Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

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.

This currently vacant storefront on Parklane in between Sounds Familiar and Monterrey has been a number of things over the years including a military recruitment office, but I recall it most as a comic book store. This would have been at the height of the comics boom of the 1980s where there were actually two comic shops on this side of town: This one and one (whose name I also can't recall) over on Forest Drive near Percival.

Really neither one was my cup of tea. I was pretty much a Silver City regular (when it was in its original location). I thought the one on Forest Drive catered too much to second and third tier publishers (like AC and Pacific), and I thought this one was lacking in selection, and a bit inept.

Comic stores are notorious for being run by fans who have an in-depth knowledge of comics but little retailing sense. I never really talked comics to the staff here, so I don't know if the first part is true, but there were various things that made me think the second part was. The one I remember in particular was that, at a time when comic book shops across the country were getting busted on obscenity charges (due mainly to prosecutors and bluenoses who operated on the theory: Comic boooks are only for kids. Your comic books have nudity, therefore you must be selling comic books with nudity to kids), they had comics with nudity shelved at kid eye-level. When I pointed out that this might not be a great idea, they immediately saw my point, but it was something which had apparently never occured to them..

I'm pretty sure they never had any legal trouble, but like most of the stores in town, they ended up not surviving the comic book bust that followed the black-and-white glut and the variant cover speculation boom.

Hair Cuttery is yet another casualty of the ongoing renovations at Trenholm Plaza which will eventually result in the entire wing of the plaza in which it was located being torn down. With its departure there are only two businesses still left there, The UPS Store and Holligan's. I've heard that Hooligan's is moving to the other side of the plaza though perhaps not into the spot they wanted. I'm not sure what is to happen to The UPS Store.

I couldn't get a really good picture of the informational signs at Hair Cuttery due to the morning light, but it appears that if you had a favorite stylist, you can still find her elsewhere in town.

UPDATE 11 Sept 2010 -- It's to be 32 ° a Yogurt Bar (32 Degrees a Yogurt Bar):

UPDATE 26 Jan 2011 -- 32 ° a Yogurt Bar (32 Degrees a Yogurt Bar) is open:

Interesting story here on why frozen yogurt stores are so popular right now.

UPDATE 5 Feb 2011: Replace the picture with one with the sign illuminated.

UPDATE 29 Jan 2019: Updated post title with street address. Added tags and map link.

Now I may be misremembering this, but I think that this vacant storefront on Sunset Drive between SC-277 and North Main Street was Wal-Mart's first attempt at a warehouse-store. Wal-Mart was not really on my radar at the time, and the details are very fuzzy in my mind, but I just recall hearing that this store required you to buy a membership and that they had huge lots of everything. Wal-Mart later refined the concept into Sam's Club, but I don't think this building was ever a Sam's Club per se. I'm not sure why though I would speculate that the location is not ideal.

Though they are apparently trying to sell it, Wal-Mart still owns the property. Occasionaly I would see Wal-Mart 18 wheelers idled there, and from the signage, the chain used (or uses) the place to sell used store fixtures. I wonder how recent the DHEC "A" rating on the door is?

UPDATE 15 March 2011: It's clear now that this was, in fact (contrary to my recollection), a Sam's Club, so I have updated the post title. Also there's some discussion of closing dates in the comments. 1998 seems likely to me.

UPDATE 20 January 2012: Finally added Beltline Drive-In to the post title.