Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

The way I normally handle a particular address is that the first time I write about it, I try to list all the previous tenants that I know about as well as the business that is the primary subject of the post. The next times something closes there, I just write about that particular business. That means that I have written about this particularly ill-starred building on Saint Andrews Road, just up the hill east from I-26 three times before this. The first time, I was primarily interested in D's Wings, but gradually found a whole lot of places had been there before. The second time was for Baja's Southwestern Grill, and third time was for Delmonico Diner.

The latest eatery to close here is Fast Tracks BBQ & More. I am not a barbecue person, so I never attempted to stop by there, but commenter Alicia reports that they have been closed since 10 December 2010, and that they plan to re-open in another location -- I hope so. She also reports that their facebook indicates that their lease was bought out, so perhaps we can look forward to yet another restaurant here. (Of course, the "available" sign would tend to suggest nothing is certain).

It still seems to me that this location would prosper more if they could work out something with the adjacent gas station to have a back exit with access to the traffic light at Fernandina road. That would make it much easier to return to I-26 without having to make a non-light left turn across Saint Andrews.

(Hat tip to commenter Alicia)

As I've mentioned somewhere or another on this site, the last time I ate in a cafeteria was sometime in the mid 1990s when I found myself at a "Picadilly" at Regency Mall in Augusta -- I was distinctly underwhelmed. Before that, it was probably the S&S on Gervais when my Aunt was visiting town.

Growing up, however we ate fairly frequently at Richland Mall's original cafeteria, The Redwood Cafeteria and sometimes its follow-up Morrison's.

My general opinion of cafeterias was not high. As a kid it seemed to me that they could even mess up rice & gravy -- cafeteria rice was not like "real" rice at all. Instead of sticking together properly, every grain was separate and discrete. (I suppose it was parboiled or "converted" as Uncle Ben called it ["Q: What's white and runs up your legs? A: Uncle Ben's perverted rice!"]). Furthermore, they didn't have hamburgers. My parents insisted that "hamburger steak" was the same thing, but I knew it wasn't. Still going through the line was interesting, and the little butter-pats on paper never failed to fascinate.

Upon hearing that the Richland Mall S&S was to close on Sunday (30 Jan 11), I decided I would eat lunch there one day to check it out and maybe get some pictures. Arriving at my usual lunch time of 3:00, I was a bit confused. The doors were open and people were at the tables (and, yes, they were mostly older folks, just as the stereotype goes -- that's OK, I plan to be one someday, and probably sooner than I expect). The way I expected to get to the serving line however seemed to be blocked. I saw a possible second serving line, but nobody seemed to be tending it.

An enquiry finally established that they had taken down the serving line sometime before I got there, and would not fire it up again until 4:30, and that the second line was for take-out only -- which is a shame because it looked pretty good, with black-eyed peas, and other nice vegetables, rather more Southern than I remember the old cafeterias being.

So anyway, I did not get to eat at S&S before it closed (unless I get there tomorrow or Sunday, which I consider highly unlikely), but I did get some pictures later in the week, and captured several of their billboards (the one across Forest Drive from the mall is already taken by a new advertiser now).

This will be the first time Richland Mall has had no cafeteria in it, and can't bode well for the future of the mall, but then what has lately?

UPDATE 30 Jan 2011: Added the first two pictures, take just after the doors closed.

UPDATE 7 September 2012: Added picture of the Two Notch Road billboard above.

According to this link the Boyne Building was designed in 1900 by local architect James Hagood Sams. I'm sure it has been a large number of things over the years, but the one which gets mentioned here more often than anything else is The Elite Epicurean. Unfortunately, I know almost nothing about it. I believe that for the majority of the time it was open, I was living out of town, and at any rate just the name would have put me off as being "too fancy" (not to mention the iffy-ness of Main Street at night).

All that aside, I can say it was listed in the 1998 phonebook (though with no Yellow Pages ad) and here's what some of you have said:

Club Dreams would seem to be one of those short lived dance clubs commenter Dave mentions -- the night picture is from a Friday night, when one would expect a dance club to be open, so I think it is gone as well.

I never made it to The Sly Fox which is a shame, because they had "poutaine" on the menu -- something I've wanted to try ever since hearing of it. My understanding is that it is basically french-fries covered with cheese-curds and gravy. The menu on The Sly Fox's web site (already off-line) specified that it was "squeaky" cheese curds too. According to what I've heard about cheese curds, they only squeak when there are fresh, basically only on the first day after, um, curding. This makes me wonder where they could have been getting the curds, as I'm not aware of any local cheese makers, and have never seen cheese curds for sale in Columbia.

Commenter Barb reports The Sly Fox was closed as of 4 Jan. I went by a couple of times this week, and there seemed to be a crew carting stuff out of the place. As you can see, the interior is pretty bare now, and the sign on the east side is down (though the one on the west is still up). The place is pretty much right across the street from Damon's and Paul's, so there is a good bit of vacant restaurant space in the area now.

(Hat tip to commenter Barb)

UPDATE 26 Jan 2011 -- Based on the comments I have added Scott Brothers & Palmetto's. Here is the Feb 97-Feb 98 Bellsouth Yellow Pages ad for Scott Brothers:

UPDATE 27 Jan 2011 -- It turns out I had some pictures of the MacDougall's incarnation as well:

I've always thought of Huddle House as a downmarket Waffle House, which is saying something, but it almost seems like the way Hardee's and Bantam Chef used to be related -- you saw the second in places that couldn't support the first. I'm pretty sure I've been in a Huddle at one time or another, but I have absolutely no reliable memory of such an occasion right now. I am sure I was never in this one which sits at the intersection of Rosewood Drive and Kilbourne Road.

The LoopNet listing suggests that the follow-on operation, one of Columbia's ubiquitous (but not apparently very lucrative) title pawn operations, has been closed at least since mid October 2010.

UPDATE 12 April 2012 -- It's now a Marco's Pizza:

UPDATE 17 August 2023 -- Update tags, add map icon.

Things move really fast sometimes. I had first written about this little space fronting on Gervais Street just across from the Capitol and above The Whig in a closing for Holey Dough Cafe. By the time I got around to taking pictures of it, all the Holey Dough identity was gone, and the place was in full operation as a sub shop, Jumpin' Jacks Giant Jersey Subs.

The first I knew that that place was gone was when commenter Midnight Rambler mentioned that the next operation (which I had never heard of) had closed!

All I can say about the Gervais Street Deli is that a) it had wi-fi and b) It was, technically, not on Gervais Street...

(Hat tip to commenter Midnight Rambler)

I originally wrote a closing for Doc's Gumbo Grille when it moved from 1115 Assembly street to the old French Quarter Deli location on Rosewood Drive. That closing was on 31 October 2009. Commenter Barb says the new location closed 30 December 2010, meaning the new location lasted just a bit over a year. As I mentioned in my other closing, the menu at Doc's wasn't up my alley, and since this location didn't host any Swimming Pool Qs shows, I never dropped by.

I know the original Keg O' Nails lasted many years in this location, but I don't think The French Quarter lasted very long -- it may be that this is just not a viable location any longer, or it may be that the market is so different from The Vista that the Doc's concept just didn't fit here..

For now, the the Doc's web site is still up with a nice little thank you message.

(Hat tips to commenters Barb & Ben)

First let me note that although no description of Myrtle Square Mall would be complete without the famous clock, I did not take that picture. It appears in the Wikipedia entry for the mall, and has been explicitly released into the public domain.

What can I say about Myrtle Square Mall? For many years, it was the mall on the Grand Strand and the "general" shopping destination on any beach trip. To be sure, there were outlet and specialty malls like Waccamaw Pottery, but MSM was the "it" place.

As kids, of course, The Pavilion was first in our hearts and minds, but over the years we took many trips to the mall as well.

It had a different mix of retail than anything in Columbia, with anchor stores I never saw elsewhere like Peebles as well as standard stores like Sears and Eckerds. For me, the main attraction was the book store just off the clock court. I cannot now recall the name, but it was either completely independant, or part of a small chain that never opened in Columbia, and I found that it had an interesting selection of science fiction books that I didn't see elsewhere. Recall that in those days the only books you knew about were the ones you saw on the shelves -- there was no Amazon where you could search for any book in the world, or that would recommend books to you based on your previous purchases. I can particularly recall finding there a a Virgil Finlay collection I had never heard of, and had no clue existed. Finlay was an old-school SF pulp illustrator who had an amazing black & white line and stipple style that was unsurpassed (in my opinion) until Stephen Fabian came on the scene, and in retrospect I think Finlay's work has aged better than Fabian's. Anyway -- I bought the book :-)

The record store (whose name I have also forgotten) seemed to have slightly different selections than the Columbia stores as well.

Apart from the stores, obviously I have to say something about the clock. It sat above the central court, and was a marvel of conceptual design. The version pictured above is in fact one of the later versions -- the first version had 60 colored balls suspended from the ceiling in a circle with suspened numbers (similar to those pictured) at every five minute mark. The bulk of the balls were one color, with the ones at the five second intervals being another. As ever second passed, another ball would illuminate until all 60 were lit at which point they would all go dark and the next numeral would be illuminated for the current minute. Hmm, or maybe the numerals were for the hours and there were seperate balls for the minutes. At any rate, you could sit there and watch the time pass before your eyes so to speak. It was not a particularly easy clock to read -- it always seemed to take a minute to figure out just what was lit, but it was a fun clock to read.

I remember a number of interesting solo trips to the mall. The first was when I had just started to drive. My mother and I had gone to the beach to winterize the beach house, and having done that, she agreed to let me drive while she walked on the beach. Well, that's an always risky permission to give to a teenager, and I headed straight to the mall, despite it being a 25 mile drive one way. I had no particular goal other than I was, by gosh, going to drive, but I did end up getting some Trixie Belden books for my sister's birthday from Sears of all places. Needless to say my mother was not pleased at being ditched for three hours longer than she had planned to be...

Another trip to Sears years later (and near the end of the store's life) for dryer parts also yielded a trove of retro flashlights of the kind I grew up with, and which I thought were no longer being made -- I still have four or five.

I'm unsure why Burroughs & Chapin decided to deep six the mall. Certainly it was somewhat dated, but that could have been fixed by a remodel. I suppose access was an issue, but it's not like there's an Interstate in Myrtle Beach, -- the replacement mall at Coastal Grand may have slightly better traffic at US-17 bypass and US-501, but it's not a slam dunk.

At any rate, by 2005 most of the stores had made the transition, and in 2006 they started knocking Myrtle Square Mall down. The fact that B&C owned the replacement mall meant that Myrtle Square never went through the "death of the old mall as the new mall draws stores and traffic" phase. It was not in B&C's interest to eake rents out of Myrtle Square while firing up Coastal Grand.

On the other hand, they seem not to have had any Plan B for the Myrtle Square Mall site. Currently the huge tract bounded by 23rd & 27th Avenues North on the north and south sides and Kings Highway and Oak Street on the east and west sides stands vacant (as does the other large B&C tract at the old Pavilion site). It's hard to believe that two such prime tracts in the heart of Myrtle Beach have sat vacant for so long. (Well, not completely vacant -- there's still an Office Depot which must have had a long term lease, and I saw signs of homeless presence in the bushes).

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This building, on Shakespeare Road at the intersection with Humphrey Street has been a number of things over the years -- none of which stick in my mind.

Assuming the latest incarnation Carolina Famous Hotdogs and Wings started about the time this youtube video ad was uploaded (22 July 2010), then I'm afraid it didn't last long at all. In general it seems that the only things which survive on Shakespeare are industrial type operations.

When I heard about the closing of the Harbison O'Charley's, my first thought was that I hadn't remembered one was over there, and my second thought was: Why Would I Go To O'Charley's?.

In fact it's always seemed to me to be a pleasant enough place without any real "hook" to get me in. I went to the one at Columbia Mall several times, and the one in Augusta at least once, and basically recall only that they had pretty good chips & salsa and burgers.

Interestingly (or not) this one closing made me try the one on Two Notch again -- I got in there, and found that a) they didn't have the chips & salsa anymore, and b) they were out of hamburgers. I had never heard of that before!

The State says that this one shut when the company

closed 16 underperforming stores Monday.

and that

The Harbison location was the only one in South Carolina to close.

(Hat tip to commenter William)

UPDATE 17 July 2011 -- work on the building and facade for the conversion to a Buffalo Wild Wings is ongoing:

UPDATE 24 September 2011 -- They're getting close.. and have certainly changed the look of the building!

UPDATE 31 October 2011 -- As commenter Andrew has already noted, it looks like they're set to open on 7 November 2011:

UPDATE 19 August 2022: Updating tags and adding map icon.