Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

This small nursery was on The Charleston Highway before it joins up with Knox Abbott Drive. These pictures are from mid September, and the going out of business sign is already up, but it seems to me that activity continued there for several more months -- I had some later pictures, but I can't put my hands on them right now.

The few times I've wanted to buy some plants, the first thing that always occurs to me is the garden department at Lowe's or Home Depot, and I suspect those big-box operations have really hurt these independent operations.

UPDATE 13 July 2012 -- Here's a few more pictures of the place I just found hiding on my drive:

Golden City is listed in this year's (Feb-2010/Feb-2011) phonebook, so it can't have been closed for too long. I find it a little interesting however, that Loopnet describes the place as "recently renovated" while work is clearly currently ongoing.

I'm not sure how long Golden City was there. Without going to the library, I can confirm that it existed in 1998, but not in 1976. Again according to Loopnet, the building was built in 1970, so there must have been other operations there over the years. And, speaking of the building -- it's rather an interesting one. The back part is fairly standard looking, but the trapezoid in front is quite unusual.

I wonder how accurate the English name is. If each Chinese glyph equates to a word (or idea) then there are four words getting squoze down into the two word "Golden City". Can anyone translate?

I'm drawing a complete blank on Appliance Professional in West Columbia just across from Zesto. I'm sure I saw it open many times, but not being in appliance-buying-mode, my eyes just skipped right over it. Anyway, it appears they moved to Saint Andrews Road (East of Broad River Road) this summer and the building is now available.

Really, the building isn't that interesting, but I like the reflections of the Zesto cone.

UPDATE 24 Sep 2010: Added a picture of the front side of the building that I forgot.

Although I've never eaten at a local Quiznos, I believe I did eat at a DC area location once, and recall it as pretty good. Of course that may be partly because one of the other guys I was eating with was a nice guy but had an interesting personality quirk such that he was never completely satisfied with anything, so at least I liked it better than he did! I find it a little bit interesting that the name they use in their signs has no apostrophe and has the singular, "Sub", not "Subs". You almost have the image that if you were the second guy to get there, the sub would be gone.

This Quiznos, the latest of a number of the chain's outlets to close around town, was at the intersection of Airport Boulevard with the Charleston Highway, across the street from Piggy Park and at the edge of Airport Square with the closed Food Lion. The building looks to have been some other type of fast food outlet before the Quiznos.

I think the door note in this case is pretty straight-forward and classy.

The main Airport Square building is like two sides of a square, with one side parallel to the Charleston Highway and the other parallel to Airport Boulevard. While I was taking these pictures, I noticed a family picking some sort of fruit from trees growing at the end of the building that comes closest to Airport Boulevard. I can't think what is in season now, and I didn't want to bother them by heading towards them and maybe make them think I was some sort of Airport Square guy coming to say "stop that" -- I'll have to go back and see what that was.

(Hat tip to commenter Tom)

UPDATE 4 Feb 2011 -- It's now open again as Best of China restaurant:

(Hat tip to commenter Andrew)

This Food Lion in Airport Square at the intersection of Airport Boulevard and The Charleston Highway, was open as recently as 3 March 2009 when they posted a want ad for a sales manager.

I posted a number of closings in this general area lately, though not all of them actually happened lately. On the whole I think its fair to say the business climate is not good there. I'm not super familiar with the local stores, but I'm drawing a blank on a grocery store closer to here than the Bi-Lo in Parkland Plaza, which is a fair drive down Knox Abbott. I guess there's the Wal-Mart and Bi-Lo on US-1, but that's about the same distance.

UPDATE 4 Feb 2011 -- It's now a "Save A Lot" grocery store. I went in the one in Aiken once and didn't see any brands I had heard of..

(Hat tip to commenter Andrew)

UPDATE 7 Feb 2011: Updated the post title with a more precise closing date based on the comments.

UPDATE 13 January 2021: Update tags, add map icon.

I don't know when this Burger King went under, but it may have never come back from that time in the 90s when the local franchisee (who owned all the Columbia BKs) got in a dispute with corporate and all Columbia Burger Kings closed. Eventually new ownership was found and a number of them came back (with special commercials featuring "Blues Doctor" Drink Small..), but several never did.

I'm not sure when the follow-on business: TitleMax/CheckMax closed, but I believe it was this year.

I find it rather interesting that the street number displayed on the building is clearly 1402, but google is adamant that the real number is 1400.

Shoney's is a place we often went while I was growing up. They were affiliated with "Big Boy" then, and always had "Big Boy" comic books as free premiums for the kids, and they had what was at that time my favorite desert, the Hot Fudge Sunday Cake.

Disaffiliating from Big Boy was supposed to help them grow, but somewhere along the line they went wrong. Perhaps it was when they overextended themselves trying to establish a hotel brand, but whatever it was, they started closing stores. Right now, the only fully operating one I can think of in Columbia is the one on Garners Ferry. (I believe that the one on Bush River Road, while still open, no longer does dinner).

I can only recall eating at this Shoney's once, more or less by accident. Our troop was coming back from a camping trip somewhere, and I believe we had some sort of van and several dads driving regular cars. Something (the van I suppose) broke down, and a good part of the troop was stranded at Shoney's (I forget whether we actually made it to the parking lot or had to walk a bit) while other transport was arranged. None of us boys had any money, so the adults brought us a meal while we waited. It never occurred to me until years later that that must have been an unexpected and unwelcome financial imposition on them. Perhaps my parents settled up later, at any rate, in the way adults had back then, nobody let on anything to the kids, and we all had a *great* time.

I guess that would have been around 1974, so the restaurant still had years to go at that point. I'm not in fact sure when it went under, but I think it was sometime in the early 1990s. At any rate, it has been a Mexican operation for a number of years now.

UPDATE 10 September 2020: Update tags, add map icon.

1306 Charleston Highway:

7007 Parklane Road:

Chappy's Fish & Chips was a constant media presence on the radio (and in The State as in the coupon from 10 November 1987 above), though I think the most common image I had of the whole "fish & chips" concept came from that English N'er-do-well Andy Capp.

The 2911 Two Notch location referred to in this ad is now the McDonald's at the intersection of Beltline and Two Notch, though I believe the original Chappy's building was demolished. I never ate at Chappy's because I don't like fish (or the smell of fish), and have never been to England, so I can comment neither on how good nor on how authentic the fish and chips were.

Though it's not mentioned in this ad, Chappy's was connected with a very similar (identical except for the name perhaps?) operation called Cedric's. At this remove, it seems like an odd strategy to dilute your concept into two brands, especially since as far as I can recall, the restaurants were a purely Columbia phenomenon. The Chappy's radio commercials used to end with an exhortation to Be sure and visit my friend Cedric too!. I think the stores had at least one English "double decker" bus that they used for promotions. Wonder what happened to that?

At any rate, I'm pretty sure the stores didn't make it through the 90s. I don't think "fish & chips" was ever going to be "big" (though the coupon suggests they were moving in a more Southern direction as well -- "hushpuppies"), perhaps it wasn't big enough to support that many stores, perhaps the owners wanted to retire -- whatever the reason I don't think you can get fish & chips at all in Columbia now. And "Andy Capp" has long since left The State as well.

UPDATE 18 November 2009: Added pix of the Charleston Highway location, made minor edits to the text and added the Charleston Highway and Broad River locations to the post title.

UPDATE 27 May 2010: Added newspaper ad from The State 19 Feb 1979

UPDATE 27 June 2010: Added pictures of the Parklane location.

UPDATE 18 August 2017 -- The Charleston Highway location is now a Cricket phone store:

I recall that when I was around 6 or 7, Midlands Plaza ran a promotion to get shoppers out during the weekend. There was some sort of ride to entice the children, and the whole thing was promoted on WIS radio. Midlands wasn't where we normally shopped, but I bugged my mother until she took me out to experience the much ballyhooed kiddy-ride. I can't remember what it was now except that it was small, groundbased and freestanding (to make it easier to transport from promotion to promotion, I suppose). I have the impression that it was supposed to hop around the parking lot, but really it didn't matter, because they could not get it started. Apparently there was a gas motor in there somewhere, because they kept pulling on a lawn-mower-like starting cord, and occasionaly the thing would sputter a few strokes, but it would never fire up. And that is a metaphor for the history of Midlands Plaza.

I don't know if this is actually the case, but Midlands Plaza seems to have been conceived as a sister site to Trenholm Plaza (perhaps even the reverse was true?), with a Post Office and A&P anchoring a choice corner site with easy access from major roads, but for some reason the place exhibited a failure-to-thrive for most of the period I can remember. Certainly it was in bad shape by the 70s, bottomed out in the 80s, and has currently come to terms with a post-retail mode of operation.

It is rather appropriate that A&P was the anchor store for Midlands, since that chain itself underwent a similar experience during the same time period. It used to be the case that you could find A&P's distinctive, steeple capped, stores all around Columbia and other area cities. You can still often find the buildings, but the chain itself has withered away. I think part of it was the fact that while grocery stores were getting bigger and bigger, A&P was entrenched in small sites, and didn't make any effort to build bigger until they had finally been leap-frogged by newer chains. Of course for that to happen bespeaks a certain complacency at the management level, perhaps best exemplified by the last A&P advertising campaign that I can recall: A&P: Putting Price & Pride Together Again. It's always risky to run a "we were wrong" campain, and much more so to run a lame "we were wrong" campaign.

After the failure of that campaign, and the closure of the stores at Trenholm & Midlands Plazas, the only other A&P activity I saw in South Carolina was the attempt to establish a "Supercenter" in North Myrtle Beach, something that might have worked if they had done it before Kroger and other big stores moved in, but which in the event went under after no more than a few years. So, with over a hundred years in business, the legacy of A&P, at least in South Carolina, is the (confusing to youngsters, I'm sure) reference in the Waitresses classic "Christmas Wrapping":

A&P has pride in me with the world's smallest turkey..

The store at Trenholm Plaza was torn down and replaced with a Publix, the store at Midlands Plaza became, for a time, Giant Food World (invoking nightmare images of boxcar sized potatoes, and Sequoia-ish brocolli), then I think became a furniture store and finally became empty (but the steeple and wether-vane have withstood the ravages of the years..)

UPDATE: Added picture of old A&P on Sunset Drive.
UPDATE: Added picture of old (but re-roofed & de-steepled) A&P on the Charleston Highway

UPDATE 4 April 2013 -- Well, I wish I had made totally separate posts for all the old A&P buildings, but I was still kind of feeling my way along way back in 2008. That aside, the Midlands Shopping Center A&P building is now gone. Below are pictures from mid 2012 and then March 2013: