Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

This post comes from reader Dennis. I know of the building, but that area wasn't really in our orbit growing up, and I don't think we ever stopped at Ailes':

I took these photos today. Not really a timely "Closing," just some nostalgic rambling.

This building at 3123 Beltline was Roche Brothers last summer, and is now Taste of Jamaica, but it will always be Ailes' Market to me. I lived about two blocks away from about 1967 to 1979, from ages 10 to 22, and Mr. Ailes lived right around the corner from us. My mother didn't drive, and didn't have a car even if she could have, so I was almost daily sent to Ailes' to get something or another. I didn't mind at all. It was a chance to get out of the house, and Ailes' had a wonderful candy aisle. It was understood that when I went on a errand there, some of the change would get spent on candy. We also did a lot of wash at the laundromat that was directly across Beltline; same building that is now a sad looking office center. That laundromat was dim and dirty, loud and hot (no A.C.) but only a block from the house.

Ailes' was a typical general store/gas station of the time, before giant national conglomerates put a Fast Fare or a Pantry (like the one to the left of it now) on every corner. Also before I-77 was even thought of, so a LOT of big semi-trucks rattled down Beltline day and night. Mr. Ailes alone decided what he would sell, and he had a little bit of everything. Rat traps to onions. Velveeta to plastic model kits. Spark plugs to tampons. Of interest to a kid like me, in addition to the candy, was the fireworks he had, the excellent comic book rack, the baked snacks like Little Debbie's and Mickey's and Sweet Sixteen donuts that were always fresh and delicious, not like the awful mess you often get today.

Mr. Ailes held court at the front, on the left as you came in, on a wooden bar stool behind his cash register. He had an anti-burglary shotgun prominently displayed on the wall behind him, right next to that sign about "We made a deal with the bank - they don't sell beer and we don't cash checks." There was also a board of shame displaying checks written to the store that had bounced, and of course the faded Polaroids of regular customers holding fish they had caught using his worms.

On the other side of the counter, also on wooden bar stools, were three or four men who were either unemployed or retired or had the greatest unsupervised jobs in the world, because they were always there, chain smoking and drinking beer. I guess one of them was his gas attendant. On the counter was the requisite gallon jar of homemade pickled eggs and a clipboard with a college football parlay card on it. One dollar per square. Also on the counter was this big can-opening device that pierced two perfect triangles in steel beer cans (I know -- I'm old.) The beer came out of one of three big, old, heavy coolers with solid steel lids. If you opened one and "shopped" too long you'd get yelled at to close it. In addition to popsicles and the menfolks' PBR and Old Milwaukee, they had ICE cold Coke, Pepsi, Mountain Dew (in the green glass bottle with the hillbilly moonshiner on it), Nehi, Fanta, Patio, and Crush.

Next to his seated entourage Mr. Ailes had three or four old fashioned pinball machines -- not fun games with flippers, but just a bunch of holes for the balls to fall into. If you won you got 5¢ (or was it a penny?) per point right out of the cash register. I never understood it and it was clear that they were for adults only.

Speaking of adults only, while I was in the right front corner reading comics, and MAD, and Cracked, and Sick, and later National Lampoon, (He didn't care how long I loitered in the store) I soon discovered a section of the trashiest, sleaziest black & white smut magazines imaginable, which he would yell at me not to look at, but of course many times I did anyway. Warped for life.

In the back left corner was a snack bar that had decent fries, burgers and dogs, cooked up by a nice little old man with the sweats and the shakes who was clearly a struggling alcoholic. We went there on hot summer days after swimming across the street at the Bradley Terrace Pool (Restricted -- Whites only) which was where that small nursing home is now. I remember seeing my first microwave oven at that snack bar.

If you went outside to the right there was a pretty nice two chair barbershop way in the back corner of the building (see the door in the photo?). The building next door was Diamond Xanthakis' liquor store, or a "red dot" store to us.

A Hess station was built on the other side of the store, overnight it seemed, and as you might expect it killed Ailes' gas sales and he got rid of his two pumps. Not sure what year Mr. Ailes sold the store. It struggled on for a long time as a out of date convenience store.

Thanks, Dennis -- Ted

This building, at the entrance to Trenholm Park and now apparently a hair salon called Hair Works once housed a small independant convenience store. I am nearly sure it was called Campbell's, and I think it was the place to go for kids wanting a snack coming in or out of the park. It had all the standard soft drink, pork rind and motor oil options as well as magazines you wouldn't take home to mom, but there were no gas pumps.

I am guessing that it pre-dated the nearby Covenant Road Piggly Wiggly since otherwise it's hard to see what market it served, especially since (unless I'm recalling wrongly) it wasn't open particularly late at night. I imagine that the decline of kids coming and going unescorted as childhood as we knew it disappeared didn't help, but the final blow had to have been the opening of a chain store across the street (now a BP) with all the same stuff, chain purchasing power and gas pumps.

Electrolux makes a good vacuum. Or at least they did make a good one -- I can't speak to their current models since the 35 year old one I inherited from my mother still works fine.

In fact, the only problem the basic unit ever had that I can recall is that at some point in the late 60s, I think, one of the wheels broke off. I don't recall the circumstances, but I would be surprised if I or my sister weren't involved somehow. My mother was very reluctant to try and have it fixed because she didn't want to be without her vacuum while it was shipped back to Sweden or whatever, and because she figured it would be expensive as well as time-consuming. We must have dragged that vacuum around limping on its three wheels for seven or eight years. Sometime in the 70s, I finally convinced her to take it to the shop. As I recall, once we got it there, the guy set it on the counter, went "hmm", pulled a wheel out of a bin, snapped it on and said that will be $5. We were in and out in ten minutes. I guess there's some sort of life-lesson there.

The Electrolux store was on Devine Street in the space now occupied by a wig shop. They closed sometime in the 70s and the current store is out on Broad River Road at St. Andrews. I don't know if it is the same operation or completely separate, but the one time I went in, it seemed to have a really different attitude -- I just wanted to buy some bags, and I felt like the salesman wasn't going to let me out of there without buying a new unit!

UPDATE 24 March 2011: Added full street address to post title.

I don't know much about Tickled Pink except that it is apparently a "children's botique" on Devine Street. On my way to lunch at The Mediterranean Tea Room recently, I noticed the "Closing" signs in the window. I'm not sure exactly when they plan to lock the doors, but with Christmas over, I wouldn't expect it to be long.

The Sub Cabin was an interesting little restaurant off of Sunset Boulevard in West Columbia. The place was actually on a side street about a block off the main road and was built as a log cabin. If my memory is correct, it must have been built in at least two phases, because the front half of the building faced a wall that looked exterior and had windows as if it had originally been a porch.

The atmosphere was very casual, and the menu was fairly basic with sandwiches and burgers predominating (I suspect there was chicken as well, but that never registers with me). There were a few unusual touches however. First, each table had a Heinz Malt Vinegar bottle amongst the condiments so you could vinegar-ize your fries like at the State Fair, and second, the hamburger patties were unusual. Almost invariably hamburger patties are round or square, but at The Sub Cabin they were rectangular so they would fit in sub buns. I can't think of anywhere else in Columbia that does that.

At some point in the 90s, the church which was gradually taking over the failed plaza which abuted The Sub Cabin underwent a major growth spurt and bought The Sub Cabin's lot, eventually tearing the building down. As far as I know, the owner never relocated anywhere else -- perhaps it was time to retire. Given that the place was on the opposite side of town I didn't get there that often, but it was a quirky little joint and I miss it from time-to-time.

I wrote recently how Peaches often crossed my mind at Christmas, but there was another place in town which had an even stronger holiday association for me. Probably because my mother was a gardner, I spent my share of time at Taylor's Garden Center growing up.

The buildings and yard space have been torn down, but Taylor's Garden Center occupied the pace now held by Forest Lake Fabrics, next to Frans and Forest Lake Park. Like Gaul, the place was divided into three parts. In the front, on the right, was the salesroom. This room was filled with all the paraphernalia of gardening: hoses, nozzles, sprayers, stakes, gloves, clippers, chemicals, you name it. I liked it because it was almost like a hardware store, and all the chemicals gave it a unique smell. I believe that if you had taken me in blindfolded, I still would have been able to identify where I was.

Also in front, but on the left was sort of an auxiliary, room. I think this was more seasonal, and most of the year I recall it having lawn statues, paving stones, fountains and the like.

Behind this room, and also on the left side was the greenhouse. This was where all the actual plants were, and had its own distinctive, loamy smell. You could go out there, and with the warmth, the smell, the sound of the fans running, the sounds of the plastic sheeting walls bowing in and out in the breeze and the rows of green plants, it was like stepping into some other world. Perhaps the "plant ship" from the film Silent Running. We kids liked to wander around out there while our mother was picking things out in the front room.

But here's the best thing about the place. The auxiliary room that I called seasonal? Well winter is a season, and one where a garden center isn't going to have a lot of business -- So each winter they set up a Festival of Christmas Trees there. Now they may have sold live trees, I don't recall (we always got ours at the Optimist lot), but the festival was all artificial trees, and very fancy ones. I can particularly recall trees which had a little pump system which recycled poppy-seed sized grains of "snow" from a catchment basin at the base of the tree to a nozzle at the top, providing a constant "snowfall" over the tree. And of course there were trees with all manner of fancy lights, trees that turned round and round, and even trees that made their own music.

I suppose they did sell some of them each year, but really it was more like an area attraction, to come to the Garden Center and see the trees.

I'm a little fuzzy on why the Garden Center closed. It wasn't part of any chain, so it might just have been a matter of the proprietors wanting to retire, or it could have been the rise of Wal-Mart (though the Forest Drive store was till in the future) or the superstores like Home Depot & Lowes. I think I was already living out of town when it happened. I recall reading an appreciation piece in The State, then the place closed and the building was torn down. I guess you could say they took over from the nursery that was on Trenholm Road behind the Gulf station, and now Forest Lake Gardens has kind of taken over from them. But it doesn't smell the same.

UPDATE 27 Mar 09: Finally fixed the title of this post, changing to to Taylor's Garden Center from the (incorrect) Forest Lake Garden Center.

UPDATE 1 October 2009: Finished changing all the Forest Lake Garden Center references to Taylor's Garden Center. Don't know why I didn't catch them earlier.

OK, this one makes me doubt my memories. (I'm sure more of these closings should do that..)

This is the store where I bought my sister a vacuum cleaner back in the 1980s. I can't remember what kind it was -- some sort of off-brand canister model that seemed fairly solid, I think. It lasted more than ten years for her, and if that's not Electrolux longevity, it's not bad.

The thing is that I was dead certain the place was called Intersection Vacuum Center, which made sense because it was located at Intersection Center. However, clearly at the time this place moved to Lake Murray Boulevard (where it still is), it was called Vacuum Mart. Further, there is an Intersection Vacuum Center in Columbia, but it's apparently on Two Notch near Columbia Mall.

The only sequence of events that would make my recollection correct is if this building was Intersection Vacuum Center which at some point moved out and was replaced by another vacuum store. Anyone have a better memory about this?

UPDATE 16 May 2010: Added full street address, tags.

UPDATE 22 January 2020: Add map icon, update tags.

It's hard to characterize The Joyful Alternative. One commenter called it a "Head Shop", but I don't think that's quite right. "New Age" doesn't exactly capture it either. I guess "Eclectic" comes pretty close.

The Joyful Alternative started in 1970 and was located in the lower left side of what is now the Five Points Starbucks building. My mother liked to go there and browse the handcrafts from around the world, and look through the various prints, candles and statuettes. I liked the various humorous postcards and placards though in general the store didn't interest me as much as it did her.

However, there was always a rather odd assortment of books there, and I remember very well the day I found the old Ace paperback editions of Jack Vance's "Planet of Adventure" books there (City of the Chasch, Servants of the Wankh,The Dirdir and The Pnume). I get the impression from the overall series title that Vance was asked by his editor Why don't you just write a straight SF adventure for a change instead of all that weird stuff with the footnotes? Of course he wouldn't be Vance if he actually did that, but the overall meta-plot of the spaceman trying to get home provided the discipline to keep him from getting bored after he had described all the weirdities of his invented world, and the books are among his very best. (He was later persuaded to changte the title of the second book to The Wannek after being informed the meaning of wank in Commonwealth countries, and not wanting it to sound like a book about 15 year old boys :-)

Anyway, I don't know how that happened, but it was the only time I saw SF books there, and in those pre-Internet days, I never would have known of those volumes at all, not having seen them elsewhere. The store continued into the 80s, 90s and 2000s, but sales gradually declined, and the place finally closed in 2003 with Starbucks moving in fairly shortly thereafter.

So I guess in the end there was no alternative..

When I think of "real" pharmacies in Columbia, I have a little mental list. If you were born a bit earlier or lived in another part of town, your list is probably different, but on mine are Campbell's Drugstore on Forest Drive, Liggett's in Trenholm Plaza, Cedar Terrace Pharmacy on Garners Ferry, The Big 'T' on Taylor Street and Parkland Pharmacy.

Parkland Pharmacy was on the other side of town from us, so we didn't get there often, but the times we did made an impression on me. My memory is that it served as much as Cayce's General Store as it did a pharmacy, and the aisles were crammed with all sorts of general merchandise. Also, and this is what drew my attention as a kid, it was a "contract" Post Office, and the back wall was lined with personal Post Office boxes. My aunt in Fernandina had a P.O. Box rather than home delivery for all of my childhood, and I always associated them with exotic places. The idea that we had Post Office Boxes in Columbia, and at a drugstore! was very strange to me. I don't think the store had a lunch counter or soda fountain, though it was about the right vintage for that.

Eventually, the same factors that brought down all the other landmark pharmacies in town brought down Parkland. I recall going there a couple of times in the 80s and thinking that it was operating under diminished circumstances, and finally they took the plunge and let CVS buy them out (or at least I assume that's what transpired). I don't know what happened to all the people with PO boxes there. I presume they were let to keep the same box number at one of the Cayce POs. If not, it will have been a mess!

As I noted recently, it appears that the CVS in the old Parkland Pharmacy slot will be moving. I don't know what will take its place.

UPDATE 29 Oct 2010: The CVS moved some time ago, and to date the old Parkland Pharmacy slot in Parkland Plaza is vacant:

UPDATE 9 September 2011: Changed closing date from "1980s" to 1995 based on commenter Andrew's research.

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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