Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

Carzzz is yet another vacant used car lot on Two Notch Road. The name makes me think of those rip-off movies you find in the cheap bin at Wal-Mart or at The Dollar Store where you're supposed to think you're getting a Disney movie, and instead it's some Eastern-European knockoff. Lightning McQueen it's not..

This building, on the northwest corner of Two Notch Road and Beltline Boulevard, was once, in the not too distant past, a Payless Shoe Source, despite striking me as a very odd location for such. In fact, the location is awkward for most uses as it is fairly hard to get into and out of.

The Carzzz web site is still online (and copyright 2010). It's interesting that the picture they use there does not have the old UK style telephone booth on the corner of the store sidewalk. I wonder what the story of that is? I have a dim memory that the nearby Chappy's Authentic English Fish & Chips may have had such a thing, but even if it that were true, I'm not sure how it would end up there.

UPDATE 23 December 2011 -- Work is ongoing here, but no indication of what is coming next:

I have some pictures of the sad fate of the British phonebooth I need to upload too.

UPDATE 10 January 2012 -- As mentioned, here are some pix of the demise of the phonebooth, from 1 October 2011:

UPDATE 25 January 2012 -- As reported by commenter Andrew, this is to be a dental clinic. In fact, as I was in the area yesterday, they were preparing to replace the banner type sign for Family Dental with a permanent sign -- something that was accomplished the next time I drove by (though I did not get a picture of it). With the opening of this clinic, the corner of Two Notch and Beltline will have two dental operations, as the old Eckerd on the opposite side of the street is now Small Smiles dental clinic.

UPDATE 28 January 2012 -- All the signage is up:

UPDATE 27 February 2019: Add tags and map icon.

As promised below, this is commenter Dennis's map of the original Richland Mall. He also sends this note:

Hi ted

Well, finally, here's a first attempt at a Richland Mall layout, circa 1968.
Please feel free to correct!

Obviously it is just a sketch, and proportions etc. are extremely
approximate. Not to scale!

1. J.B. White's

2. a jewelry store -- King's?

3. no idea -- what was in this area?

4. Hickory Farms

5. The Shop for Pappagallo (women's shoes way too expensive for our family)

6. Baubles 'N Things (not sure about this one)

7. Mr. Popper's

8. Meri's Records

9. maybe this was Baubles 'N Things

10. ?

11. Pet-A-Rama

12. Ruff Hardware

13. Berry's on Main (actually at Richland Mall - always thought this was a
dumb name)

14. Winn Dixie

15. Redwood Cafeteria - not sure this was a plain rectangle; it may have
been an L shape. For a while the corner closest to White's had a separate
entrance and a little soda fountain area.

16. Hickory Farms' second location after the moved "across the aisle."

17. Woolworth's

18. Colonial Stores / Big Star

19. Eckerd's

20. What was here? A little travel agency, maybe? Remember travel agencies, before the internet?

21. Gerald's Shoe Repair

22. Merle Norman Cosmetics (or maybe they were 23)

23. Russell Stover (before they put their own building way out in the
parking lot)

24. coin laundromat; owned by the cleaners next door. The manager had a little walk-thru between the two.

25. dry cleaner's -- Ed Robinson's, maybe?

26. automated Post Office, like the one at old Woodhill Mall. An exercise in frustration every time.

27. Russell Stover's own building, far enough from the mall to make sure
they went out of business.

The white boat shapes in the center walkway were fountains when new, then, like every other property owner that gets completely fed up with the trouble and expense of fountains, the owners turned them into planters. Sometimes they covered them with carpeted plywood and used them as stages. I met Jolly Jim and J.P. Sidewinder there one Saturday. Was there a third one down closer to White's?

The white lines between Woolworth's and Colonial show the bike rack, used constantly by me.

The little gray inset into Colonial was their loading dock, which always
stunk. Speaking of stink, there was a really ugly dumpster in the parking
lot right out the back door of Redwood Cafeteria that reeked and bred vermin in ways that defy explanation.

28., 29., 30. The shady backside of the mall had a few offices that held no
interest for me. One was a State Farm agency, I think, and one was the
mall's business office.

Thanks, Dennis!

Have at it folks..

