Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

The original location of Pier 1 Imports, or at least the first one that I recall was in the back of the Cedar Terrace shopping center on Garner's Ferry Road, in the space now occupied by a Fred's.

My mother was into "quirky", and interested in other cultures, so we often stopped at Pier 1 if we were in the area. The way I recall it, the store ran heavily to wicker, rattan, and exotic umbrella baskets. As a kid, I cared vary little for the furnishing aspects of the place, but was fascinated by the offbeat food items and cheap import toys. I remember in particular some sort of (Japanese?) candy squares that were wrapped in rice paper, and you ate them paper and all(!). We actually got some of those, but my I could only look in horrid fascination at the chocolate covered ants, which we never did get. I don't remember most of the toys, but I did get a harmonica there once, which was made in China (an actual communist country!) and seemed impossibly exotic with a colorful embossed box, and instructions printed on transparent paper in characters that weren't even in the alphabet, much less in English. I've still got the harmonica and box though the instructions seem to have vanished at some point -- I never did learn to play it..

I think Pier 1 moved to Two Notch in front of Columbia Mall after that, though for some reason we never went there. I think I read somewhere that the chain had fallen on hard times and rethought their concept. I don't believe there's one in town at all now, though I'm sure you could find chocolate covered ants somewhere.

UPDATE 19 May 2009:

OK, the consensus in the comments is that I had the Cedar Terrace location of Pier 1 wrong, and rather than being in what is now Fred's, it was in what is now Sub Station II & Steve-O's, so here's a picture of that storefront:

And as long as I'm posting a picture of it, I'll give you my Sub Station II story, even though it hasn't closed. At some point in the 80s or 90s, I went to lunch with my sister, and as she lived fairly near to Garner's Ferry at the time, we ended up in Cedar Terrace at Sub Station II. As it happened, I wasn't really in the mood for a cold sub, and I saw on their behind-the-counter menu board "Italian Sausage Sandwich with Peppers & Onions". I thought Hey! I love those at the State Fair, and I never get to have one anywhere else., so I ordered it.

I should perhaps have been apprehensive as there was no indication of a griddle anywhere, but we went to our table and chit-chatted a bit. I noticed though that the counter person seemed to be dipping something out of a pot behind the counter. A few minutes later our order was called and I found my sandwich to be two soggy boiled links placed in a bun with no condiments of any kind. Great. Well, the sausage was obviously going to be what it was, but Hey, I asked the counter person, where are my peppers & onions?

Oh, that's just what's written on the sign. We haven't had those in years

While I'm updating the post, I should also note I was wrong about there being no Pier 1s in town. There is actually one quite close to the old Garners ferry location at the Woodhill Target complex:

UPDATE 30 June 2020: Updating tags, adding map icon.

Woodhill Mall was another of Columbia's hard luck malls. There were three of them which fell on hard times more or less together: Decker Mall, Bush River Mall and Woodhill Mall. Decker and Bush River were obviously "sister" malls, with similar designs, and both anchored by a Kroger on one end and a Richway on the other.

Woodhill had a different design and store mix though it did include a Richway as well. If I recall correctly, the layout of Woodhill Mall was basically a 'T' shape. If you stood on Garners Ferry road and looked down onto the mall, the 'T' would be laid on its side rotated 90-degrees, such that the crossbar would be perpendicular to Garners Ferry, and the "leg" would extend out to the left.

The anchor store at the top (nearest to Garners Ferry) of the crossbar was Tapp's, a local stalwart which was headquartered downtown, but which also had large stores at Dutch Square and Woodhill (and a small Tapp's Twig store at Trenholm Plaza). Continuing down the crossbar, were a number of stores that I can't recall, but also a book store, and a record store.

Where the crossbar hit the leg, there was a mini food court. I'm pretty sure there was a Chik-Fil-A there, and a small sandwich & burger shop which made The State's list of best burgers in town in the late 1980s. (I want to say it was called "Jonathans", but I'm not sure). If you continued down the leg towards Richway there was a video arcade, though it was never as good as some of the others in town.

It's hard to say exactly why these things happen, but for some reason, Woodhill Mall always failed to thrive. I suppose the closing of Tapp's was a big blow, but it was clear for years that the place was going downhill -- it was never unsafe or anything like that, but stores would close and not be replaced, or be replaced by one-off local stores which had no reasonable hope of surviving.

One thing that the mall did have going for it, for some reason, was it's Santa. Apparently a good number of people considered him superior to the other mall Santa's, for reasons which escape me now, but while that's nice, it's not enough to save a mall. At some point, the managers decided to embrace whatever would bring in a few dollars, and the whole back side of the mall was converted from retail to "self storage". They also opened a major recycling center behind the mall.

In the end, the only thing the mall had going for it was the remaining anchor (Richway which converted to Gold Star which converted to Target), and that wasn't enough.

I think it was early in the 2000s when I was in town and decided to take some old magazines and papers from my father's to recycle. I drove out to Woodhill Mall and found it totally gone! I was shocked, but not on reflection surprised.

Since then, the property has been redeveloped into an two upscale strips. The Target (it came back) strip apparently called just Woodhill, and a strip at the top of the old mall parking lot (against Garners Ferry) called The Shoppes at Woodhill.

I believe at this point, only the building with Hampton Hill and the old automated post office are left from the buildings of the original mall complex.

OK, this one is very vague. Hopefully someone will recall more details than this, but at one time this lot (now housing an ATM drive-through) on "B" Avenue in Triangle City West Columbia (up the hill from Zesto) had a WWII-surplus Quonset Hut standing on it.

We only went there a couple of times that I can recall since few of my mother's shopping destinations were in the area (perhaps we had gone to The Factory Outlet on 12th Street..), but the place was some sort of surplus store with all kinds of junk. It was sort of a combination of Big Lots and The Dollar Store, but it was definitely a local, one-off, operation. I have the feeling that it may have been un-airconditioned, with noisy fans running in the rear, but I might be mixing that up with some of the used-furniture stores we used to go to. To the best of my recollection, we never bought anything there, but it was definitely an interesting experience to go through the stock.

Anybody else remember this place?

I noticed this defunct building / strip mall on Sunset Boulevard recently when I stopped to take some pictures of the old Quincy's building next door.

Of the three businesses that google suggests were here, I can only sort of recall hearing about or perhaps seeing Pizza House. At one point back in the 90s, I went on a quest for Columbia's best pizza and hit a large number of pizza restaurants, but never this one. At this remove I'm not sure why. It could be the distance, but during that time, I did try the nearby Grecian Gardens for pizza, so I doubt that was it. It could be that it was one of those places where you order at the counter rather than at your table -- I try to avoid those. Or perhaps it looked decrepit even back then.

The other two businesses I'm fairly sure I never heard of. Debbie's Plants seems like a fairly self-explanatory name, but not one that would attract me, and the medical facility seems to have either been eldercare or mental health care or perhaps both.

I see that the whole complex is for sale. It looks like it would take fairly extensive work to make it look decent again -- it wouldn't surprise me if whoever buys it just knocks everything down.

UPDATE 11 April 2010: Added 1977 Bellsouth yellow page ad.

UPDATE 18 October 2012 -- As I speculated above, the whole place was knocked down some time ago. I have a more extensive set of pictures (though taken on a much less sunny day) somewhere, but for now these from 19 February 2011 tell the story:

UPDATE 13 February 2017 -- This strip is now Salsaritas and Starbucks:

Well, I'm on the road, so posting may be erratic the next few days, but I thought this one was interesting. I think I've been off of most of the I-26 exits between Columbia and Charleston at one time or another, but I don't think I'd ever taken exit 165/Bowman until today. Actually that's probably because there isn't really anything there, at least going west, except one rather lower-tier gas station / convenience store -- and a honking big open lot across the street that was obviously a Shell / Blimpie / truck stop at one time in the recent past.

I didn't really expect to be able to find out anything about it, but Google is a strange and wonderful bird, and searching "I-26" "exit 165" Blimpie immediately pulled up the going-out-of-business auction info for the place:

Going Out of Business Auction
10:00 AM May 17, 2008
Rain or Shine

Bowman Shell - Food Mart
GOING OUT OF BUSINESS AUCTION
Selling contents of business. Property has been sold.
This sale will be a combination of restaurant equipment plus (Blimpie Sub Shop Equipment), and gas pumps, diesel pumps, walk-in coolers, canopies, signs, a pickup, and many other items.
Inspection-May 16, 2008 12:00 PM - 6:00 PM and on the Day of Sale from 8 a.m. until Sale Time

Interesting that Property has been sold, but almost a year on, there's still nothing happening with it.

This building, now a Marshall's can't really be considered as a Columbia Mall outparcel store because it predates the mall. It was definitely a grocery, and I'm pretty sure it was Winn Dixie. We went there only very rarely, since we considered the area to be something of a boondocks and a long way from our house. Of course this was a time when a "long distance" phone call was something you saved for special occasions, and the area now seems quite close to me even though I live in the same place.

I'm not sure why the place failed to thrive after Columbia Mall went up -- on the surface that seems like it would have driven more traffic, but apparently not. I'm pretty sure that Winn Dixie moved out of here before coming back to the area with the ill fated Decker store in the 1990s. After that, a number of things went in -- I think it was a party shop at one time, but Marshall's has been there for several years now.

UPDATE: Updated the date in the post title from "1970s" to "Late 1990s" since commenters recall this store being open until the Decker store opened.

I don't believe I ever shopped this store, but I think it was on Rosewood for most of my life. The building is one of the older style Pigs, much like that of the Covenant Road Pig and the Marshall Street Pig, though in this case the follow-on store has not retained the Pig's marquee letters the way Kimbrell's has.

The current tenant is Dollar Tree an "everything for a dollar store. It appears from this real estate listing that the building itself is again for sale, though Dollar Tree has a six-year lease. I notice that they are building a lot of residences on the other side of Rosewood (and a bit down the hill) -- too bad the PIg didn't hold out another few years, as that would be a new customer base (though the store is small for the current Piggly WIggly concept).

UPDATE 27 April 2009: I have updated the closing date in the post title from "2000s" to the "July 2002" date supplied by Dave in the comments.

There was a time when I would have known within days that Waldenbooks at Columbia Mall had closed. I guess it says something about the times (and me) that in the event I didn't even suspect until I started getting google hits on this blog for keywords like "waldenbooks columbia mall closed". I went by today to check it out, and it is indeed gone, though there is still a (discount) book store in that storefront.

I'm pretty sure Waldenbooks was one of the original stores in the mall when it opened, and one of the last of those (I believe only Sears is left now, though if you count Macy's through its purchase of Rich's there would be two).

Books were actually pretty well represented in the initial mall. There was Walden's, Zondervan's Christian Books, B. Dalton Books, Rich's had a reasonably sized book department and I think Belk's had a smaller one for a while. While I would often check Rich's for interesting closeouts, Walden's and B. Dalton's were my main hangouts. In those days, you never knew when new books would be out so I would generally stop by at least once a week and make a run through the SF and humor sections. Of course once I moved out of town, I stopped by less often, and by the time I moved back, I was an Amazon junkie, and the brick and mortar shops I tended to hit were either B&N, Books-a-Million or The Happy Bookseller. The last book I can specifically recall buying from this Walden's was (South Carolinian) David Weber's Honor Among Enemies in 1996.

Waldenbooks as a chain is owned by Borders, and the parent company has been closing these smaller outlets for years. According to this Reuters story the company plans to slash its Waldenbooks locations from 300 to 50 or 60, and I guess Columbia Mall didn't make the cut.

I noticed the closings signs out yesterday for this Ritz Camera location in Sparkleberry Square by Kroger on Two Notch Road.

I've used Ritz and their predecessor Wolfe off and on over the years. In general they seem to have a friendly and knowledgeable staff with the downside being that you sometimes get behind someone with an involved consultation when you just want to drop off some film. I went by today to take some pictures of the place, and maybe get a spare battery for the closing-cam. I got there too late to shop, but I'm guessing the sale will last another week or so at least.

I was totally unaware that the chain had gone Chapter 11 in February -- This blog post has some of the details and a complete list of Ritz store closings. It appears that the store I normally use, on Beltline by Richland Mall, will not be closing. In fact, the Two Notch store seems to be the only one in Columbia on the list -- We'll see how things develop.

UPDATE 26 March 2014 -- Add tags.

Man, this is a cavernous space! My eyes tend to glide over buildings that I'm not interested in, and most of the time auto parts stores fall into that category, but it's hard to believe how many times I must have driven past that behemoth without noticing it. Apparently this place was a machine shop as well as a parts store, so I guess that explains the larger footprint. Perhaps it explains why the place closed as well. I admit I have very little idea of what exactly a machine shop does, but if it involves auto repair, wouldn't most people use parts from the factory rather than having them machined locally?

According to a really cool real estate listing that you should look at, if just for the ariel view, the place has 9600 square feet in the main space and 2690 square feet in the mezzanine. Notice the curtains hung in the mezzanine window too!

Hat tip to ChiefDanGeorge..

UPDATE 28 Sep 2010 -- It's now a church: