Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

OK, you know the drill by now if you've followed my State Fair posts from previous years: I like what I like, and I like to take pictures of it, so there's nothing new or astounding here, just old friends like the Buxom Beer Girl, The Cotton Candy Stands and the ducklings, but I enjoyed being out and about amongst the neon and greasy delights as usual. I took the tripod, but really couldn't get into setting it up to try for HDRs this year, so I just got one, which is not as good as those from last year (2010). I did take a few videos this year, in particular the one above (which has some issues with light spikes, but is quite watchable) and one below the jump.

Meet your party at the (Time Warner) rocket!

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This is a country store in the city.

I really have no idea when this place closed. Looking inside the back add-on section, it appears to have been in disrepair for a while. On the other hand, the ice company has not taken the ice lockers back yet. I wish SC would put dates on the "A" restaurant ratings stickers! Honestly, if you told me the place had closed in 1953 or that it was still open some days, I would probably believe either.

This Richland County conservation report PDF says the place was built in the 1920s and

There are nine commercial buildings in the Olympia village. Most of these date from the early twentieth century and are similar to Nix's Olympia Grocery, a one- story, gable-front building with a brick facade and stepped parapet. These small commercial buildings were community-gathering spots and supplied operatives with a place to socialize and purchase needed items.

You can see that at some point the Nix's appelation was dropped and the place became simply Olympia Grocery. The sign itself was apparently supplied by Coke, something once exceedingly common (with the Coke advertisement often as big or biger than the store name), but not seen now on new stores.

The first time I went to take pictures of the place, it was a nice sunny afternoon, but in the event, I couldn't get near Nix's since the laundry down the road was burning, and the street was blocked off by fire engines. By the time I got back out that way, it was the rather grey day you see here. (And the laundry looks like it may be salveagable)

UPDATE 28 March 2011 -- Well, it's gone:

There were two problems with my ever visiting Biscuit House on Bluff Road behind the stadium: A) It was way on the other side of town and B) That whole waking up before absolutely necessary breakfast thing.

Of course, lots of other people don't have those problems, and the Biscuit House apparently developed quite a reputation over the years. In fact, there was a spate of newspaper articles when its closing was announced, and even a video documentary.

In the end, the problem was the same as for the Farmers' Market: USC bought up all the land for football parking. The good news is that apparently the Biscuit House recipies will live on in franchaised kiosks in local convenience stores.

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These nine pictures are attempts at HDR. I took a tripod, and set the closing-cam to do 3 exposure brackets (1 "under exposed", 1 "over exposed" and 1 "correctly exposed"). I still have had trouble getting anything reasonable looking out of Qtpfsgui though other folks certainly have. There are just too many knobs and levers for me, at least for now. I did find another free program called Picturenaut, which actually produces nice results with the default settings. The downside is it only runs on Windows.

All the night pictures were taken on 15 October and the day pictures on 24 October. As usual, the fair remains an evergreen experience and if you missed it this year, you should try to catch it in 2011.

Lots and lots of other pictures after the jump. Be warned!

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Well, The South Carolina State Fair was fun as usual. My only regret is that I did not get to ride the bumper-cars this year since I would have been the only one on the floor at the time I went by, and what's the fun of that? Oh, and I didn't manage to score a free yardstick anywhere this year.

Other than that, you've got your french fries, Italian sausage, fried mushrooms, cinimon rolls, performing sealions, elephants, rides, art and lots and lots of neon. What's not to like?

You can pretty much stop here if you don't like lots of photos, that's about all that's after the jump. I'm a little disappointed in how my Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3 handled the neon. Last year my deceased Kodak DX3600 tried its little heart out to make sense of the low light conditions it was never built for, and I think actually got better saturation on the neon than the Lumix, even though the Lumix is a much better camera. On the other hand, I just locked the Lumix F-stop at 2.2 and let it do whatever it wanted with the shutter, there's probably a better neon setting somewhere. (The thing has the most driest, most snoozeworthy manual of nearly anything I've seen). Interestingly, whereas usually the JPGs I get by manually processing the camera raw files are more pleasing than the ones the camera creates, the opposite was true here. Anyway, even if the average quality wasn't as pleasing, I still think I got some very nice shots. So if you like that kind of thing, and have a while to download, hit the "MORE" link.

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I suppose it's a silly thing to get pre-nostalgic about, but to me as a child, a big part of the adventure of going to the State Fair was the getting there. The first years I can remember, my father decided that he didn't want to face the hassle of fair traffic and parking fees, so we would catch the SCE&G Fairgrounds bus at, I believe, the corner of Main & Blossom. These were the only times we rode the bus as kids, and it was very exciting!

Later, I think my mother was less than thrilled at riding the bus and we started to drive, but it was still an adventure -- sort of an imperfectly organized chaos where you followed a bunch of cars, hoped you were in the right lane, and then tried to figure out which guy waving a flashlight you were supposed to follow as they invented a parking lot on the fly. Of course if it were dry, the dust would be flying everywhere, and if it had been wet, it was a long slog through the mud, but it never really occurred to me that the Fair should have anything other than a dirt/grass lot.

As you can tell from the pictures though, that's about to end. It appears that next year, we will have a "real" parking lot at the Fairgrounds. Oh well, as long as they still have the rocket and the handwriting analysis computer, my childhood won't be totally gone!

Got 1.5 million dollars for a restaurant? If so, Columbia icon Jaco's on Bluff Road could be yours.

I believe the place used to be a Texaco filling station at some point in its life, and I recall reading a story on the place years ago, in The State, I think, about how the place used to blow off Texaco coporate during its national "always a clean restroom at Texaco" campaign. I'm sure the story was apocryphal, and was presented as such, with the point being a certain devil-may-care spirit about the place.

Unfortunately I can't say from experience as this is yet another of the many Columbia places that go on the blocks before I get around to visiting. I suppose part of it is that I rarely get down that way except for The State Fair, and traffic makes it somewhere you wouldn't even think of stopping then. On the other hand, it may not be too late. I know they had a Superbowl party, so they may be keeping the business open until they get a buyer.

UPDATE 16 May 2017 -- According to The State, Jaco's has been sold and closed on 13 May 2017. I am updating the post title with that information.

UPDATE 3 February 2023 -- Torn down and rebuilt as J's Corner:

Also adding a map icon. (And I note that the address is now listed as 1015 Rosewood Drive rather than 638 Bluff Road).