Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

I don't remember what the name of this place was, and I don't think even the building remains now, or at least where I recall it as being is a car lot with a pre-fab looking HQ.

Anyway, there is an odd little triangular lot where Augusta Road (US-1) and SC-12 come together. The join of the two highways makes the point of the lot, and Hook Avenue makes the base. I recall that for years when I was driving out US-1 towards I-26, I would see this little building with a sign that said (more or less) "Hardware & Groceries". Finally one day I thought to myself, That's rather odd, isn't it? and decided to stop.

It was exactly what the sign promised, groceries on one side of the store, and hardware on the other. I didn't need anything, but I was the only customer in the store, and I felt like I ought to buy something rather than either letting them think I a) was an idiot, or b) had stopped in just to gawk, so I looked around and picked up a package of spaghetti noodles like I had meant to do that.

My guess is that the place started when the area was "the boonies" and had just carried on as the surroundings developed. As I said, when I went in, I was the only customer so business even then can't have been good, and with the coming of Kroger, Bi-Lo, Wal-Mart & Lowes, both the grocery side and the hardware side would have taken a fatal hit. I'm not sure when the place closed, but I don't think it made it into the new millennium.

Anyone know what this place was called?

UPDATE 18 October 2009: OK, based on the comments, I was able to identify this from the 1997 phonebook as "Sharpe's Hardware & Grocery Inc" and get the street address. I have updated the post title to reflect that and that the closing date was later than I thought.

Sometime recently, I mentioned how odd I had always thought it was that Trenholm Plaza had (and has) two grocery stores at which point Dennis reminded me that both the original Richland Mall and Midlands Shopping Center also had two each.

With that in mind, the last time I was driving by Midlands Shopping Center (and googling suggests it is still called that, though there is no longer any signage to that effect), this building caught my eye. It is obviously the other (non-A&P) grocery building there, though it seems to be used by DSS for some sort of job training now.

In his comment, Dennis pegged this one as a Colonial/Big Star, but I'm not so sure. First of all, it's not in the list of stores on the bottom of the ad here, and second it looks more like an old Piggly Wiggly facade to me. (Which would make sense since Midlands started as a twin of Trenholm Plaza). Anyone know definitively? If so, I'll update the post title.

UPDATE 6 Oct 2009: OK, based on comments changed post title from "Grocery Store" to "Colonial Stores Grocery". Definitely not a Piggly Wiggly.

UPDATE 5 April 2012 -- Here's some pictures with a better view of the murals described in the comments:

OK, I'll admit it -- I like Fred's. Why? Well there's probably some history. There is a Fred's within easy walking distance from the house were my aunt lived in Fernandina Beach, and I sort of developed a respect for its no-nonsense "yes, we are a cheap store" attitude over the years. I was also always happy with the fact that they showed no desire to get rid of the huge live-oak in their parking lot:

With that initial positive impression, I was glad when Fred's started moving into the SC market, and in general I would rather shop there than other bottom tier stores like Dollar General or Family Dollar. I first saw them here when I was living in Aiken, and they opened a store on Whiskey Road. I remember buying a padlock and some other sundries there, and I'm pretty sure I've gotten motor oil at the Decker store.

I didn't even realize there was a Cedar Terrace store for quite a while (it's not very visible from Garners Ferry) and never ended up shopping there. I'm not sure how long it was there, but it certainly hasn't been very many years.

I don't know what happened here. I would have said that Fred's would be better able to deal with a recession than many other stores, since price becomes more important then. Perhaps they have been expanding too fast and have gotten overextended. Or perhaps people just like 'Sam' better than 'Fred' when there's only a mile between them.

(Hat Tip to commenter Gary..)

Bush River Mall was built as the twin of Decker Mall, and as far as Decker Mall has fallen, it has so far avoided Bush River Mall's fate.

Like DM, BRM was built as a long corridor with a Kroger Sav-On anchoring one end, and a Richway with the "TR7 Garage" roof anchoring the other. The central corridor was not all on one level, and as I recall it, moving from Kroger to Richway was a gradual uphill slope.

The mall also had a business mix similar to Decker Mall's, and I can recall in particular, a record store and a video arcade. One thing it had that Decker Mall did not have was movie theaters. I believe the Bush RIver Mall theaters were almost in the middle of the mall midway between Kroger and Richway. It was definitely a "plex" of some sort, I believe it was an eight-plex. I know I saw a fair number of movies there, but the one I recall best is Private Lessons in 1981 (the original one, not that Japanese version that used to come on cable all the time). I was living at USC in The Towers when my roomate and I decided we had to see a movie. He had a car, and I assured him I knew how to get to Bush River Mall, so we picked that venue. Well, I did know how to get there -- From Forest Acres! It turned out that the only way I could think of getting there from campus was the asinine route that involved going down Bull Street to Sunset Drive, taking Sunset to Broad River Road and then taking Bush River Road at Boozer. Needless to say we were 15 minutes late. Luckily, it's not a movie where the plot is paramount (or hard to figure out, come to that).

In the late 80s or early 90s, Bush River Mall, like Decker Mall, started to go downhill. When Richway went bankrupt it was taken over at Decker and Woodhill Malls first by Gold Circle and then by Target. I'm not certain, but I don't think that happened at Bush River. At any rate, both Kroger and whatever was in the Richway slot pulled out, and that didn't leave much in the center to attract trade. A couple of also-ran stores tried the Kroger building. I think there was a Ben Franklin and then maybe some sort of clothes store. The theater didn't help much either, though I'm not entirely clear why. It may have been that the new Dutch Square multiplex started before the Bush River Mall theaters went under though I can't swear to that timing.

Whatever the causes, the mall finally ticked over from troubled to dead with no businesses left. This state of affairs lasted several years, and would have been an ideal time to get pictures of the old place if I had thought of it (and it used to be a real choice whether use up $20 shoting and printing a 24-exposure roll of Kodacolor..). After a while they knocked the whole place down, and the only remnants were a "now playing" sign for the theaters at the corner of Bush River Road and the mall north access road, and some down-at-the-heels beauty and etc shops in an outparcel in the same corner.

Now, of course, Wal-Mart has moved in, and has brought more businesses with it than ever were in the mall. For a new Wal-Mart, it was a bit odd when it opened in that it was not 24 hours, something unexpected that bit me once, but that may have changed by now.

UPDATE 8 June 2010: Several commenters send this link to a really great set of pictures from the last days of the mall. Check it out!

I've always liked Cornell Arms, the apartment building on the corner of Sumter and Pendleton Streets. I'm not sure why exactly, except that it has been there my entire life (that I can recall) and that the name with the antique "Arms" designation harkens back to the era of classic movies (and, admittedly, Hee-Haw). The section underneath the residences is retail space, and the tenants have come and gone through the years. I know that for decades, my father's barbers were there, and the restaurant space now housing Tio's has in the past had both McDonald's and Lizard's Thicket.

I can only vaguely remember the pharmacy, as our main drugstore was Campbell's. It was in the space now occupied by Carolina Cafe & Catering. I think we may have gone in a time or two if we were visiting my father's office, or if we were in the area taking the bus to the fairgrounds (which we used to do both to avoid the parking crowds there and to give us kids an 'adventure'). I am pretty sure it was fairly no-nonsense from a kid's point of view, except for the soda fountain, with few of the mini-department-store pretensions of modern big-box drugstores.

I don't really have a closing date for this place, but I started at USC in 1980, and I think I would recall it if it were still open then, and I don't, so I'm saying 1970s.

As I was driving back from Hiller the other day, I noticed this rug store on Devine Street with the going-out-of-business signs up. I had never noticed it before, but I do have to say those are some nice looking rugs. Unfortunately right now, I suppose people are deciding that the threadbare ones at home can take another year or two of traffic.

I don't particularly concern myself with "timeliness" here. For one thing, I'm just one guy with a car and a camera -- there's no way I could keep up with everything closing, even if I somehow knew about it. For another thing, I may care more about some place that closed 20 years ago than some other storefront that went under yesterday.

With that said, after commenter Tom mentioned it in Have Your Say and after I saw the story in The State that today was the last day in business for Jim Moore Cadillac, I thought I might as well drive by and get some pictures.

According to The State the dealership is a casualty of GM's ongoing death-spiral restructuring. The story is a bit vague about whether the store was making a go of it otherwise, saying only that sales had been "improving".

I really don't have any mental tags for this dealership at all. We were never a Cadillac family, and the only commercials I recall were for what I presume was a related business, "Moore Hudson Olds", which all had a distinctively overmodulated announcer pretending to be live from their lot. Still it's always sad to see a landmark like this close, and Main street definitely doesn't need another vacant lot.

UPDATE 30 Nov 2010 -- Here's some more pictures taken on a brighter day:

UPDATE 19 May 2025 -- Time has not been kind to this property, and nothing else has ever moved in:

Also adding map icon and updating tags, and here is the LoopNet info.

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.

Until fairly recently (by my standards..) there were two open air markets in the Northeast area. I've written about the one on Two Notch road near Home Depot (though it burned down before that was built) here.

The other one was on Decker almost at the intersection with Percival Road and continued for some years after the other one was gone, and I'm not sure what finally did it in though it can't have helped that Decker had several major grocery stores on it.

The way I recall it is that it was very "produce" oriented, and that the fresh vegetables were out front under a sort of shed structure which is now gone. You couldn't really call it a building, and it was not air-conditioned. I believe there was a real building behind the produce area though I'm not sure it was the one currently housing the auto-tint operation. I don't think we went to this place often if at all growing up, though I do recall stopping there several times on my own to pick up Vidalia onions for sandwiches.

I think the synagogue in Arcadia lakes hosts a farmers' market now, and I believe there is an open air market farther out Two Notch towards Big Lots, but you really don't see this type of place around Columbia much anymore.

I'm not sure when this place closed, so I don't know if it took a hit in the recent economy, or went before that. The web-site mentioned in the sign is already gone. All in all, like running a restaurant, I'm afraid running a used car lot seems to be a good way to end up on this site.