UPDATE 19 Sep 2010 -- Well, I went down to the library today and ended up looking in the old "City Directories". I hadn't really paid a lot of attention to those, since they tend not to have interesting ads like old phonebook yellow pages. HOWEVER what it turns out they *do* have is complete (or at least pretty complete) listings of shopping center tenants. Herewith the Richland Mall listings for 1962 (which I believe was the mall's first year of operation), 1975 and 1985:

1962:

1975:

1985:

UPDATE 21 June 2011: Added [at top] a view of the old Richland Mall including Whites, Russell Stover, Richland Mall Theater, and part of Redwood Cafeteria from an old Chamber of Commerce promotional book.

UPDATE 9 February 2012 -- Well Richland Mall is rezoning:

According to The State:

The new zoning allows the mall owners “all kinds of options,” including space for offices, residences, hotels, restaurants and schools, according to Mark Williams, Forest Acres’ city manager.

UPDATE 21 May 2020 -- Here's a nifty color shot of the old Richland Mall centrial corridor at the Colonial. Unfortunately I can't inline it due to copyright, but it's worth a click.

I've been putting off doing a post on Woolworth's because I don't have any pictures of the place, or even any ads. I'm sure I'll find a newspaper ad eventually, but they don't seem to have gone in for Yellow Pages ads at all.

Anyway -- Woolworth's was in the original open-air Richland Mall from the beginning. Woolworth's front entrance was on the Beltline side of the mall, and the back entrance opened into the mall's main traverse corridor. The way I remember it, Woolworth's was approximately in the middle of the mall. I'm definitely a little shakey on the layout of all the old stores, but I can definitely say that if you went out Woolworth's back door, a left turn would point you at White's on the far end of the mall. I believe that as you were walking to White's, you would pass Meri's and, in later years, The Happy Bookseller.

Conversely, if you came out the back door and turned right, you would go past Jackson Camera, Eckerd's and head down towards the laundromat and Winn Dixie.

If you came in through the front door, there was more or less a clear corridor to the back door, and there were registers in both the front and back. Still facing the back, the right side of the store was more or less devoted to clothes, and I didn't usually go over there. The left side was much more interesting and had records, pets, various school and office supplies, the lunch counter and the restrooms.

Every year, about this time, we would go to Woolworth's for new school supplies. I liked Blue Horse brand because all the items had coupons you could clip and send in for premiums. The fact that I never got enough to send in and never actually got a single premium didn't deter me. (Somewhere about the house there is probably still a cache of Blue Horse coupons..). For pencils I liked Ticonderoga #3 (and always avoided Empire pencils) and for notebook paper, I liked "college ruled". Aside from the stuff we actually used, there was neat stuff that we never used, though we each had several. This included protractors and drawing compasses (with the deadly points).

The pet department didn't have dogs or cats -- it ran more to hamsters and gerbils as far as mammals went, turtles to represent reptiles, and lots of fish. There were several places in town we would get aquarium fish, but I think we got most of our "neons" from Woolworth's.

Of course Woolworth was famous, or infamous, for its lunch counters, but as this store was built post 1964, I'm prety sure it always served everybody (at least officially). The lunch counter was, as I said, on the left side of the store, and fairly near to the rear. We didn't eat there too often, but as I recall it, there was an actual counter with padded swivel stools arrayed around it, and then some booths away from the counter itself. I'm pretty sure I remember the aqua-enamel covered Hamilton Beach milkshake machines, and that the fries were crinkle cut.

The record section was to the right of the lunch counter (though still left of the central corridor) and almost against the back windows. There were a certain amount of "real" records shelved alphabetically, certainly not a deep selection, but probably a fair number of the days hits. The attraction for me however was the cut-out bins. In these, would be remnants: records that didn't sell for whatever reason (usually because they weren't very good...) with a notch cut out of the covers to indicate their status, and boxed up indiscriminately to be sent to places like Woolworth's at reduced prices. The records were in absolutely no order of any sort, but I was obsessive in those days (and broke, which helped) and I would look through each and every record in every cut-out bin. I know I got a number of records there over the years, but at this point, I can definitely recall two, both by the discount repackager Pickwick Records. Both were cheapo repackaging of Beach Boys material from the Capitol era. One, "Wow, Great Concert!" repackaged the first Beach Boys concert album, leaving off several tracks, and the second was an 8-track tape repackaging album tracks from the first two Beach Boys LP's (Surfin' Safari and Surfin' USA) leaving off the hit singles and adding their own typos to the song titles -- For years, I assumed that "Moog Dog" referred to the synthesizer, when in fact it was simply a typo for "Moon Dog". Actually, come to think of it, I also bought a non-Pickwick repackaging the Beach Boys pre-Capitol tracks at Woolworth's as well. (Always beware if you see an off-brand looking Beach Boys package that boasts "Surfer Girl" & "Surfin' Safari" it probably dates from the Hite Morgan sessions and has much earlier and more primitive performances -- interesting, but not what you heard on the radio).

When I first started going to Woolworth's, the bathroom was unique amongst all the bathrooms (that I was aware of) in Columbia: It was a pay bathroom. The door handle had a protruding mechanism with a coin-slot, and the handle itself was more like the handle on a bubble-gum machine than a usual door handle. I loved that thing, and annoyed my mother to no end by "holding it" while we were in White's (which had nice, free, restrooms) so that I could use the coin bathroom at Woolworth's. In later years, they disabled the coin mechanism and the restroom was free to all, though you could still see that it had once been pay.

If all this weren't enough, possibly the neatest thing about Woolworth's was the arcade game past the front checkout counters, against the front wall. This was the pre-electronic, pre-videogame era when in general, pinball machines were the only option. This particular machine had the general pinball format -- about two feet wide and four feet deep, but it wasn't a pinball machine. I wish I could remember the name of it, but it was some sort of "shoot the aliens" game. You would put in your dime, and your joystick would activate. The joystick would traverse right and left, and had either a trigger, or a firing button on top of it. It was connected to a plastic laser cannon at the front of the console, and moving the joystick would swivel the cannon right and left.

Shortly after the game came to life, a mechanical flying-saucer would pop up at the back of the game and move randomly left and right (and sometimes pop down behind the scenary to move invisibly). You had to point your cannon at where you thought the saucer was going to be by the time your blast got to it -- you had to guess what it was going to do and lead it. Every time you pushed the firing button different segments of lights along the top of the game would light up, indicating the progress of your laser bolt. To some extent you could still change the direction it was progressing in by adjusting your joystick, but the gross direction was fixed at the start of your shot.

If you guessed right and the saucer was in the area where your bolt impacted, it would make a very satisfying sound effect and all the lights would flash to indicate the destruction. You would also get points, but that was pretty secondary to me, since there were no prizes and I generally wasn't playing against anyone. And really, it was almost enough to just watch the machine go through its paces whatever the outcome. It's amazing what they did totally without computers or any electronics -- just mechanical know-how and electricity.

Woolworth's survived the change from the open-air Richland Mall to the ill-fated and enclosed Richland Fashion Mall. As I recall it, the new store was on the second level. If you came into Whites from the Beltline side, it would be out the right mall entrance to Whites. The new store was smaller than the old store, and didn't have pets. By this time, I was in college, and I only went there once or twice. I recall it as a pretty sad looking affair, and in fact the whole chain was in trouble by this time.

Fairly shortly thereafter, Woolworth's rebranded itself as Footlocker and shed its dimestore history. They kept a Footlocker store in Richland Mall (I think it was out the left mall entrance to Whites) but I had no interest whatsoever in that concept, and never went in.

Wonder if I still have that 8-Track?

I've written before of my first experiences with a "Steak House" at Ponderosa in Trenholm Plaza, and how after that we became regulars at Quincy's on Two Notch.

After I moved out on my own, I mentally divided steak-houses into tiers. In the top tier were Quincy's and Ryan's. In the middle tier were Western Sizzlin and Golden Corral, while in the bottom tier were Western Steer and various one-offs. These weren't hard and fast, and over time Ryan's went way down in my estimation, while Golden Corral came up while Western Sizzlin stayed solidly middle tier the whole time.

The ad from the 1974 phonebook says there were Sizzlin locations in Charleston, Savannah and Brunswick. By the time I moved to Fayetteville in 1985, there was certainly one there, on Raeford Road within walking distance from my apartment, and I believe there was one nearby on I-95 as well (though it could have been a Steer), which the owner's wife took as a special decorating project producing the most jam-packed-with-decor steak house in existence.

The one in Faytetteville was gone the last time I checked (July 2009), as are both here in Columbia (the one on Knox Abbott was a number of restaurants including Crazy Buffet and Hot China Buffet and is now vacant again). I'm pretty sure the one in Charleston is gone, or at least I've never run into it. I have no idea about the one in Brunswick either, but the one in Savannah ("Pooler", actually) is still going strong. That has been our way-point on trips to Florida for many years, and we take a picture in front of one of their signs on each trip. They seem to keep staff forever, and one of the waitresses always used to recognize my us by remembering my father though she saw him no more than twice a year. Over the years, the buffett has gained in importance in comparison to the "steak" aspect, but it's still solidly middle-tier and comfortable.

