Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

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.

I don't really know anything about Gamecock Country, but I was at a karate graduation in this building recently, and thought it must have originally been something else. A bit of googling shows that the building has apparently changed hands twice in the last two years. Google also suggests that Gamecock Country was a sporting goods store.

UPDATE 6 Sep 2009: Added Smith's Hardware to post title based on the comments.

Well, this wasn't what I was expecting to find when I took a look at the old Aquarium & Pet Shop, Incorporated site. This place is on a little side street of Bush River Road, just past Fuddruckers by the Radison and the Bush River Road, I-20 Southbound interchange. I would see it out of the corner of my eye for years as I would get on the highway there, but since I don't have any pets, I didn't really pay any attention.

I did notice when the sign came down though. I would say that was probably around 2005 or so, and I kind of wondered what would go into that spot.

When I was eating at Fuddruckers last Saturday, I decided to walk up and look at the place, expecting to find an empty building. Instead, the place appears to be jam-packed with stuff, and is plainly still under at least semi-regular care by people running the pet store. In fact, given all the paraphernalia I could see from the parking lot, I wondered for a minute if I were wrong about the place being closed, but walking up to the door cleared that up. I'm not sure what the story here is, though I hope it is not a sad one.

UPDATE 5 October 2026 -- The place had deteriorated considerably from the time the pictures above were taken, and it was probably a mercy that it has now been razed:

Also adding map icon & updating tags.

I've posted pictures before of the older style, steeple-topped A&P stores. This one, on a Dutch Square outparcel was one in the "new" style A&P adopted before leaving the South Carolina market. (I'm not counting the "supercenter" type stores such as in North Myrtle Beach).

I don't believe I ever went into this store. I certainly spent plenty of time at Dutch Square as I've mentioned in a number of posts, but during most of that period I was a tween or teen, fixated on books and music, and hardly shopping for groceries at all (not to mention that Dutch Square was on the other side of town from our usual grocery destinations). I'm guessing the 1990s as the (vague) closing date for this store, but it could as easily have been the 1980s.

I think that after this store closed, the area was actually pretty grocery-less, with no stores I can think of in the same general vicinity. (Food Lion had a Bush River Road store, but it closed too).

UPDATE 12 March 2011: Updated closing date based on commenter Andrew's research.

Apparently Tiny Treasures was once in Richland Mall, then moved to the Piggly Wiggly plaza ("Forest Park Shopping Center") a few years ago. I have never been in there since it seems to be a children's clothes store, and I don't have any kids. That area of the plaza has been fairly volitile over the last few years, also losing Ten Thousand Villages and L. A. Weight Loss.

Here's another casualty of the decline of O'Neil Court. There's a lamp and lighting store by this, and that's a business where if you need an unusual shade or globe, you'll go loking for a store. For auto parts, it's pretty much the stores you notice when you drive by. That's my theory anyway for why this NAPA store has moved into a new building on Two Notch just under the Food Lion plaza near Pine Belt Road.