Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

Well, I suppose it had to happen, but it is rather jarring to see The Pelican Inn up for sale. Built about 1830, this landmark inn has been part of the Pawleys Island landscape forever, and has been an inn or boarding house since the turn of the 20th century and has been the locus of several sightings of South Carolina's most famous ghost, The Gray Man. It is also possibly the last inn in South Carolina not to be air conditioned!

The web site is mostly zombie now, but an archived version explains some of the place's appeal:

Our goal has been to maintain the historical feel and share
the Inn with our friends. The Guest Rooms are comfortably furnished and have a Queen and, depending on the room, one or two Twin Beds. The Rooms are cooled by ceiling fans over the beds and breezes through large windows. Guests will also notice the absence of telephones, TVs, radios and other modern distractions.

They were in the news just this year for taking on a new chef, so this closing is rather surprising. I hope that when the place sells, the new owners will continue to run it as an inn, but I don't really expect that to happen.

UPDATE 14 Aug 2009: Well, note the rental plaque in this picture:

The property is now a Pawleys Island Realty Property

This beautiful Historic Inn is located in the heart of Pawleys..Rented as an entire house it's a 10 bedroom that accomodates 24 with 6 baths. Beautiful wooded property that has with stood the test of time. Oceanfront but not ocean view with the largest creek dock on the island for crabbing, fishing, kayaking. Large restaurant style kitchen with attached dining area, Cable TV, washer and 2 dryer, Ceiling fans, Central Heat/Air.Grill. Oceanfront Gazebo with hammock. Come create lasting memories, great for family reunions and weddings.

UPDATE 25 March 2010: Good news! Check the comments. It appears that the inn will be back in business.

UPDATE 23 April 2010: And here is the Pelican Inn's new blog.

UPDATE 21 August 2010: here is the Pelican Inn's new official web site.

Back, I believe, in 1970, Sesquicentennial State Park inaugurated, with great fanfare, a concrete ampitheater. My memory says that it was inspired by The Tricentennial. At this remove, I can't recall why anyone thought this boondoggle made sense, but at the time it was a fairly big deal, and I understod everybody in the arts community to expect great things from it. (Inasmuch as a 9 year old understood what the "arts community" expected!)

The first production I saw there was The Liberty Tree. I believe this was part of the Tricentennial celebration, and was a play set in Revolutionary Times, full of patriotic themes. I remember it had a very catchy theme song where the refrain was "Dee dah dah -- dah dah, The Liberty Tree, The Liberty Tree, something something..", but I don't think the play itself was a musical. At any rate, it was great fun for us kids, and one of the few live plays we saw growing up (the others [aside from below] were The Roar of Greasepaint, The Smell of the Crowd, and an imfamous USC production of Huckleberry Finn which my mother ended up paying my sister to leave). It was fun to drive out to Sesqui, which we never had done at night, and to run around the asiles.

The next production we saw there was a production of Gypsy: A Musical Fable with local radio personality Gene McKay cast as the act's manager (Herbie?). In retrospect, I'm a bit surprised that our parents took us to a show (partly) about strippers, but of course there was no actual stripping involved, and they probably figured that most of that would go over our heads, as indeed it did, and besides, I had figured out how to make a flashlight by taping two D batteries to a 12-inch ruler, wrapping a wire around a flashlight bulb and then touching the wire to one end of the batteries and the bulb to the other. Naturally I insisted on bringing this to the show and spent most of my time fooling with it (I hope my parents made me go back into the building portion of the amphitheater!).

After that the ampitheater fell into disuse. I can speculate as to why, and I would advance several guesses. First and foremost would be the fact that it is located in South Carolina. I don't mean anything cultural by that, rather that the climate is not really ideal. In the summer, the days are blazing hot, and nobody wants to sit in a concrete oven. The nights are better, but the location in a wooded state park guarantees plenty of bugs. Spring and Fall are better, of course, but you still face the prospect of rain-outs and daytime shows are still uncomfortable. Second, Columbia was (and still is though to a lesser extent) a medium sized city which already had two permanent drama companies (Town Theater & Workshop Theater) as well as various productions by USC. It's not clear to me that there was ever a drama community to support productions out in the boonies (as Sesqui certainly was at the time). Also, I expect that the location of the ampitheater inside a State Park probably would raise problems regarding anything of an avant-garde nature, or involving the sales of alcohol.

The final production I saw there was probably around 1976 or 1977 by which time, the ampitheater was definitely out of regular service. I don't recall the name of the show, but it was a British farce of some sort, put on by a travelling British troupe and essentially our whole high school was bussed over to Sesqui to see it. I think they got the by now defunct venue for free or a nominal fee since it was "educational". (If you make students go, then it's "Educational" by definition, right?) The only details of the show that I can recall, were that you had to listen very hard to hear the speakers, and to interpret their accents, and that a lot of the action seemed to revolve around making "bubble & squeak", apparently some sort of English "delicacy". This would have been in the spring, around May, and in the early afternoon. The place was blazingly hot. I had recently read a book on science projects which included a chapter on building a solar oven, and I remember thinking that the wall of white concrete seats surrounding the stage floor (where we were all clustered) looked a lot like the tinfoil "solar wings" which reflected and focused the sun onto the oven in the book. It certainly felt like that anyway!

Sesqui is not one of my regular hangouts, but I've been there dozens of times since the 1970s, and idly wondered whatever happened to the amphitheater. On my most recent visit there, I decided to look for it. I remembered that it was off to the left as you drove in from Two Notch, but not how far down it was. In the event, I got all the way to the lake parking lot without finding it, and it didn't seem to appear on any of the park signage. I drove back out towards Two Notch and saw a disused dirt road to the right, parked and hiked in a bit before deciding that there was no way the access could have deteriorated that badly since the 70s and it was too far off the road anyway, so I drove back down to the lake one more time.

Hmm. That building behind the (still!) never finished colonial era house looked oddly curved -- Could it be? There were still no signs, but I parked and walked on up. There was a little building in front that could plausibly have been a box-office, and the big building was oddly curved. I walked around to both ends of the building, but there was fencing keeping me from getting behind it, or even seeing what was behind it. OK, there was a little access road to the side signed Training Cener, so I walked down that. The whole place was fenced in, and the path didn't go all the way behind it, but siddenly I could see -- the bank of concrete seats! This was the ampitheater! I took some pictures and figured that was probably that, but then decided to walk back up to the building again, and see if I could see anything through the doors.

I couldn't; the glass was too dark, but then on a whim, I turned the handle, and the door was unlocked. Now, normally when I take pictures of abandoned buildings here, I don't make any attempt to go inside. There may be alarms and it's certainly trespassing. Given the total lack of signs here, I'm pretty sure the ampitheater building is not considered an "open to the public" part of the park, but since it's a State Park, I figured I was part owner, and I went in.

As it turned out, there was nobody inside. It appears to me that the theater is now a training "retreat" for State Park employees with sleeping quarters and a nice kitchen in the old concession stand. The back door leading down into the ampitheater was locked, so I was not able to go down into the seats, but I was able to get some reasonably good pictures through the back windows. The place looks kind of sad, as you would expect after 30 or so years of disuse.

On my way out, I took some more pictures of the "box office" and wandered over to the log cabin. I have some kind of vague recollection that it was originally meant to show colonial building techniques as part of some historical village exhibit, but that never came to fruition, and the place remains unfinished despite having been there over 20 years now.

Oh well, it wasn't economical, or practical, but it was entertaining!

Let me entertain you
Let me make you smile
Let me do a few tricks
Some old and some new tricks
I'm very versatile

UPDATE 21 June 2011: Added (at top) a picture of The Liberty Tree being performed in the ampitheater from an old Chamber of Commerce promotional book.

UPDATE 13 March 2013 -- Commenter Bo sends in this photo:

along with this information about the log cabin:

Hey Ted here is a photo of the "old Log House" at Sesqui Park. Before the lapboard siding was removed. It was a rental house near the corner of Lancaster & River Drive. Now an empty lot next to Head of Style Salon. The "tenants" were customers on my paper route That building was originally "Watson's Tile and flooring. Owned by The Honorable Albert Watson US House of Representatives.

and this youtube video:

When I was small, the book-mobile would pull up in our driveway every week, and all the neighboorhood kids would come to our house to check out books. After the book-mobile stopped making the rounds, we would usually go to the Cooper Branch Library on Trenholm Road, which was on the way to and from my mother's usual grocery and shopping runs.

Now the number of books in the Cooper Branch was quite impressive to me as a kid, but it really wasn't all that big a place, and the stock didn't turn over that rapidly. Though I enjoyed reading the same books over and over (I'm sure I read Alfred Morgan's The Boy's First Book of Radio and Electronics upwards of 50 times, with the same going for Robert Heinlein's Space Cadet and Alan Nourse's Raider's From The Rings), it was always a thrill to go downtown to find books I'd never seen before.

As you can see from the pictures above, the building that was the downtown main library is gone now, and a church is using the lot. (You can see the original building here). The way I recall it, parking was very much at a premium at the Sumter & Washington site, and a visit would usually involve a metered space. There were two public entrances to the building. If you entered the main entrance, you would be facing the main check-out desk. To your right, would be an area devoted to periodicals taking up the whole side of the first floor. To your left and behind you would be a seperate "reference room" filled with books which did not circulate. Straight to your left would be first the card catalog hive and then the stairs to the upper floors. To your left and in front of you would be the non-fiction area (though though this wasn't absolutely strict as Dewey Decimal code 808.3 did include Science Fiction anthologies).

If you came in through the second public door, you would encounter a flight of stairs which would take you directly to the children's section which was either on the second or third floors. The fact that there was unsecured street access to the children's section seems a bit odd from a 2008 perspective, but those were different times.

Again, I get a bit confused between the second and third floors, but one of them was entirely devoted to fiction. Sometime in the 1970s, the library decided on a very important (to me) innovation: they would organize the fiction section by genres. This meant that romance, mystery and westerns were all broken out into separate sections, which I did not care about and it meant science-fiction was broken out into a separate section which I did care about, a lot. Remember that these were pre-Internet days. I was the only one I knew who read science-fiction. There was no e-mail list for science-fiction. There were no web-forums for science-fiction. As far as I know, there wasn't even a science-fiction book club in town. I knew some names: Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Andre Norton, Alan Nourse and that was it. Whereas before it wasn't practical to check every book in the fiction section on the chance that it might be SF, now I could check every book on the SF shelves: Nirvana!

When I became interested in rock music in the mid 70s, the library was also the place where I could check out (and tape to casette..) rock & pop LPs, and peruse music magazines like Billboard and Rolling Stone that I would never be able to afford myself.

Sitting in the periodical section happily turning pages, I did start to notice some of the pathologies beginning to affect the downtown library though. I think I first noticed that several guys sitting in the magazine section seemed to have fallen asleep. I didn't make the right connections at first -- my father fell asleep reading all the time, and there had certainly been classes and study sessions where I was very close myself. When I noticed the rank smell, I finally realized that these were homeless people, something I hadn't encountered before. It's a difficult problem to address at all, and the library was ill-suited to do anything. It was a public space after all. I certainly don't know what the answer was, but I do know it hurt the library. I recall friends who were reluctant to go down there, and parents reluctant to take their kids.

None of that affected the need to find someplace for all the books it took to seve a growing population and a growing library system however, and after a process that considered several alternatives, we finally ended up with the new site at 1431 Assembly Street. My memory is that the old library sat vacant for several years, then I sort of lost track of it. The first I knew that it was slated for demolition was when I drove by and there was no trace of it left.

I like the new library (and they seem to have a handle on the homless issue), but the thrill is gone. Now that I have a job, if I really want a book, I can just buy it, and with Amazon and Google, I'm never surprised by what is on the shelves (heck, I get email alerts months before a new book by a favorite author is due!). Still, there's probably some 13 year old making his first trip downtown every day and there's still 8 copies of Space Cadet on the shelves..

I did a post on University Corner and the changes there. One of the biggest changes was the passing of The Big Bird.

To be honest, I only went there a few times myself. Yes, I lived in The Towers, but I was on the University meal coupon (later meal card) system, so I always ended up eating at Russell House, Capstone or one of the other "company store" places on campus. The few times I did go, it seemed like quite an interesting place, with burgers, a cafeteria-like line with meats and vegetables, and some sort of game room in the downstairs part of the split-level building. The eponymous "Big Bird" was, of course, a Gamecock, and I doubt they got much business beyond college students.

I'm not sure exactly what happened to The Big BIrd -- businesses have always come and gone in University Corner, but it seemed like an institution. The actual address, 625 Main Street is now occupied by Moe's, but it seems to me that The Big Bird was gone for a good while before that happened.

UPDATE 3 Oct 08: Added two pictures of the Moe's currently at the old Big Bird location.

UPDATE 22 Jan 09: Added a picture of the old Big Bird sign from commenter Terry, who
writes:

The Big Bird sign has been stored at this sign shop in Hopkins for some time now. I'm not sure why they hang on to it.

UPDATE 27 December 2012: Corespondent wblood1 sends this 1980 picture of The Big Bird:

Notice also, the old 7-11 to the left of it and Stuffy's to the right.

The time came when we, as every family does eventually, needed the services of a funeral home. Obviously it is a sad and painful experience. I can only say that I was impressed by the professionalism of the Dunbar staff as they took care of details I never would have thought of.

I knew they were emphasizing their Devine Street Chapel, but I had not realized that they had actually closed the Gervais Street location until I drove by recently and saw that the main sign was no longer on the property, and that parts of it were looking a bit overgrown.

I was a bit concerned since, despite the memories associated with it, the old house with its attached carraige-house is a Columbia landmark and a bit of stateliness on a more or less characterless commercial artery. It appears though that the house is on the historic register, and will be preserved as the USC Children's Law Center:

Proposed Whaley House Purchase:

Mr. Parham reported that the Childrens Law Center was established by the USC School of Law in 1995 to serve as a training and resource center for family court workers and attorneys who participated in legal proceedings involving children. The Center taught courses at the Law School, provided Continuing Legal Education and legal research for attorneys and judges, trained guardian ad litems and state agency case workers, and performed research-based juvenile justice programs. Currently, the Center provided more than 225 training programs and professional meetings annually to more than 5,000 professionals who protected, served and represented children in family courts. The Center was currently located on the 5th floor of 1600 Hampton Street where it had no on-site training or meeting space.

For that reason, Harry Davis, Director of the Childrens Law Center, with the approval of Dean Jack Pratt and President Sorensen, was seeking approval from the Executive Committee to enter into a Contract of Sale to purchase the property located at 1527 Gervais Street as the new home for the Childrens Law Center. This property was located directly across Gervais Street from the proposed site of the new law school. It consisted of approximately 1.25 acres, and contained 2 structures: the Whaley House (8,012 square feet), and an adjacent Carriage House (5,140 square feet). There were also 70 parking spaces on the property. Mr. Parham stated that the Dunbar Funeral Home had occupied this property for many years and the property was owned by Stewart Enterprises, Inc.

and:

Mr. Whittle asked if the building was on the National Registry of Historic Places, and if so, will it require any special maintenance and upkeep and/or will it limit the usage in the future as to how the property can be used? Mr. Harry Davis, Director of the Children Law Center, responded that the building was on the historic register. The University had several discussions with the Columbia Historic Foundation and discussions with the architects and engineers. And, it was his understanding that the University would not be permitted to alter the exterior of the building without permission of the Columbia Historic Foundation. However, interior renovations could be made as the University might desire. The USC engineer had also looked at the building in a preliminary examination and stated that it appeared to be a sound structure.

I didn't try to peer and take pictures through the windows as I often do out of a feeling of respect. It did seem that lights were still on inside, and the AC unit was running. However, USC doesn't seem to have been in any hurry to make the actual Law Center move, and the lack of maintainence and painting is quite visible on some of the woodwork as well as the lawn being unmown in some areas. I hope they step up to the plate soon.

UPDATE 29 September 2012 -- As mentioned by commenter Matt, some sort of extensive work is being done on the place now:

UPDATE 19 October 2012 -- Apparently the place is being painted yellow. This seems to be a very gradual process where first a section is repaired and made ship-shape and then is painted:

UPDATE 21 June 2022 -- I'm not sure what is going on, but the place is partially boarded up with work apparently being done again. The real estate sign suggests the property could be a cafe:

I see LoopNet has more details:

PROPERTY HIGHLIGHTS
2,592 sf restaurant/café space for lease in historic building
1,762 sf - interior café space $21.50 NNN
830 sf – porch seating area $12.50 NNN
Owner will deliver the space as a warm vanilla shell.
Delivery date – fall 2022

Also adding map icon and updating tags.

I only went into Kress a few times. When I was small, and we went clothes shopping downtown, Kress was not on the agenda, and we didn't go there for normal dimestore type things since we had both Dodd's and Woolworth's closer. I do recall that my mother was of the opinion that they had the best candied fruit for fruit-cakes, but I think that keeping up with us kept her busy enough that she just made do with grocery-store fruit on most of the occasions she made it. (And people joke about fruit-cake, but I love a good one).

After I started driving, and perhaps while I was living on-campus, I know I stopped by just to see what it was like: stepping inside was like stepping back about 50 years in time. Aside from the fact that anyone who wanted to could sit at the lunch counter, you could imagine that their retailing concept hadn't changed since the 1940s. I wish I had eaten at that counter when I had the chance, but the timing was off, and if I were in college, I was probably broke anyway.

The building itself, or at least the Kress part of it, is rather odd in that it doesn't have a rectangular shape. There are several other storefronts on Hampton such that you would think Kress was a fairly small space, but then you go around the corner onto main, and you come across the main entrance. The Hampton Street part seems to be an architect's office now while the Main Street entrance was the old Rising High location -- something that had completely escaped me when I did a closing on that store. The Main Street facade may have once been the impressive side of the store, but with the Rising High makeover, I think the art-deco-ish sign on the Hampton Street entrance is now the best side.

I didn't go to Kress often enough to miss it, but I do miss dimestores. I know we have dollar-stores now, but it's not the same experience.

I was on campus the other day, and noticed the final passing of a landmark that's been gradually disappearing since the 1970s.

The Welsh Humanities Building is just past the Pickens Street footbridge on the way to Capstone. It was built in the early 1970s, and when it was first completed, there was a reflection pool in front of it. In that pool were vaguely birdlike abstract sculptures which bobbed up and down as water flowed over them. As a kid, it reminded me of those toy drinking birds that keep dipping into a glass of water, and I always enjoyed watching them.

The motion of the birds was the first thing to go. I don't know if the orignal artist was no longer available to keep them up, but at some point, they apparently broke, and facilities people turned off the water running over them. After the birds sat motionless for a number of years, they were finally totally removed from the pool. The pool itself continued to be maintained at least into the 80s if memory serves.

That changed when the pool was permanently drained, and chairs and tables for students using the mini restaurant on the ground floor of the Welsh building were put in. This continued for a while, then the old pool itself was filled in level to the rest of the surrounding plaza.

Then finally since the last time I was in the area, probably 2003, a whole new building has been built on the plaza, including most of what was the pool. The new building appears to be a wi-fi coffee bar combined with a "light meals" type of lunch counter. On the whole I think I'd prefer the birds.

The first time I can remember going to the train station was when I was quite small. My father knew one of the Seaboard engineers, and arranged for us to see his engine one night while he was taking a train through town. Altough I was fascinated with big machinery at the time, I really can't remmber much about it, other than the fact the engineer told us how we could leave pennies on the track which would be flattened as he took the train out of the station. And although I suppose train traffic had been long on the wane even then, I also recall how active and noisy the place seemed to be, with idling engines and people bustling back and forth.

After that, we went down to the station about once a year, when my Aunt would take either the Silver Star or Silver Meteor from Jacksonville to Columbia. Often, this meant that she would arrive late at night, and I can remember that our ritual for going to pick her up would include a stop at the Krispy Kreme on Taylor Street (near the Big-T) to get hot doughnuts to eat while we sat and waited for the train.

I only took a train from that station once. When I was in elementary school, my mother arranged a "train party" for one of my birthdays (I suppose I was 7 or 8). Parents brought my classmates down to the station to catch the train to Camden. My mother rode with us on the train, and when we got to Camden, we were met by my father and some of the other parents who had driven over while we were en-route. We had a picnic with cake in a Camden park, then my father and the other parents drove us all back to Columbia. I don't recall much about the station itself on that trip except the for some 2nd-grade reason, a friend and I got fascinated by a stamp machine in the place and bummed some change to see it operate. In the event, it only dispensed half a stamp, which we thought was very noteworthy. (The train ride itself was noteworthy because the passenger car had a water cooler rather than a fountain, and it had neat conical paper cups).

If memory serves, the Seaboard Diner was also originally located at the station. After the station closed, it relocated down Gervais several blocks towards the river, and was finally torn down at some point during the vistafication of the whole area. I suppose that process is still not totally complete, as you have a bit of the old

left in with the new

I don't know if there is a word for the style of the building other than "train station", but it's a style that just screams train station even when you see it in small towns where the tracks have long since been pulled up. I think the current tenant, The Blue Marlin seafood restaurant has been in the main part of the station more or less since it closed. I believe the mix on the other side of Gervais has been a bit more volatile. My memory is not clear exactly clear on how the station originally worked. I guess that when a train was long enough, it was parked across Gervais during loading and unloading.

After 9/11, I got tired of how awful flying had become, and decided that the next time I had to go to DC, I would take the train. Of course I had to use the new station by then, but it was a nice experience. Riding the train is amazingly civilized. You can get up and stretch whenever you want to, or get a snack, and at mealtimes they serve real food in the dining car. I can see why my Aunt elected to take the train from Florida, especially before the Interstates were done. It is also, however, amazingly slow, and I can't see it ever catching on again. I was amused a few years back by the wrangle between the state government and I believe Wacamaw county about who was on the hook to fix the train drawbridge over the Inland Waterway at US-501. I think the county claimed that they had a "treaty" with the state dating back 50 years that said the state was responsible, and the state finally said OK, this time, but never again. That's been over ten years ago now, and there still hasn't been a train over that bridge and onto the Wacamaw Neck, and I fully expect that it is just as likely that one will pull up in front of The Blue Marlin first.

"All Aboard!"

Does the phone number 252-6341 mean anything to you?

If you were here when the whole state's area code was 803, it probably does. Certainly there were many times I dialed it to set my wind-up watch to the dulcet tones of Standard Federal Savings & Loan's time of day service. That was a time when you couldn't turn to CNN and get the time off the bottom-scroll, or get it to within a second over the Internet. Around here, it was pretty much wait for the NBC news-tone at the top of the hour on WIS or call Standard.

I don't know much about the early history of Standard. Apparently it was founded in the aftermath of the Panic of 1907 and weathered WW-I, The Great Depression, WW-II and the 70s. Up through the 50s and probably into the early 60s, it was known as Standard Building & Loan. You can see from my first passbook here that in October of 1962, they had just put a paste-on label reading Standard Savings and Loan Association over whatever had been printed there before. My guess is that they had just switched from Building & Loan given that the inside of the passbook and the coin-banks their kid members got still bore the B&L verbiage:

The passbook cover notes the association's two locations, Washington Street & Trenholm Plaza. The Trenholm location had to be pretty new at the time, given that the area was a golf course into the mid 50s, at least.

In that era, the way savings & loans worked was that you would bring your passbook with you to the bank (OK, technically it wasn't a bank..) whenever you made a transaction, and your passbook would be run into a printing machine (similar to the way checks are still sometimes handled at supermarkets) which would print the day's transactions on seperate lines. (I'm not sure how long it had been since the teller's actually wrote in the passbook, but there still seemed to be a lot of hand-inking involved.) If you didn't have any actual transaction, the bank could still compute your interest (dividends) and enter that for you.

On 12 October 1962, I had $396.36 in my passbook -- very likely the first money I had ever had in my own name, though as I was probably more concerned with learning to walk, I doubt I really thought on it much. I did enjoy later visits as the Trenholm branch had a magical coin machine into which the teller would dump all your coins and it would sort them out and give you a total after much pinging and whirring.

By the time 1973 rolled around and I got my second passbook, you could see that the intervening decade had been good to Standard:

With five locations in Columbia and new branches in Newberry, Orangeburg, Sumter, Mount Pleasant, Charleston and Myrtle Beach, they were obviously an institution on the move.

This was even reflected in the passbook itself, which had moved from being strictly utilitarian to a design with some panache, embossing and even gold-leaf for the text.

You could see the effects of inflation too in that the FSLIC guarantee had been raised from $10,000 per account to $20,000:

At some point in the 1980s, Standard started offering checking accounts as well as passbook accounts, and that's were I got my first checks. They were also fairly early into the ATM market, and though they never had many, the Trenholm location was convienient while I was living in town. (It was a walk-up, and I can distinctly remember thinking, I hope I'm never so lazy that I need to use the ATM without getting out of my car).

In 1985, I took my first real job and moved to Fayetteville NC. I kept my Standard accounts, but as there were no branches up there, mostly dealt with the (now defunct or subsumed) Southern National Bank. While I was living out of town, the S&L crisis of the 80s struck.

I know it's a complex issue, but I think it can be boiled down to the following: Gradually the state and federal governments took the position that George Bailey could go head to head with Mr. Potter -- and kindly, befuddled Uncle Billy was in charge of the new direction.

Standard was far from the only solid-seeming institution to dig its own grave at the time, but it was still a shock to me. I'm sure the taxpayers, en-masse, took it in the shorts as usual, but the government handled it pretty well from a member perspective. There was no panic, just an orderly takeover of the bank. It went so smoothly in fact, that my father decided he wasn't going to move his money and would just keep it in whatever institution ended up with the assets. At this remove, I can't remember what bank that was. It may have been NBSC. They certainly have the location at Trenholm Plaza which used to be occupied by the Standard Branch (which was a much smaller building, and was torn down when the current NBSC was built).

The downtown building is still there (it was obviously remodeled or replaced after 1908 if that was the original location), with its distinctive landmark clock beside it. My memory is that when Standard was at its peak, the building had one wall which was a waterfall -- that now seems to be gone. I have no idea what happened to the other branches either in or out of town.

The 2 August 1991 date for the closing comes from an online lawsuit which references the RTC takeover.

And that little coin-bank? It still has some change in it.

The Time At The Tone Will Be: Too Late

UPDATE 23 March 2010 -- Here are two pictures of the old Trenholm Plaza branch. They were taken inside another Trenholm Plaza store where Standard just happened to be in the background through the window, so the quality is not high:

UPDATE 21 June 2011 -- Here is an older picture of the Trenholm Plaza branch from a Chamber of Commerce promotional book:

WELCOME Visitors from The Sun News (myrtlebeachonline.com)!

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Technically speaking, Waccamaw Pottery was only one store at this landmark dead mall, but the way I recall it, the name was casually used for the whole complex which was centered around it. Back in the 70s and 80s, the outlet mall was a real retail powerhouse on the Grand Strand, and this despite not having a single store that I as a teen wanted to go to. In fact, as I remember it, the place was notorious amongst my whole extended family as a somewhere "grown-ups" liked to go for hours and which we couldn't stand. I remember being in the car with several cousins sometime after my sister had started to drive. As we headed up US-17 towards Myrtle Beach, she suddenly hunched over, gripped the wheel tightly, put on a maniacal expression and announced "This car is going to Waccamaw Pottery and there's nothing you can do about it!"

I can honestly say I don't ever recall buying a single thing here. In fact, I can only recall ever seeing one thing that was even interesting there: In the 70s Playboy printed up a book version of some of their Bo Derek pictorials in advance of the movie "10", and one ended up on a discount table at one of the Waccamaw stores. Of course I couldn't buy it, but it certainly beat browsing festive ice-cube trays or whatever..

Wikipedia says Waccamaw Pottery went under int 2001, which matches more or less what I remember for their Augusta store, but I thought I recalled their "home turf" mall here going under in the 90s. For some reason, outlet malls seemed to go into decline in general around then.

I hadn't really planned on taking these pictures, but I spent the night at the Holiday Inn on the Waterway, and as I got in the car on July 4th, there the mall was and I coudn't resist. Although the place in general is pretty delapidated, with salt spray thick on the windows, deteriorating signage, and some graphitti, there are still some businesses hanging on in the west-most part. In particular, a design operation, a furniture store and a taxi operation. Apparently Hardrock Park is using some rooms in the main area as well (and you can see one of the Hardrock roller-coasters in the background of some of the shots). Some places apparently went under very quickly. You'll notice all the furnishings still in the ice-cream shop, and the Haggar 18 Wheeler (and Haggar history plaques) still in the Haggar store.

The place is still under active scrutiny too. You'll notice in the last picture, there is a security truck reflected in the windows behind me. I could see the reflection, of course, so I stopped what I had been doing, which was leaning suspiciously against the doors while I took some shots through the glass, stepped back and made a show of ostentatiously taking that last picture to make clear that I had a camera and that's what I had been doing. To avoid any pointed questions, when I turned around, I acted like the security guy was just who I had been looking for, and started plying him with questions about the future of the property. He was actually a nice guy and indicated there there were definite plans though he couldn't talk about them yet. We both knew he had made his point without having to say anything about trespassing, and I had plenty of pictures anyway, so I called it a day and headed for lunch.

This car isn't heading for Waccamaw Pottery..