After the Sizzlin closed, the place became another restaurant A Touch of Class, which I can't recall at all. Obviously at some point between then and now, the original Sizzlin building was torn down and the Family Auto Centers trailer-office etc was put on the lot, which sold used cars, with the inevitable (though always welcome) fuzzy streamers.

Postscript: Just noticed that in the yellow pages ad, while the main graphic does say Western Sizzlin if you look closely at the pictured building (click through to the higher res shot), the building's sign and the building itself clearly says Western Sizzler!

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This distinctive building is on Beltline between Rosewood and Devine Street. I don't know if they were the original tenant, but for many years it was an office supply store. I never went there myself, as I was living out of town for most of the time between when I started using "office equipment" (essentially printers in my case) and when I started buying supplies online. I'm pretty sure my sister did find a ribbon for the antique Brother "Diablo 630 compatible!" daisy-wheel printer I set her up with. Those things had a really unique machine-gun type staccato sound they made as the wheel spun and the solenoid hammerd the letters onto the page. I found the fan-fold paper feed almost impossible to adjust correctly such that it wouldn't gradually mangle the paper..

Anyway, the place was in the 1998 phonebook, but I believe Dollar General has been there pretty much for most of this century.

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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This much retailed (and once churched) spot on Cross Hill Road next to the former Kroger Sav-On has never seemed to catch fire for any of its many tenants, most of which I have only a vague recollection of. Aside from all those listed above on the post title, I'm pretty sure it was a menswear shop also at one point, and I either got or thought about getting a suit there. (Something I hate like posion).

This PDF at the City of Columbia website suggests that the city was thinking about buying the building back in the 2006 timeframe and wondering what the absestos and lead paint implications would be, but apparently nothing came of that. The document describes the building as being "used as a former antiques store" -- that's certainly an odd turn-of-phrase, but implies that the building was vacant at that point, with Fletcher's having been the most recent tenant.

Cross Hill Road is an odd little stretch whose name I never could remember. For years growing up, I thought that Beltline Boulevard ran all the way to Garners Ferry Road instead of turning off towards Rosewood. I can only think that at some point a lot of road work must have been done to make the setup so illogical. (Of course it didn't help either that until last year, I thought that Garners Ferry started where Cross Hill runs into Devine Street and Fort Jackson Boulevard -- I never realized that Devine Street runs all the way to Wildcat).

At any rate, whatever you call it, this lot, along with the Kroger lot, is now Interstate feeder property (which neither was in the beginning), and I expect that eventually a hotel or national chain restaurants will take the real estate.

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This building, across the street from Richland Mall and just south of Moe's has been a number of things over the years, with none of them seeming to last long. Right now, I can only find two other names (and a Doctor's practice) before H2, but I'm sure there were many others as loopnet says the building dates back to 1969. Part of my difficulty may be that the address is sometimes given as "2100 Beltline Boulevard" and sometimes as "2100 N Beltline Boulevard". One operation I sort of recall had an odd name as though it was a Christian Youth Fraternity or something like that.

I'm not sure what "joining" means in the case of H2 and Tonic. I suspect it just means "we transferred your membership". The H2 facebook page seems unchanged since last year, so it's possible the place was closed for a while before I noticed it.

UPDATE 21 May 2010 -- Here's an ad for European Health Spas (as mentioned in the comments) from the 19 Feb 1979 edition of The State. I can explain why the street address doesn't match. The ad lists 2204, which apparently doesn't exist today (at least as google-able retail), but clearly the ad namechecks "Richland Mall". Perhaps there was a street renumbering in the 1980s? Anyway I've added it to the post title and here's the ad:

UPDATE 29 July 2010 -- Apparently it's going to be Austral Salon next:

This space, to the right of Barnes & Noble on the lower level of Richland Mall was the mall's drugstore, Eckerd Drugs.

I'm trying to remember if the original Richland Mall had a drug store and I don't think it did. Eckerd's came in with the enclosed Richland Fashion Mall stage, and may have ended there. I don't think it made it to the Midtown at Forest Acres stage, but I'm not sure exactly when that started, and I refuse to call the mall that anyway.

It certainly did not make it as late as the Rite-Aid buyout of Eckerd's. I'm not sure exactly when it closed, but I think it was the early 2000s. By that time, Eckerd's had already seen the writing on the wall which required corner stores, and had moved the Trenholm Plaza store to the current corner-equivalent location that RIte AId on Forest Drive now occupies. The Richland Mall store had no drive-through, and could never have one, and while the parking was as close to strip-mall parking as Richland Mall gets, it still wasn't as good as a real strip-mall.

UPDATE 10 August 2020: Add map icon, update tags.

I'm not sure when the Richland Mall Theater was built. I can remember going to movies before it was built (specifically at The Atlantic Twin and various theaters on Main Street), and my coherent memories start around 1965, so it can't have been built too long before the first picture I saw there 1968's "Oliver!". What I most remember about that movie is that it seemed interminable to a seven-year-old. IMDB clocks it at two hours 33 minutes, so I'm not surprised I felt that way -- I expect I'd feel that way now too!

The theater was on an outparcel of the "original" open-air Richland Mall. I recall it as more or less at the section of the parking lot fartherest down Beltline from Forest Drive, but I've been wrong here before about the original Richland Mall orientation vs the orientation of the current mall. I think it was more or less where Bank of America and the empty Black Lion building now are, as shown in the second picture, but I could be mistaken.

The layout of the theater was a central ticket window with doors on both sides, a central concession counter and a corridor to each screen at the left and right sides of the lobby. I say 'each' screen, there were only two -- though at the time even two was an innovation. As you can see from the ad in the 15 April 1973 issue of The State the theater was a "Rocking Chair" theater, and this figured heavily into their initial advertising. What this actually meant was that the seats were more thickly padded than "regular" theater seats, and they did indeed have springs such that you could rock them frontwards and backwards a certain extent -- and of course a certain number of kids were always going to be obnoxious about that! (The Palmetto at 1417 Main Street was also a "Rocking Chair" theater -- I expect it shared ownership with the Richland Mall Theater).

The whole "rocking chair" bit paled for me though. What I was always interested in was the theater's "time capsule". This was a bronze plaque set into the concrete of the theater's right-hand sidewalk. It was engraved to say when it was buried and when it was to be opened. I don't remember the date set for exhumation, but I assume it was probably 50 years after the theater opened, so around 2018. I was an avid science fiction reader, but somehow I couldn't even imagine a date that far into the future that involved me personally. In the event, it turns out I'm doing much better than the theater, and though of course you never know, I fully expect to be here in 2018, but the time capsule is long since gone. I don't really remember when the theater was razed to make way for Richland Fashion Mall, but I suspect that it was after I left town in 1985. Otherwise, I think I would have heard what happened to the time capsule. I'm sure it must have been dug up, but whether they opted to open it at that time or to continue to wait, I don't know.

Although I saw a good number of first-run movies at the theaters over the years, I think the bulk of my experience with them came through their summer kids' matinees. The idea was that a) it gets really hot in South Carolina in the summer, b) moms get really tired of having the kids around all day during the summer and c) we could use some matinee business at the concession stands. What Richland Mall (and other theaters) would do was have kid-oriented second-run movies every weekday during the summer for a nominal price (say, $1.00). Moms would drop their kids off (unsupervised!) at the theater and shop Richland Mall while they were out of their hair, the kids would get to see a fun movie and have lots of Milk Duds and popcorn out of the heat, and the theater would get to rake in concession sales during normally idle time.

Some movies I specifically recall seeing this way were Alkazam the Great (a US dubbed [Frankie Avalon!] version of the classic Chinese "Monkey King" story), The Apple Dumpling Gang, Blue Water, White Death (the precursor to today's "Shark Week".., and a bit strong for the kiddies, really..) and The Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin (a now forgotten Disney flick that I loved!).

These programs still exist in some form during the summer, but as most moms work now and most households have air-conditioning, it's just not the same.

I'm trying to think what the last show I saw at the Richland Mall Theaters was. I'm not sure, but it could have been a midnight-movie showing of Peter Falk's classic The In Laws ("Serpentine, Shep! Serpentine!").

The new Richland Fashion Mall did (and does) have theaters on the top deck, but I don't believe they are related to the original Richland Mall Theaters. (And if they were, they aren't now, having changed ownership at least once, from "Litchfield" to "Regal").

"Please sir, I want some more."

UPDATE 3 Sept 2010: Commenter Dennis sends this link which has information about and pictures of a number of old Columbia theaters, including this picture of Richland Mall.

UPDATE 21 June 2010: Added [at top] pictures of Richland Mall Theater and a Richland Mall view with the theater in the distance from an old Chamber of Commerce promotional book.