Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

Some of my google hits give the name of this place as Casual Male XL, but the majority seem to go with Casual Male Big & Tall. Anyway, this place was on Two Notch Road in Dentsville, between the Hess station and FedEx-Kinkos. As I hate to shop for clothes, it was never really on my radar, but I noticed sometime after New Years that the storefront was vacant. I kept meaning to get a picture, but somehow never made it to the area at an opportune time, so finally when I found myself driving by one night, I decided I might as well get a shot then or forget about it.

This section of Two Notch has been iffy for several years, with the Wendy's and Shoney's buildings still vacant, and the recent departure of Floor It Now. On the other hand, the old Quincy's just got a nice new tenant, and Lowe's and Best Buy do bring a good bit of traffic to the area.

UPDATE 3 March 2012: I happened to notice that I had a fairly decent daytime picture of this place still in operation in the background of a Wendy's shot I took, so I am putting that at the top, over the original nighttime-only pic.

I don't know much about Mattress Place, in fact without Google I wouldn't even know the name of this storefront, but I would notice it from time to time driving up and down Two Notch Road near Arcadia Lakes and the old Po' Folks (though on the opposite side of the street). It never really looked like it was thriving to me, but it lasted a good number of years despite all the other mattress stores in the Two Notch corridor.

Apparently it and the Glory Church on the same lot share the 6405 street number, so I'm unsure if the other google hit I get for that was in the mattress building, or the church building, but the address was also the home of the Quick Pick Community Thrift Store. I can recall seeing that and meaning to stop sooner or later, as you can often find some really neat stuff at thrift shops (I picked up a $9 bike for my niece recently..). I suspect that Goodwill locating on Decker took a lot of their business.

When I was small, Cromer's P-Nuts used to advertise locally a good deal, and their ear catching slogan, Guaranteed Worst In Town! certainly made an impression on me though we never shopped there that much.

The first Cromer's store I was aware of was on Assembly Street at Lady Street, where this building now stands:

My mother took us there a few times on downtown shopping trips, and I recall being impressed with the wide array of merchandise that included items I never saw anywhere else. A lot of these were carnival type "prizes", and indeed the store seemed much more focused on school fair fare than on peanuts. You could rent sno-cone and cotton-candy machines, cart mounted popcorn poppers and sets of helium cylinders for floating baloons. It was a fantastic assortment of stuff for which I would never have a need but which nonetheless fascinated me.

The Assembly street store was there at least into the late 1970s. I started driving alone in 1977, and I can recall taking a classmate of mine all the way from Polo Road to Cromer's on Assembly so we could buy some sno-cone cups for a science project. As I recall, the idea was to cut the tips off of them at different distances from the tops, giving a selection of different sized holes in the bottoms. We were then going to time how fast it took to drain a full cup in each case and relate that to some formula or other. Honestly, it was mostly an excuse to be away from school on a nice spring day (with permission) as much as anything else. My guess is that would have been 1978. Shortly after that, the downtown store burned down.

The downtown store wasn't the only Cromer's in town however. They also had a store inside of Dutch Square. It's hard to say exactly since the interior of Dutch Square has been remodelled since then, but I think the Cromer's was more or less in the spot now occupied by Trendz.

The mall store was smaller than downtown, but it had something downtown didn't have: Monkeys!

That's right, the entire back of the store was a glassed-in monkey-habitat, and there were always several monkeys there swinging around or doing things less salutory. I don't know exactly what the reasoning was -- The store didn't sell monkeys. It was purely a publicity gimmick, and as such I suppose it worked. Certainly it got kids who otherwise had no intention of buying anything into the store, and I would guess that once in, a certain number of them were going to spot something that caught their fancy.

I'm pretty hazy on when the Dutch Square store closed, and whether it was before or after the downtown store burned down, but I'm pretty sure it did not make it into the 80s.

In the same general time frame, Cromer's branched out to the Grand Strand, and opened a large store on US 17 just below Myrtle Beach in the general area of the Air Base (above Kroger and below what is now the Flea Market/Food Lion plaza).

I went in several times, and what I remember most is the "mongoose". It "lived" in a hollow stump-like construction with a trap-door lid over the top, and was fronted by a sign describing the mongoose with an emphasis on its speed and visciousness. The text ended with an invitation to view the magnificent creature by carefully raising the trap-door. By this point, nobody (other than a very small kid) would think there was an actual mongoose in there, but you were curious and you raised the trap. At which point there was some sort of recorded roar, and a spring-loaded beast would jump at you, like one of those snakes in the nut can, but worse. It never failed to get a few people to gasp, and for the rest of the store to wait in anticipation of the next person to fall for it.

I don't think the Myrtle Beach store made it into the 90s, and the place is now some sort of Harley Davidson shop.

In the meantime, Cromer's in Columbia regrouped, and opened a store on a small side street of Bluff Road near the Farmers' Market. I'm not sure when it opened, but it was there as late as 2005 as I finally needed one of those helium cylinders for baloons. At that point, it seemed to me that, given the non-foot-traffic location, Cromer's was focusing even more on event supplies than before, and that straight retail customers were not the norm.

Sometime between 2005 and now, Cromers returned to downtown. I suppose you could debate that, as it's not in the old downtown "shopping district", but I would say 1700 Huger Street (the corner of Huger & Blanding) counts. The new location shares a building with Cogdil Carpets.

Along with the new building, they now have a web site, but since I've never been in, I can't tell you if they have a monkey or a mongoose.

UPDATE 1 Aug 2009: This link has a picture of the Assembly street store burning down. It was taken by Robert Busbee of the Columbia Firefighters Association. The date given for the fire is 8 December 1993. A number of other historic fires are pictured on the Firefighters website. (Hat tip to commenter Brian).

UPDATE 21 April 2013 -- Commenter Melanie sends in this picture of the Dutch Square location *with monkeys*!

UPDATE 26 March 2018 -- The Huger Street location has now moved to North Main, see here

Celebrations Columbia Incorporated was a party supply rental store. I think they did a lot of weddings, at least I recall the one time I stopped in there, there were outdoor wedding, um, trellises. That day I was actually looking for propane space heaters on poles such as you see on restaurant patios when its chilly but they still want to let people sit outside. They turned out not to have any, and I never found occasion to go back. (A place on Two Notch did have the heaters, but they wouldn't deliver, so I ended up hoping for a warm day, which worked out OK).

I noticed in the middle of last year that they were either closing shop, and as of yet nothing else has replaced them in the building.

UPDATE 3 Feb 09: Commenter Steve says they just relocated, not closed. I have adjusted the post title to reflect that.

Here's another casualty of the recession, or at least that's my guess. Floor It Now has been, I think in this strip mall at the corner of Two Notch Road and O'Neil Court for at least several years. (It's hard to say for sure since I've never been in the market for flooring).

Unless people are actually falling through it, replacing a floor is pretty much an aesthetic deciscion, and right now, I'll bet that floor with all the scuff marks and old paint splatters doesn't really look that bad.

UPDATE 13 June 2009: It's now a Kim's Enterprises Beauty Supply

Until I recently had cause to note it, I never realized just how many mattress stores there are in Columbia. Two Notch Road in particular seems infested with them. This one however was on Beltline across from Richland Mall in a little strip with a Moe's a vitamin shop and some sort of hair salon. I usually hit that Moe's twice a week, but it was a while before I noticed the mattress place was gone.

I'm not sure what happened, but I'd hazard a guess that in the current economic climate, people reckon they can put up with that lumpy old mattress another year. For that matter, the storefront seems rather small to allow much of a mattress selection to be displayed.

UPDATE 30 April 2009:

It's now a nail spa:

This is not the fancy Piggly Wiggly that was once at the top of the hill on Saint Andrews Road, but a later store. It was a typical Pig of its time, which was somewhat before the chain's current upscale push with stores like Forest Drive and Litchfield Beach. As I recall, I only stopped here once, and found nothing in particular to like or dislike. The plaza where it was located is below the Bush River Road / Saint Andrews Road intersection, near the industrial plant and Seven Oaks Park. It was the anchor store, and the whole strip has been hurting since it closed. I'm not entirely sure why that happened, but I think it may have been leap-frogged by the upscale new Bi-Lo which opened a few blocks down the road. The property was vacant for a while after the Pig pulled out, but is now some sort of fitness center.

UPDATE 2 Feb 2011: Added store number (102) and full street address to post title.

UPDATE 9 March 2011: Added specific closing date based on comment by commenter Andrew

UPDATE-2 9 March 2011: Oops! There were two Pigs on Saint Andrews road, and I got the wrong date and address. (Which also means it was not store #102..) -- Fixed.

UPDATE-3 9 March 2011: OK, the store number moved here from the other Saint Andrews store, so it was store # 102, just not the first location for store #102.

UPDATE 20 May 2021: Adding map icon and updating tags.

I wrote about the closing of Capitol Newsstand on Main Street. That was always the flagship and the final store to go, but at one time Capitol had three other branches that I know of. There was another one downtown on the south side of one of the streets parallelling Taylor Street, there was one in Dentsville on O'Neil Court, and this one, now Aladdin on Saint Andrews Road. I may have the order wrong, but I think this one closed after the second downtown store and before O'Neil Court.

I didn't get to Saint Andrews Road that often, but on my few visits to this store, I got the impression that the selection of magazines was smaller, even discounting the foreign language ones the Main Street location had, and that the timely appearance of new paperbacks was less reliable. That could just be an artifact of my irregular observations though. I'm not sure why the store closed, certainly parking and panhandling were not the issues they were on Main Street. I suspect however, that with the opening of Books-A-Million and Barnes & Noble on Harbison Boulevard, the market this store served dropped markedly.

UPDATE 21 November 2020: Added full street address to post title and put the name Saint Andrews Newsstand in parentheses as it seems to have been the name used on the plaza marquee. I changed the closing date from "1990s" to "Late 1990s" as I found a listing in the 1998 phonebook. Also updated tags and added a map icon.

It's hard to remember at this remove how revolutionary Apple's McIntosh was. As I recall, I was starting grad school when the big roll-out came. Through being in computer science, I was somewhat aware of Xerox's PARC work, and of Apple's Lisa which ripped off built on Xerox's concepts, but I had never actually seen a GUI environment, and didn't expect to any time soon either. So when there was a big Apple expo down at The Coliseum, I didn't really know what to expect, but walked down anyway.

I remember vividly that there was a booth with the original 128K Mac and an Apple guy demo-ing it. He had MacPaint up, with the, at one time ubiquitous, black-and-white stylized image of a Japanese Geisha combing her hair. I was completely blown away, but tried to be skeptical by asking the guy what good such fancy graphics were if you couldn't print them out, at which point he fired up the original ImageWriter dot-matrix printer and gave me a copy of the picture then and there. It sounds primitive now -- it is primitive now, but I had the strong feeling I was seeing the future.

Not long after that, I got to interact up-close-and-personal with one of those 128K Macs as I was assigned to port an experimental computer language interpreter to it. The code was in "C", and the first C compiler had just been released for the Mac -- it was a nightmare. This amazing computer of the future did not have a hard drive. It did not even have two floppy drives as many PCs (A: and B:) did. It had one very slow floppy drive, so the process of compiling a program was something like: Insert the program disk, double click, insert the first compiler disk, insert the second compiler disk, re-insert the program disk, re-insert the compiler disk, re-insert the second compiler disk, re-insert the program disk. You get the picture. You could easily go 45 minutes and 30 disk swaps before getting your error messages. At which point you had to start swapping in and out the editor disk. Not to mention that the compiler didn't really support standard stdio calls and that 128K was just not enough RAM to support the runtime recursion that the program wanted to do once you actually got it compiled. I never did finish that assignment.

Anyway, another feature of the Mac floppy drive was that it initially only supported very special and hard to find floppy disks. I believe they were pre-formatted, though I may be wrong about that. In order to get anywhere I had to have a couple of boxes of them (which I still have somewhere) and the only place in town I could find them at first was a store in this office complex on Two Notch behind a small pond, across from The Impulse Club and next to Hi Line Imports.

The computer store (then) was on the second floor in the central piece where you can see the wooden rails. The complex as a whole has never seemed to prosper, but never fails either. According to some signage by the road, there is still a computer store there, but the original one is long gone.

The image that rocked my world is still a classic though:

UPDATE 13 February 2023: Add full address to post title. Add map icon. Add tags.

I don't ever remember this PIggly Wiggly, now a furniture store, being in operation, but then we didn't go down South Beltline much growing up. The building has a classic 1960s look, and I'm happy to see that Kimbrell & Sons have kept the raised marquee letters along the roof-line.

This store is similar in size to the old Trenholm Park Pig which also had the roof letters back in the day. I'm not sure why the store closed, but there's a newer Pig about half a mile up South Beltline, so I'll speculate that this stand-alone operation was axed in favor of locating in what would have been at the time a new strip mall, and which is closer to the Two Notch corridor as well.