Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

Read the rest of this entry »

"What Good Is Sitting Alone In Your Room?"

Actually until the last year or so, I didn't even know there was a drag cabaret in Columbia. I think I had kind of a vague idea that a nightclub was in Punch Line location, but I figured in Five Points it was probably a college hangout.

The building is PT's was in never seemed to really thrive. It's at the way outside edge of Five Points, and aside from The Punch LIne, I can't recall ever stopping there. The address for PT's is Harden Street, but the building also fronts on an odd little section of Senate Street which is totally unconnected with the rest of Senate Street. (Come to think of it, the State House also cuts off Senate Street, so it actually has three discontiguous segments.)

The Free Times says the next tenant in the PT's space will be a burgers and milkshake operation, soooo..

"Right This Way, Your Table's Waiting.."

UPDATE 25 July 2010: OK, the PT's building at 1101 Harden Street has now been demolished. See the link for details.

This closing has been talked about long enough that I actually got these photos last year, knowing I would have to deploy them eventually. This Hardee's has been a fixture in the old Five Point's Sears parking lot for years. I think it may even date back to when Gene's Pig & Chick across College Street would have been its competition. (It certainly does not date back to Hardee's original space-age designs such as at Silver City or The Eggroll Station though).

This story from The State last year tells how the Hardee's is going to be replaced with a Chick-Fil-A, and how it will all be carefully landscaped in accordance to the new Five Points streetscaping guidelines. Color me unimpressed. You have only to compare US-17 as it passes through Mount Pleasant where everything is set-back so far and blends in so blandly that you can't even tell you are passing stores that want to sell you something with US-17 in the Myrtle Beach area where even failed and vacant storefronts are exuberant to see how guidelines can suck the life out of a road. Not to mention this quote:

"Chick-fil-A is a business of high quality and we anticipate this development will add great character to the already diverse and eclectic makeup of Five Points," she said.

Of really? Replacing one national fast-food chain (which is actually currently on the rebound) with another national fast-food chain will add character and diversity to Five Points? I guess character and diversity aren't what they once were..

(Hat tips to commenters Tom, Mike D, Larry & Jim)

Read the rest of this entry »

This rather handsome brick building on Harden Street in Five Points was, according to the Historic Columbia Foundation, built as a laundry in the 1930s (this city property valuation report claims it was actually built in 1930). I'm sure it has been many things over the years, but most recently, it seems to have been a used furniture store called Habitat Store which was associated with The Habitat For Humanity charity. I used to love going to used furniture stores, back when they were "junk stores" rather than "antique stores", but I can't ever recall this one, so I'm guessing it probably started after I left town in the mid 80s.

This is kind of an interesting one in that it was totally unexpected. I know this Harden Street storefront has been a number of things, but I couldn't bring any of them to mind. Googling turns up virtually nothing -- except a page from the Spartanburg Herald Journal for 21 Feb 1962:

MISS SUN FUN South Carolina will be selected March 31 in Columbia as contestants throughout the state vie for hte title Sponsored by the Columbia Chapter of the American Business Clubs, winner of the state title will enter into competition for the national finals to be held in June at Myrtle Beach. The national winner will receive $10,000 in prizes. Application forms and rules have been sent to newspapers throughout the state. They may also be obtained from contest headquarters by contacting Miss Sun Fun South Carolina Pageant 942 Harden Street Columbia. Entry applications must be mailed before March 1.

I kind of remember the Sun Fun Festival and Miss Sun Fun being a big deal when I was little (though at the time of this article, I would have been 1 year old and oblivious). I had always thought of it as strictly a Myrtle Beach thing though, and didn't know it had state-wide entrants, and apparently even a national reach.

Indeed, while The Sun Fun Festival & Miss Sun Fun still exist, they now appear to be owned by the Myrtle Beach Chamber of Commerce, and I can't really recall hearing much about either since the 1970s.

It's still something nice to think about during dreary Februaries though..

I first wrote about this building back on 10 April 2009 when I was doing a closing on Kester's Bamboo House, and China Garden may have been closed even then, at least I don't recall seeing anyone inside, and from the pictures I took then (two of which open this closing), there already appear to be signs of work around the front door.

I'm not a big fan of Chinese food, and this wasn't one of my mother's favored places, so I never ended up eating here, but China Garden has certainly been a Five Points landmark for many years. The building has been there so long that when the fatal Harden Street renovation reached China Garden, they went under the sidewalk to shore up the foundations and found there were no foundations. This caused the street work to stall in front for an inordinate amount of time while they figured out what to do. Presumably that is all fixed now..

Anyway, it's definitely closed now, and it appears that it will reopen soon as a place called Grandma's, which I expect will no longer be Asian cusine. If they keep the "pagoda" sign as it appears they will be doing, we will have two non-Chinese restaurants in town with Chinese-themed signage. (The other is Bombay Grill.

UPDATE 24 June 2019 -- Add tags and map icon.

Although there was another, more old-school Hiller Hardware down somewhere in the Vista, this is the one I knew from my childhood as my mother liked to look at the non-hardware, gifty, stuff from time to time when we were in 5 Points. I always thought the place was pretty cool too because of the hardware (not the gifty stuff!) and because, if memory serves me correctly, they often had junior science experiment type kits for sale as well (I suppose that was gifty under some rubric, but it wasn't painted or ceramic..)

Hiller had its own parking lot, as well as metered spaces in front and on the sides, and it was one of the odder lots in town. There was an entrance on Blossom Street by the store back door, and another entrance on Hilton Street which you would not expect at all. The second entrance comes down a rather steep hill and the whole thing is banked like a racetrack. One of my cousin's boyfriends liked to drive up around the bank at an insane speed when the store was closed. It was pretty scary and I was never tempted to do it myself (I did come in from Hilton a number of times myself at a sane speed). It appears that in later years, the Hilton entrance was roped off.

When I heard the store was closing a few months ago, I went by for the first time in years. It hadn't been too picked over at that point, and I got some light bulbs, WD-40 and dust-off spray. The place was still much as I recalled it with the no-nonsense hardware section and the gifty knick-knack sections living together in harmony.

Why did the store close, well, this State story cites the interminable 5 Points street work and big box stores. I'm pretty sure it was the later.

It's an old story in retail. We say we like mom & pop stores, but we shop where there's acres of parking and the stock is both a bit deeper and a few cents cheaper. I'm no different -- as I said above, it had been years since I was in Hiller but I've been to Home Depot or Lowes probably a hundred times in the same period.

It appears to me from the plywood sheeting over some of the front and side windows, that the store was vandalized (or burglarized) at least twice in its final months, and that is a real shame.

The good part of the Hiller closing (again from The State story above) is that the owners own the lot outright, so they will do OK under the new arrangements. In fact, it appears that the incoming bank will only be leasing the property, so they or their heirs will be able to make other deals in the future as well.

Lots of pictures after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

As far as I can tell, the old Carver Theater at 1519 Harden Street is currently vacant. This building was once one of the only two black theaters in Columbia during the years of Jim Crow. In the Waverly neighboorhood, and adjacent to the historically black Benedict and Allen colleges, the theater also had live talent shows as well as motion pictures.

I believe I can recall this place still being in business as a theater while I was growing up. This site says it closed in 1971 but this one suggests that it was open as late as 1974. My copy of The State movie listings for 15 April 1973 does not have an entry for The Carver, which supports the earlier date though I suppose they may not have advertised there.

There are a number of write-ups on The Carver Theater online as it is in the National Register of Historic Places. Here is one, here is another, and here is a third.

After the theater closed, the Agape Church moved in starting in 1998 and stayed for several years. The entry in the National Registry states that the current owners

I certainly wish them success!

UPDATE 2 September 2022: Interesting! The State says that Allen University will be re-opening the Carver as a first run theater, and venue.

Also adding map icon and updating tags.

Kester's Bamboo House occupied the spot on Harden Street now held by China Garden and Jungle Jim's. The first (rather unflattering) image comes from the 1963 Southern Bell directory and the second from the 1970 one. I'm not sure when the place closed, but I suspect it was sometime in the 1970s. I'm pretty sure I recall hearing about it as a child, but don't recall seeing it after I began to drive myself. A posting to a genealogy website says that the original Mr. Kester passed in 1966, but I don't know if the business stayed in the family after that or was sold at that point.

I also don't know if 724 Harden was split into two businesses at that point, or if Kester's occupied the whole space by itself, though the 1970 Yellow Pages ad claims banquet seating for 100, which seems larger than the current China Garden capacity. At any rate, I'm pretty sure the current China Garden building was at least part of Kester's and does date back to that era, and is somewhat responsible for the closing of The Parthenon.

As I remember it, the story in The State was that when the interminable Five Points road work of a few years ago reached The China Garden a snag developed. As the work crews went to replace the infrastructure under the building's foundation, they found that the building had no foundation! The front wall was basically supported only by the sidewalk, so before they could go under the building to work, they had to shore everything up and this took a lot longer than they expected -- and all the while they were there, access to The Parthenon was very difficult.

UPDATE 24 June 2019: Add tags and map icon.

Zesto's is a Columbia area chain of almost-open-air walk-up restaurants. The older ones are generally odd in that while there may be a dining room, it does not connect to the order counter (which may or may not even be "inside"). The chain is greek influenced, and probably does most of their business in chicken, but for me the attraction has always been chocolate-dipped soft-serve vanilla cones. There's almost a little ceremony as the server fills the cone, then upends it and dips it into the vat of molten chocolate. Then, you take it, wrapped in a little napkin which soaks up the vanilla which is already running down the cone to your hand and, and bite into the just hardened shell -- perfection.

This lot on the corner of Harden & Blossom streets was for many years home to the Five Points Zesto. I believe the store was actually built as a Zesto and had a large ice-cream cone "statue" similar to the Triangle City store in Cayce. Although I typically went to the Forest Drive store across from Richland Mall for my chocolate-dip fix, I recall being quite sad when the Five Points store was demolished. What was even sadder is that the location would probably still be viable as a Zesto's, but the store which replaced it, a Record Bar offshoot called Tracks failed pretty quickly. Here's what commenter Hal had to say about Tracks:

I also worked at the Columbia Mall Record Bar. I worked from November of 85 untill the store closed in 91. Brian is correct in that there where two Record Bars in Columbia at the time. One at Dutch Square, which was store #9, and the one at Columbia Mall, which was store #94. The Tracks in 5 points open around 89 or 90, and was the mack-daddy of it’s day. It was the first two story store, which they later regreted because it had no handicap access to the second story, and it was a video rental store. It also got national news coverage when a drunk plowed his car straight trough the Blossom street wall. Hillarious.

At any rate, Tracks didn't last there too long. I forget if there was anything else before the current tenant, T-Mobile, which has been there at least five or more years.

The traffic cones, and the general drab & gray aspect of the picture are due to it being taken the day before the Five Points St. Patrick's Day fest -- what great weather they had this year!

UPDATE 4 June 2024: Update tags, add map icon, correct post title from Zesto's to Zesto.