Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

This storefront on Parklane across from K-Mart, started as a Chappy's Fish & Chips, but after that, I don't believe there was ever another restaurant in it, and the place took an automotive turn, a trajectory which it is still more or less on. Given the number of car lots that have come and gone along the Two Notch Corridor over the years, and the way title-loan places pop up everywhere, I wonder if turning cars into money isn't a more stable business model than turning money into cars..

I probably should read The State more often than I do..

First -- Richland Mall is back:

Second -- Kroger at Sparkleberry Square is in trouble:

As to the first, I, for one, have always refused to call the place either "Richland Fashion Mall" or "Midtown at Forest Acres", so I'm glad to see the "classic" name back. Kahn certainly has an uphill slog ahead there though. Given that even the new Village at Sandhill has had a lot of churn and ongoing vacancies, an older, already perceived as failing (because, it is failing) mall is going to have even more trouble luring tenants. I guess the obvious thing to try, as I think Sky City has suggested, would be to try to lure Macy's from Columbia Mall to the vacant Parisian or Bonwit Teller slot. Of course that would put paid to Columbia Mall so I'd rather something else happen..

As to the second, I think that after this, this, this, this, and this, I can say that Sparkleberry Square is "troubled". Kroger cutting its hours certainly does nothing to reverse that perception. For a restaurant, it's fatal sign #1. I don't think the Kroger will close, but I'll bet they're nostalgic for the rents at Decker Mall about now.

(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..

As I was coming out of Staples the other day, I noticed that Cici's Pizza Buffet in Fashion Place, the hard-luck plaza at the corner of Decker & Trenholm Extension was closed. Frankly, I had only been vaguely aware that it was there. I kind of took Cici's off my list of places to try when a soldier in Augusta told me that the one on Washington Road was the worst pizza he'd ever had and he'd had a lot of bad pizza. Now, it could have been a purely local issue, or he could have just been wrong (after all, could it really be worse than Chuck E Cheese?), but I figured Why risk it? and have yet to darken a Cici's door.

Cici's is not the first pizza restaurant to close in Fashion Place as The Italian Oven blazed that trail years ago. The first day I noticed it, there were still some guys inside doing inventory-looking stuff, and as of today there is still a lot of equipment and pizza boxes in there.

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The Kroger Sav-On at Decker Mall was the first Kroger I ever encountered. It opened while I was in high-school, and was really different from the grocery stores I was accustomed to before it arrived.

Firstly, it was quite large. This was before Wal-Mart super centers or anything like that, and I was used to stores the size of a Colonial, Piggly Wiggly or A & P. This store was noticably larger than any of those.

Secondly, it was more diverse. Some of the largeness was due to it having a built-in pharmacy, which none of the other stores did, but a good bit of it was from selling more than food. In the beginning, the place seemed almost like a mini department store to me, where you could never be sure just what you might find. For instance, I got the very first microwave oven I ever bought from the (now also closed) Kroger at Surfside Beach which also dates from this era, and I still recall how bemused I was to have found such a thing at a grocery store.

Thirdly, it was open late. I don't believe this store was ever 24 hours like the Forest & Beltline store, but it was open a good bit later than I was used to, and the idea that I could pop out at 10pm and buy something was very enticing. (Especially as I was starting to drive and then drive at night).

For a long time, this store, and Target carried Decker Mall. Then when the mall began to decline to the point that you either parked near Kroger or near Target because there was nothing interesting in-between, they locked the doors on the mall side of the store and made everyone come in the front. Finally, when the flight from the Decker corridor to Two Notch began and strengthened, both Kroger and Target moved into new stores, Kroger's in Sparkleberry Square, Target's just slightly east of that. I have never fully understood the demographic logic of that. Yes, the area is growing, and a new store there will make money, but it's not like everybody near Decker suddenly died -- the population that was there is still there. Of course, this store doesn't really fit in with Kroger's current look (which is, I admit, quite nice) and would have needed re-working at some point anyway. (I keep expecting the Forest & Beltline store to either close or remodel..)

Interestingly, and somewhat unexpectedly, Decker Mall survived the move of both anchors and continues to live on, mainly on the strength of the DMV, I suspect, but there actually are a few other ongoing operations there as well.

UPDATE 29 March 2010: The clouds were so nice today, I couldn't resist getting and adding some better shots above.

UPDATE 11 March 2011: Updated closing date due to research by commenter Andrew.

I believe this Chinese restaurant on a Decker Mall outparcel has been there in one form or another ever since Decker Mall opened, making it much more durable than any of the stores inside the mall.

I'm not really sure when it closed. I was driving by today around noon and noticed that there were no cars in the lot, which I thought was odd, so I stopped to take a look. There is absolutely no indication that it is closed, other than the fact that it was not open. There was no "Sorry, Thanks for X Wonderful Years!" sign or anything like that, and all the fixtures still seem to be in place as well as third party items such as the gumball machines.

I'm saying "Jan 2010" then since that is recently enough to look fresh but far enough in the past that the phone being disconnected (which it is) makes sense.

This place is almost across the street from the old Jumbo Asian Buffet which is also defunct, but there is another Chinese restaurant just up the hill on Decker a bit, so the neighboorhood is not totally bereft.

UPDATE 19 Feb 2010: Added "China City" to the post title based on the comments.

UPDATE 5 June 2012 -- Somebody has been working inside this building recently after years of no activity at all:

UPDATE 12 July 2012 -- Open again!

UPDATE 14 November 2019: Updating the post status to "closed again". As I mention in the comments, I had taken new pictures and actually updated this post at one point to reflect the second closing, but lost it in a database crash. The pictures at least I should be able to dig up again if I remember to make an effort. Also updated the tags and added a map icon.

UPDATE 28 February 2020 -- Here are some pictures I found from 12 April 2015:

UPDATE 17 May 2024 -- It looks like this building may finally be about to meet the wrecking ball:

UPDATE 18 June 2024 -- Still no sign of demolition, I think they are just tearing the parking lot up for infrastructure work:

You may be familiar with WXRY FM as a new-ish non-commercial radio station in Columbia, a sort of WUSC for grownups. (And I know that at least one of their staff follows Columbia Closings: Thanks!).

What you might not know is that is not at all how WXRY started.

FM radio actually goes quite a ways back in US broadcast history, but the story is not straight-forward. In the beginning, FM was pioneered by Edwin Armstrong. He figured out a way to create radio networks using FM only links (a big deal at the time as other networks had to use expensive AT&T landline links). This brought him into conflict with David Sarnoff and his Radio Corporation of America. Showing the ever-present danger of political influence when government gets too entwined with business, Sarnoff pressured the new FCC to change the rules for FM, destroying Armstrong's network and driving him to suicide while leaving RCA's AM technology in the driver's seat. These shenanigans destroyed FM for several decades.

When FM started to make a comeback in the late 1960s, AM totally owned the pop market and FM stations felt they needed to do something different to create a market presence. Some used the higher fidelity and static-free nature of FM to broadcast classical music, others created the "album rock" concept, playing non-single cuts by popular groups that would never have otherwise been on the radio, but a large number of FM stations went the "beautiful music" route.

"Beautiful Music" (I'm not sure that was an "official" format name, but it seemed to be how these stations often described themselves) was what we would now call "muzak" (though that's actually a trademark) or "elevator music". If the names One Hundred and One Strings or Mantovani mean anything to you, then you understand the "Beautiful Music" format, and WXRY was Columbia's "Beautiful Music" station.

I think I've written before about how I came to rock music fairly late in life. My parents didn't hate rock or think that it was ruining society, they simply didn't care for it that much. We listened almost exclusively to WIS AM, which was mostly middle-of-the-road grownup pop. I was always into tinkering with radios though, and at some point I pulled an old bakelite FM-only radio off a neighboorhood trash heap. After testing the tubes at Liggett's and finding that there was a bad one, I convinced my parents to spring for a new tube. At that point the radio worked, but I found that the "off" switch built into the rheostat was broken. I never did master soldering, so I couldn't swap it out, but I could put a powerline switch in the power cord, which I did. The result was what I'm still convinced to this day was the best sounding radio I've ever heard. Sure it was mono, but somehow those transformers and tubes (and not having to support AM circuits, I suppose) gave it a really rich sound. I couldn't listen to WIS on it of course, so I poked around until I found WXRY and spend many hours listening to music that would have given other 12 year olds hives (and would give me hives now..). Eventually I took the radio to our beach house where I found another "Beautiful Music" station out of either Georgetown or Myrtle Beach and I'm sure gave my cousins hives. In the end the radio's tuning went out, though I've still got it stored away somewhere.

After I took the radio to the beach, I more or less lost track of WXRY. I do recall that in the 1970s, a guy in my scout troop knew someone who worked there and told the story about how the staff decided to get wild one day and slip John Denver's "Annie's Song" ("You fill up my senses like night in the forest..") into the lineup, and how they got phonecalls to stop playing that "hippie music".

Loopnet says the building currently at 2400 Decker was built in 1981. If that's correct, the original WXRY studio must have been torn down at some point. I don't know what happened to the station between its being "Beautiful Music" on Decker Boulevard and its current status as "The Independant Alternative" from high atop "The Historic Barringer Building" on Main Street, and whether it was on the air continuously during that whole period. I must admit I have not heard Mantovani on their current air.

UPDATE 2 March 2012: Just found out that at some point after WXRY, this building was a location of homeschooling store Educational Wonderland.

This Blockbuster Video Rental on Decker Boulevard, across from the old Decker Mall has has the going-out-of-business signs up for a few weeks now.

I stopped in about two weeks ago, and it seemed that they were continuing to do a normal rental business on some titles while selling out the rest of the store to the walls. I thought the prices were good, but not great, and picked up a couple of DVDs.

As I drove by today, I saw them carting off the sign, so as of now, Decker has lost yet another business. As with Hollywood Video, I guess Redbox, Netflix and the Internet have done a real number on their business model. Lately they have been trying to adopt the Netflix model while leveraging their store network ("Bring your DVDs back to the store for immediate credit!") but so far it doesn't seem to be working.

UPDATE 7 Jan 2010: Here is the store at night after being totally cleaned out:

UPDATE 12 Jan 2010: Added another picture.

UPDATE 30 August 2011 -- work is underway to turn this location into The Chabad/Aleph House:

UPDATE 5 October 2020: This place is now Chabad Of South Carolina though I don't have a picture yet. Also updating post tags and adding map icon.

OK, first Zorba's on Decker closed. Then the old Zorba's sign proclaimed that a new Italian sounding restaurant would be coming. That never happened.

Then a Mexican operation repainted the facade

and nothing happened for a long time.

Then (no picture) they put a paper sign up on the front door seeming to say (I don't read Spanish) that tacos were for sale, but apparently there was nobody at the building during the time this sign was up.

Then they put handmade signs on the Decker street-level "entrance"/"exit" placards saying the place was open:

At the same time they added a ramshackle looking shed to the left of the portico and posted another sign in Spanish that appears to say something about Tacos and tortiallias (Tortas?), but note again that there appears to be nobody there.

Then they took the shed down, and again nothing appears to be going on at the place (the "OPEN" roadside signs are gone too):

And all the while the whole place appears to be for sale:

THEN they put a canopy on the outside deck. Still nobody seems to be there.

Then they turn the lights on the main sign, but the building is dark at all times:

So --- your guess is as good as mine!

UPDATE 2 November 2009: Now the canopy is gone from the deck..

UPDATE 7 August 2019: Add some tags and map icon.

I don't play pool (now air-hockey is a game!), so this club has only been on the periphery of my notice over the years, but I was conscious enough of it that it caught my eye when I saw new signs up the last time I drove down Decker to I-77.

Doing a little googling I find that it has something of a tragic history, with the co-owner being fatally shot there in 2006. Google also insists that the place has been called Sue's Lounge though the Google Streetview for "Sue's Lounge" brings up the old Decker Billiard signage on the place.

The new name of the place is La Parranda which apparently means "The Big Party" in Spanish (and a song of that name was a hit for Gloria Estefan..), so I'm assuming that the ownership has switched from Korean to latin, though the graphic on the sign seems to indicate that pool and alcohol will still be available.

UPDATE 25 April 2013 -- Well it's back, sorta. I hope they didn't pay too much for those signs: