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..

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.

I wrote about this place before, or at least it's main building when I did a closing for Piggly Wiggly Store 62. After The Pig closed, the building became a Gold's Gym which with this demolition moves to the old Sofa Express slot at Sandhill (apparently with plans for the old Ashley Furniture Homestore storefront as well).

As of Sunday 20 June 2010, the site is in sort of an odd state. From the front it almost appears untouched, but most of the back side has already been completely gutted or torn down, leaving the facade as sort of a potemkin shopping center.

According to commenter "mg", Dick Smith Nissan will be locating here eventually.

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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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There's been a good bit of churn in the venerable Boozer Shopping Center lately: Golden China closed and became an Indian restaurant, the Book Dispensary moved, the allergy store moved, and the idiosyncratically apostrophed Gift's of Love florist has moved as well, or at least I hope it has. The sign says so, but the web site seems to point to something generic, and the new location is described in a rather non-specific way.

On the plus side for Boozer, Manifest is hanging in there after some initial plans to close, and a Dollar General has recently moved into the old Heroes & Dragons / Key Catalog Wholesalers slot.

Well, this is the second Tuesday Morning to close in the last serveral years. Of course events now seem to suggest that the first one I wrote about at Trenholm Plaza probably was a casualty of the up-scaling of that venue rather than any inate problems (based on a classy restaurant being put into that spot, and Tuesday Morning opening a new location just a few blocks down the street).

I doubt Spring Valley Commons is upscaling (at least not as long as there is "self storage" in the old theater slot), but I guess time will tell if we see another Tuesday Morning in the same general area. I have finally been in a couple of Tuesday Mornings, and it strikes me as a store you would not have reason to visit very often, so it seems to me that each store would take a pretty large population to sustain one.

(Hat tip to commenter Andrew).

UPDATE 2 March 2023: Updating tags and adding map icon.

I had noticed several times that this very interesting building on Millwood was vacant, but somehow never got around to taking any pictures until recently. This is the former location for Shandon Florist, an 80 year old area stalwart which has since moved to 2733 Millwood Avenue.

This real estate listing (which also has an aerial photo) says the building was built in 1962, and in a few of these shots it appears to me that there might be some roof issues which might have factored into the move. Still, I quite like the building. It seems to draw on the same period inspirations that went into the old Eggroll Station and Silver City buildings.

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Rugged Warehouse never really caught my notice while it was in the Barnes & Noble plaza on Harbison Boulevard. I hit B&N fairly often, and Outback and Chili's from time to time, but I guess I never go over to the back part of the plaza. I'm not even sure how long it was there. For some reason I can't find my 2009 phonebook, but it's not in this year's, and it's not in 2008. However, I can't find the Forest Drive store in there either, so maybe I'm somehow looking in the wrong place.

(Hat tip to commenter RM.)

UPDATE 4 April 2012 -- As mentioned by commenter Andrew, Off Broadway Shoe Warehouse is in the offing:

This little cell-phone storefront was in one of the more vintage strip malls left on Forest Drive, more or less across the street from Frank's carwash. I see in these pictures a sign on the door that I didn't notice while taking them, and which I should have gotten out and looked at. It probably either explains where they've moved to, or directs customers to another existing store. (There's probably an ap for that..)

UPDATE 15 February 2014 -- This is to be a Jimmy John's:

UPDATE 26 March 2014 -- Jimmy John's is open: