Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

We never ate at The Whale's Tail growing up. I wasn't a big seafood fan (which is to say I refused to eat the stuff), and my parents didn't push the issue too often (in fact we used to go to Oliver's Lodge before 5pm because I could get spaghetti before 5 but not after. (Which really sounds odd to me at this remove, but I'm pretty sure thats right..).

Anyway, while I never went there, I used to see the billboards from time to time, and I decided to go looking for it today. The old phonebooks (the above ad is from the 1977 one) never give a real street address for it (it was pretty far out in the boonies back in the day) but I took exit 97 both ways and didn't see anything that looked probable. There's certainly a lot of new construction in the area, and I suspect the building must have been torn down long ago. Can anyone confirm or refute that? The only possible place I saw was Little Pigs barbecue which looked to be the right vintage, but I always imagined The Whale's Tail as a bigger building.

UPDATE 27 May 2010: Added shots of Little Pigs which turns out to be the old Whale's Tail building.

UPDATE 15 February 2012: The Italian restaurant was Rubino's Italian Restaurant and I have added it to the post title along with the full Broad River Road street address.

I continue to have a bit of a fascination with Intersection Center. The whole property has been up for sale several years now, but (rather unsurprisingly) it has yet to sell. Fairly recently, the owner (I assume) went as far as to blank out the "Intersection Center" sign on the Broad River Road entrance to the complex, though it is still up on the Dutch Square side.

Despite the rapidly increasing decrepitude of all the buildings in the area, a few stores (or storefronts anyway, I think one may be some sort of church) do hold on. All Breed Dog Grooming Shop is not one of those. I do know it was open as recently as 1998, so I've simply listed the closing date as 2000s.

We used to get our dogs sheared evey summer, but we never had one groomed. It sounds like kind of a poodle thing to me (not that there's anything wrong with that..)

UPDATE 22 January 2020: Add map icon, update tags.

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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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I don't get onto Farrow Road that often, and in some cases it surprises me when I do since my mental geography for that corridor is pretty vague. It's another one of those streets that seems to have seen better days, with bygone restaurants like The Fountain Bleu Club that are fixtures in phonebooks year after year, but are now long gone.

Here's another form that era. The first ad is from the 1970 Southern Bell phonebook, but the second one from the 1985 edition is almost exactly the same, except for the change in phone number, and the ominous reduction in the number of open days from "7" to "6".

I don't know exactly when the Farrow Road Drive Inn closed, but the building is still in service as a restaurant, now operating as The Paper Moon Cafe, and is apparently going to be annexed into Columbia proper:

This annexation is part of the City’s initiative to bring in those parcels of land that are part of another jurisdiction, but are surrounded by the City of Columbia. These are known as Donut Holes. These areas pose a number of challenges to the City that can be addressed through annexation. They can often cause inefficiencies in the delivery of services due to confusion about jurisdiction. Also, if the land is in a jurisdiction with a different approach to code enforcement, these areas can negatively impact the quality of life for adjacent City residents. Such inefficiencies and the costs to taxpayers are germane to City and County property both, which results in a greater impact to City residents since they pay City and County taxes.

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Recommend Approval. This property is commercially zoned within Richland County and is currently being utilized as a restaurant with frontage on Farrow Road. The property is contiguous to the City Limits north across I-277 with RS-3 (Single-Family Residential) zoning and east by single-family residences and offices that are zoned RS-3 and C-1 (Office and Institutional). In that the property is occupied by a restaurant which is a permitted use within the C-3 zoning classification, the C-3 zoning is appropriate at this location.

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..

OK, in case you wondered why yesterday's post about Andy's Deli on Parklane started out with such a mediocre picture -- it was like this.

I had xeroxed the restaurant section from the 1985 Southern Bell phonebook, and was deciding what to try and get pictures of. I saw Andy's Deli and a Parklane address and thought to myself "Oh, I know what that was", and went and took these pictures of Albert's Deli. I even started writing up the post that way, then happened to check the "7260 Parklane Road" address in Google Maps, and the spot that came up was way off from where I thought it should be. Then I checked the actual address of Albert's and found it was 7358, not 7260.

Thinking son-of-a-gun, I was completely wrong I rewrote the post, and found a picture I had taken for the comic store that used to be in the same strip that happened to include the current Monterrey / former Andy's off at the edge, and went with it. All the while I was also thinking, but didn't Albert's used to be something else?.

Then I remembered to look in the 1998 phonebook I actually have a copy of here at home. Albert's is *not* in that one, so I went searching for what was at 7358, and lo-and-behold, it was Andy's. So, sometime between 1985 and 1998, Andy's moved from the Monterrey site to the Albert's site, and sometime between 1998 and now, it closed.

As for Albert's itself, I stopped there a year or so ago. I think I was going to or coming from the old Sears Repair Center on Parklane. I have to say it did not knock me over. The food was OK, but as I recall, there were no booths, and you had to take your cup back to the counter for refills, so it would never be a hangout of mine.

UPDATE 14 February 2020: Update tags, add map icon.

(oops! photo screw-up -- I'll get a better one in an update!)

As promised, better picture:

I don't actually know why Parklane Road exists, or conversely why Decker Boulevard exists. I can only guess that once-upon-a-time, before all the roadwork on Trenholm and Two Notch in Dentsville, these two roads did not dovetail together as they do now and really were two roads instead of one road with two names. Anyway, like its sibling Decker, Parklane has over the years "failed to thrive". Considering that it is a corridor between two Interstates, and feeds Columbia Mall, it's hard to say why exactly, but it's not been prime retail or restaurant territory.

I had totally forgoten than this Monterrey next to the old comic store and Sounds Familiar had been an Andy's Deli back in the 1980s. The ad is from the 1985 Southern Bell phonebook. I'm not sure when Andy's moved out (keeping the Lum's Hotdogs location on Greene Street), but it seems like Monterrey has been there forever now.

UPDATE 20 April 2010: Added "better" picture. Better in that the right storefront is centered. Unfortunately the sun went away though..

When a "massage salon" is open until 3AM, one suspects that the massages offered are very thorough. Certainly the late 70s (this ad is from the 1977 Southern Bell phonebook) seem to have been sort of a peak for such. Since then, this building on the south side or Rosewood just west of Pizza Man (and which was pretty clearly originally built as a home) has been a number of things. In particular I recall a record store, which a 1998 zoning board meeting characterizes as selling mostly religious CDs, and at present (though currently it is for sale at $325,000) it houses a recording studio which seems to have a number of telephone sidelines, so -- to reuse a bad joke, you can still reach out and touch someone.

Swensen's was a fairly popular restaurant chain in the 1980s. I'm not sure I ever went to the Columbia location (now The Hunter Gatherer) at the corner of Main & College Streets, but almost anywhere we went on a trip, there would be a Swensen's. I know for sure there was one on The Market in Charleston (now an Applebee's, I think) , and we ran into them on class trips to DC and Florida as well. The ad above from the 1985 Southern Bell phonebook has the logo I recall.

Swensen's started in San Francisco as an ice cream stand, but by the time it franchaised and locations hit the Southeast, they were casual dining restaurants (with ice cream, of course) and I think I had burgers there more often than anything frosty. Their fries were a bit unusual in that rather than being longer than they were wide, they were sort of square and waffle-hatched.

According to Wikipedia during the 1990s, the chain shrunk from 400 stores to about 200, and when it started to expand again, it was mostly overseas. I think the Columbia store closed during that wave of shrinkage. The current tenant in the building, The Hunter Gatherer brewpub has left the interior in a rather rough (if interesting) form. I suspect it was somewhat less distinctive as a Swensen's but I could be wrong. I would be interested if anyone can recall whether Swensen's had the main-floor and catwalk layout used by THG.

UPDATE 16 April 2010: Added Campus Club South and TW Muldoons to the post title and identified what year the ad is from. Added The Quarter Moon to title.

UPDATE 16 October 2023: Here is a story on the history of Swensen's. Apparently the orignal store is still around after the franchaise operation collapsed.

Also adding map icon and updating tags.