rails and you would see-saw there. You certainly didn't drive a car. When you got there, you would probably give your list to the grocer whose help would fetch your items to you. You certainly wouldn't go back into the stock yourself and pick things out. You might not even pay cash for anything, as the grocer would have an account for your family which you would periodically settle. And just to continue this digression in a seasonal mode -- if it were near Thanksgiving, you would go to the butcher, pick out a turkey, tie a string around its neck and walk it back to your house.

All that was if you actually went to the store. For a lot of things, you didn't have to. The ice-man would drive his cart to your house and replenish your ice-box, and the milk-man would come by in his wagon and leave full bottles on your doorstep and pick up your empties to clean and re-use.

Well, by and by the iceman cometh-ed not, but the milkman was a steady presence for over half of the 20th century, featuring in innumerable risque jokes and arriving at dawn or before day-in, day-out and year round. In Columbia, or at least my part of Richland County, the milkman was Edisto Dairies.

I've forgotten the milkman's name, though I knew it well at the time, but the Edisto truck would come off of Trenholm road and make its way onto my street and I knew that if I got up early enough, and ran down to the corner, the milkman would let me steer the truck from the corner to our house. The truck was something like a UPS truck, with the "doors" always open on both sides. The floor was corrugated metal with a very spartan seat for the driver. My mother would make sure I had on shoes before sending me off, as there were apt to be glass fragments on the floor of the truck. I would hop in from the "passenger's" side and take the wheel and the milkman would ease the truck into gear and off we would go.

Edisto's milk came in standard bottles. I think some dairies had long-neck ones, but Edisto's were short neck, and were sealed with flat, waxed paper caps. I'm unsure now what actually held the caps to the bottles -- perhaps they were put on while the milk was warm with pasturization and vacuum-sealed as it cooled. The caps were actually in some demand for school projects. I remember in particular at Satchel-Ford Elementary we had a "counting man" which was a flat wooden figure of a man who had no fingers. and we would somehow attach milk-bottle caps to his hands for various counting exercises.

I don't know much about Edisto the company. From the name, I assume it was a collection of farms along the Edisto river, but I could certainly be wrong. As a commenter notes, they advertised that their milk was "Golden Guernsey" milk, and aside from their milk-routes and, according to commenter Lew, a milk plant on Superior Drive, they also had several ice-cream stores in town. The one I recall was in Trenholm Plaza in the far corner, next to Trenholm road. The place has, I think, always been some kind of ice-cream store since then, and currently houses Hooligan's, a nice place to take kids for ice-cream and a sandwich. (Though that wing of the plaza is to be torn down soon). They also had several huge advertising displays in town. The one I remember most was on Beltline Boulevard, and was a huge animated stream of pouring milk flowing from a big carton into a big mug. (I suppose the milk stream was some sort of painted revolving spiral..

The government at both state and federal levels has always intervened in the dairy market. I think it was primarily the state governments until the New Deal -- as a child, one of my father's family tasks was to take the coloring agent that came with each purchase of margarine, break the capsule, and spread it on all the sticks of margarine to make them yellow since so as to protect dairy interests it was illegal to sell yellow margarine in Florida. After that, there was a web of regional price support rules, and it was illegal to sell milk more cheaply than the agreed local price. I think that started to change in the 60s and 70s, and the milk market became more national. I don't know if that had an effect on Edisto, but I suspect it may have. At any rate sometime in that timeframe, they were bought out by Coburg dairies.

The rise of supermarkets had already been reshaping the grocery market for decades, and with their ample refrigeration cases and centralized locations, at some point it no longer made sense for dairies to deliver to indivudal homes, or for families to want them to. I may be wrong, but I don't think Edisto/Coburg home delivery lasted much if at all past the turn of the 70s (actually potato chip delivery lasted a lot longer!), and today milk is a complete commodity, like sugar. You buy "whole", "2 percent", "skim", or "nonfat" and never notice whose name is on the top of the carton and if the cows are anything beyond "cow" (ie: Jersey, Guernsey etc), they keep it to themselves. Not to mention that the whole insurance industry would descend like a horde of locusts on any company letting an 8 year old "steer" one of their trucks.

UPDATE 11 October 2011: Added a photo above of an old Edisto sign currently on display at the new Mast General Store on Main Street.

Campbell's Drugs was the anchor store for the old Forest Lake Shopping Center at the corner of Trenholm Road and Forest Drive, across from Trenholm Plaza.

Originally, Forest Lake Shopping Center was kind of a "double" strip mall with Campbell's on both the front (Forest Drive) and back (parking lot and cut-through over Gill's Creek). On the front with Campbell's were a 7-11 (later a Majik Market), a barber shop and a hardware store. (The hardware left early, and was replaced, possibly, with an ABC store). On the back were Dodd's, a fabric store of some sort, a formalwear store and some others that changed from time to time, and never really sparked my imagination.

Campbell's was an old-school drugstore, not affialiated with a national chain as far as I can recall, and boasted a soda fountain and short-order counter. If you came in the front door, the lunch counter was on your left leaving a corridor of general merchandise on your right which you walked down to get to the perscription area which was in the back of the store. I don't recall much about the store's stock aside from the usual Whitman's samplers and greeting cards, but it did have a paperback spinner rack from which I once talked my mother into buying me an Arthur C. Clarke short story collection. I do recall that there wasn't much about the stock to strike a kid's interest, so waiting to have a prescription filled could be kind of boring. Past the pharmacy area was a back door, with a sidewalk going down the hill to the back side of the shopping center.

Because of its location fairly near to our house, and on the way home from Dr. Harvin's Office, Campbell's was where we got all our perscriptions filled. Before Jack Rabbit set up in Trenholm Plaza, it was usually where we dropped our film off as well. They didn't have processing facilities, but would send your film off to a regional lab and you could pick it up a week or two later (color took longer, I think). I recall one time that we were dropping off film, and I didn't feel like going inside with my mother and sister while they took care of that and picked up a few things. Since it wasn't considered child abuse at the time, my mother let me stay in the car with my book and our dog. I apparently had strict instructions to roll the windows mostly up if I got out of the car, but in the event when I got bored and went inside, I couldn't be bothered and our dog (a sweet tempered Cocker Spaniel) took the opportunity to jump out of the window and make a run for the Cooper Branch. Since this involved crossing Trenholm, and since Trenholm was even then a pretty busy road, and since my mother had to go racing after her, I was in very bad graces for a while thereafter (she was fine though!)

Sometime, I think in the early 80s, Forest Lake Shoping Center was "remodeled", which in this instance meant tearing down the bulk of the original main strip. The auxiliary strip with the old Colonial store (now Coplon's), Sakura and Forest Lake TV remained, but Campbell's and all of the other main strip stores were torn down to make way for a new First Citizen's bank and Talbot's. I'm sure that given the trends in the pharmacy industry, Campbell's would probably have to have sold out to a chain by now as Cedar Terrace Pharmacy, The Big T and Parkland Pharmacy did. Still, I was sad to see it go.

For most of my life, "The Big T" as Taylor Street Pharmacy was known was the only 24-hour drugstore in Columbia. That said, it was far from the closest drugstore to my home, and a 24-hour drugstore is something you (hopefully) don't need that often, so I was probably only there a dozen or so times over the years.

The store, which was on Taylot Street above The Township and below Baptist Hospital, was unaffiliated with any chain (not unusual at the time), and I recall it as having rather a hodge-podge assortment of merchandise aside from the perscription department. I think one of the times I went when I was a kid, it impressed me as Lachicotte's at Pawleys Island set down in Columbia (though without the floats and fishing tackle). I do recall that they had a spinner rack of paperbacks, something I would always check in any store we visited, and some toys. I can't recall if they had a soda/short-order counter, but I would suspect that they did given the size of the store and that it was a standard drugstore fixture back in the day.

"The Big T" monicker was not just a common nickname for the place -- it was embraced by the store and used in their advertising, to effect, I think, since even people who didn't go there felt friendly towards the store.

In the end life became more difficult for unaffiliated drugstores, and most of that era (Campbell's, Cedar Terrace, Parkland Pharmacy..) are now gone. With the decline of downtown, the Taylor Street location became something of an obstacle as well, and the store finally sold out to CVS, who continue to operate it today, under a much reduced schedule (it apparently is not open on Sunday at all much less 24/7). It appears to me that apart from a revamp of the corner entrance to add CVS branded architecture, the main building is pretty much intact, at least from the outside.

UPDATE 14 March 2009: Added 1963 Yellow Pages ad.

UPDATE 31 March 2009: Added 1970 Yellow Pages ad.

UPDATE 10 March 2011 -- Some of the original Big T signage is visible during the current work on the building:

UPDATE 15 May 2011: Changed to closing date in the post title to 1994 based on commenter Andrew's research. (Oops, set it to 19994 the first time..)

The Horseshoe Deli now occupies the space in the first floor Russell House foyer which used to house the student post office boxes for most (or perhaps all) campus residents.

The Post Office box facility was rather oddly shaped in that it was a rectangular block set in the middle of the current deli space. There was a door to the Russell House courtyard at one end while the other end was open to the foyer. The entire rectangle was covered with old-style (combination lock) post office boxes on all four sides except for a door allowing Postal personell access to the inside so that mail could be put into the boxes. (There may also have been a window, though no full service post-office-like functionality was provided -- you could not buy stamps or mail letters). I don't remember what my PO Box number was, but my box was on the side of the rectangle nearest to Greene Street, and was at a moderate height which involved no stooping or craning.

Since Russell House is more or less in the center of campus, and since I lived in Douglas, which was at the far edge, my practice was that if it looked like it might rain during the day, I would take my compact umbrella with me from my room, and if it wasn't raining by the time I got to Russell House, and if it was after morning mail delivery (which it usually was as I avoided early morning classes if at all possible!), I would put my umbrella in my PO Box and go on with my day. As I'm sure most of you have guessed, this worked well until the day the spring catch decided to release inside the mailbox, turning the umbrella (which was point-first into the box) into one of those objects that can only be pushed one way (like a cable tie or Chinese finger-cuff). I finally had to wait until the next day and ask a postal worker to retreive it for me...

I'm not sure when the PO Boxes were moved. It appears to me that some have been put upstairs by the old game room, while the majority have been put in the "Carolina Underground" basement mall.