Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

I read somewhere that as World War II drew to a close, businesses took internal bets as whether that meant "back to the Depression" or "victory boom". Montgomery Ward decided on "Depression" and adopted a cautious, defensive strategy. Sears Roebuck bet on "boom" and started a post-war expansion strategy.

I don't know this for a fact, but it seems to me that the old Sears on Harden Street must be a "boom" store. Even though Main Street was still the big shopping destination, Sears bet on suburbia and ample free parking to cater to the fact that every family in their market (the middle class) now had a car.

This store was still going strong when I was a kid, and was huge. I believe that it encompassed the entire strip mall that now stands there (with the possible exception of the Offce Depot). I guess we went there most often shopping for clothes, but since that was an activity that I purely hated, I would always wander off in the hardware and camera sections.

In fact, I got my first camera at that store. I think I still have it in a storage box from two moves ago, though I can't put my hands on it right now. It was an off-brand, cheap one, and I think I actually used my own money to get it. I remember that it used "127" film, and that I had carefully checked (I was obsessive about some things) that it would take slides that could be projected on my aunt & uncle's projector though in the event I never took a single slide on it. Come to that, I don't think I ever took a roll of color film either -- those were different days! I also got my first (well, only, come to that) enlarger there. It was a cheap plastic contraption that had a pretty crummy lens and haphazard focus, but it was a $20 way to make prints bigger than "contact" size (a 127 negative was bigger than a 35mm one but not as big as a 120 one, so contact prints were really too small -- now 616 film made nice contact prints!).

Of course for kids, the biggest thing Sears had going for it was The Wishbook. This was their Christmas toy catalog, which we would be sure to leave lying about the house opened to strategic pages all during the holiday season. The selection and prices were also good for several months into the new year, which led us to possibly the stupidest thing we ever bought.

We had some sort of club, which I believe we called the YPS club (S-P-Y backwards..) dedicated to solving the (nonexistent) mysteries of our neighborhood, and for some reason, even though the club only lasted a few weeks, never had any meetings or even any missions, we decided we must have a typewriter to take the club's (nonexistent) meeting minutes. My parents had a typewriter, but they (wisely) considered it too delicate for our hands so we searched The Wishbook minutely and found a toy typewriter which would actually type for a surprisingly good price.

Our parents looked at the picture and description and tried to talk us out of it and to explain how the machine actually worked, but we were fixated and would have none of it. In the end they threw up their hands in a "ok, but let this be a lesson for you" manner and ordered it. I was so excited when it came in, and we went down to Sears to pick it up. The excitement lasted about half the way home until I got the thing unboxed and figured out how it worked. The "keyboard" which had looked so impressive in the picture (though not to adult eyes) was actually one piece of metal with pictures of seperate keys painted on it. So to "type" you dialed a Dymo-Embosser-type head to the right letter and mashed the "keyboard" which would imprint a capital letter on your paper. I suppose you could get 1-WPM on it if you were good..

Another thing I remember in particular about that store is that they had an automatic foot-sizing machine in the shoe department. No, this was too late for the infamous X-Ray foot sizers, but it was till pretty neat. You took off your shoe, put your foot in a rectangular box, and the walls would close in on it like a James Bond death-trap until they hit your foot on all sides. I used to stick my foot in it even when I had no intention of getting shoes.

Sears missed the first wave of suburban shopping malls in Columbia (ie: Dutch Square), but decided that they were the future and became (and remained) an anchor store in the new "Columbia Mall" being built in Dentsville. When that store was ready to occupy, they closed down the Harden Street location, and for many years that new mall store was the only Sears in town. I think the old store was vacant several years then was redeveloped into the current strip (with several face-lifts and a total rebuild of Food Lion after a fire). I'm not sure if any of the original Sears building is still present -- I rather doubt it.

Sears had a good post-war. Starting more or less at parity with Montgomery Ward, it saw MW out the door as its bets paid off and theirs didn't. By that time however, it was clear that Sears had missed the next bet and had no idea how to cope with Wal-Mart or even Target. It will be interesting to see how they come out of the current recession, or if perhaps the "new" store will have to be redeveloped too.

UPDATE 21 June 2011: Added a picture (at top) of the old Sears building from a vintage Chamber of Commerce promotional book.

UPDATE 29 February 2020: Add tags, full street address, map icon. (I used the '1001 Harden' address of the current Food Lion).

As the Christmas season rolls round once more, I am put in the mind of Peaches Records & Tapes. Peaches was a record store chain whose "gimmick" was their easy-to-assemble kits of LP storage boxes. These were of wood and made to mimick retro peach shipment boxes complete with vintage appearing art. (Brian Wilson & Van Dyke Parks had an excellent album Orange Crate Art inspired by the same conceit).

Peaches had only one location in the Columbia area, a large space on the College Street side of the old Sears complex on Harden Street. The store had the not entirely positive distinction of having turnstiles, bag checks, and other theft prevention measures that were quite unusual at the time, but once you got in, it was quite nice. Although they did have a tape section (that's where the whole And Tapes thing came in), their main focus was vinyl, and they had quite an interesting selection. Possibly it was due to their Columbia location being close to USC, or simply that they had more floor space than The Record Bar or School Kids, but there seemed to be a higher possibility of finding something really interesting there than at those other shops.

They also had a large collection of "cut-outs" (new, but discontinued records) through which I loved to browse when I had the time and money (money was definitely in shorter supply than time..). I remember in particular finding an album by the German group Trio which had the killer songs "Da Da Da (I Don't Love You, You Don't Love Me)" and "Boom Boom" which as far as I could tell was available nowhere else in Columbia other than the studios of WUSC.

I mentioned up front that the Christmas season made me think of Peaches. That is almost entirely due to the fact that they were the only store in town which stocked Christmas 45s in depth. Then as now, Christmas albums started popping up everywhere, record store or no as the days turned to fall (though I think they usually waited at least until Halloween was over in those bygone days...). Christmas 45s were a bit more rare however. Of course you could find this year's Christmas songs at The Record Bar, but classic Christmas singles hardly ever. Starting in the late 1970s on cassette, I had been building a Christmas song program, adding and rearranging things a little every year as I found more of the music I wanted. Today we would call it a "mix tape". Anyway, I remember finding a number of tracks in their Christmas single collection that were impossible for me to find otherwise. The Temptations "The Night Before Christmas" for one, Elton John's "Step Into Christmas" / "Ho Ho Ho" for another and Bruce Springsteen's "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town" for a third.

As far as I can gather, Peaches made a very bad business decision in the 1980s: They believed that the CD format would not catch on. As it turned out, this was very much not the case, and by the time they saw the writing on the wall, it was too late to retool and the chain went bankrupt. (Of course, even chains that bet on the CD have been killed by downloads, so Peaches would probably be gone now in any event).

After the chain folded, their (almost completely glass-walled) store stood empty on Harden Street for years. It stayed intact for longer than you might expect, then windows started being broken, and the thing became an eyesore. Finally when the old Sears strip was revamped for at least the second time, they knocked down the whole Peaches building, and put up the current Office Depot structure. I guess they shook the tree.

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This corner building, now the site of The Pour House was the long-time location of Frank's Hotdogs, yet another of the many Columbia restaurants I was going to "get around to" and never did before it was too late.

From what I could gather in years of walking and driving past, the place was open late-nights and had a diner-like setup with a serving counter and tables around the walls. It appeared that the owner took a certain pride in the "basic" nature of his setup, and for many years, a window slogan proclaimed "No Reservations Required". Curiously, given how uncommon non-Sandy's hotdog places are, Frank's was just down the street from Lum's Hotdogs. I don't know if their years of operation overlapped at all though.

When I was growing up, comedy was something distant. You saw it on Ed Sullivan, or The Tonight Show if you got to stay up that late. There were a lot of classic comedy bits I would hear from time to time on WIS. Bill Cosby's "Noah? Build me an ark..... Right!" was a favorite as was a Tim Conway prison-warden routine and Alan Sherman's "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah". I know there were travelling comedians in the days of Vaudeville and burlesque, but all that was long gone by the 60s and the idea that you could go pay money and go see someone do comedy was kind of alien to me. That was TV stuff.

Then The Punch Line opened in Five Points in this odd little strip mall next to the old Sears building. I'm not now totally sure of it's location in the building, but I think it was in the space now occupied by PT's Caberet.

As always, I'm fuzzy on dates, but I believe The Punch Line started in the mid-80s. I'm pretty sure I was still an impecunious college or grad-student at the time, and then started working in Fayetteville, so in the event, I only ended up going to one show there. It was a total introduction to the format for me: Local guy, feature and finally headliner. I can't remember who I saw, but it was certainly the hardest I'd ever laughed (over an extended period) in my life!

I don't know what happened in the end. It seems to me that Five Points would be a natural for a comedy club, but The Punch Line folded, and the new venue The Comedy House set up shop in a distinctly non-entertainment-district, non-foot-traffic location off of St. Andrews Road (followed by a move to Decker Boulevard -- also a non-entertainment-district non-foot-traffic location). As far as I know, that's currently "it" for regular comedy venues in Columbia. Charleston seems to be a much more fertile area with The Have Nots in their own theater and regular events such as The Charleston Comedy Festival.

UPDATE 25 July 2010: OK, the old Punch Line building at 1101 Harden Street has been demolished. See the link for details.