Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

I've always enjoyed the Carolina Renaissance Festival in Huntersville, but for one reason or another I have not been able to get there since 2016, so when I saw that there was a charity Ren Faire in Socastee, I thought I would check it out.

It was a nice sunny day, and the place was drawing a decent size crowd. They have a good number of craft booths, concessions and the usual Ren Faire players including kind-friendly fairies, bawdy ballad vocal groups, fire eaters & jugglers. It is nowhere near the size of the NC encampment, so you only need an hour or two to take it in, but it was a fun way to spend a Fall afternoon, and if you will be in the area next weekend, I suggest you check it out.

Here's one I always wanted to visit, but it was very far North from my usual Grand Strand stomping grounds, and the one time I made an actual effort to get there, I found it closed (they apparently were always closed on Monday, and some years Monday & Tuesday). When I heard it was to be sold, I thought I would make one more effort, but as is usual, could never remember to do it when I was on the Strand until it was way too late to drive up there. In fact even the day I took these pictures I was there too late for decent light.

The Sun News has the story on the closing though the details were a bit vague at the time, in particular whether it would close in February of 2024 or July was unknown, and I don't see any follow-up story. What I do see has the ironic detail that the parcel was being sold to a development company who did not care to run a restaurant there, except now the plot is being resold again with nothing apparently having come to fruition, so the restaurant might as well have stayed.

The building looks as though it would welcome a little work, but still seems to be completely tabled & equipped. Even the computer is still up, sort of.

You can see a cached web page here, and Yelp reviews here, and a USA Today 10 Best post here.

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Columbia's only TGI Fridays closed back in 2013, with the building to bite the dust sometime this year probably, but the Grand Strand continued to have several locations.

I ate at this one back in January of 2024, and it was fine: A decent burger & fries an hour after most other places were closed. I did notice that it wasn't actually open as late as I expected from a Fridays, and that the customers were pretty sparse, but in general it seemed in good order, and I was surprised to see the signage down on my last visit.

This continues the trend of Inlet Square losing national chain restaurants, some thing that has included Hooters, Applebee's & J. Peters & Spinnaker's. In the case of all of those except the last, local operations have moved in after the chains shut, so we will have to see what happens here. I do know that some sort of redevelopment for Inlet Square is supposedly in the cards (of course that has been the case before with nothing materializing..)

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When the Myrtle Beach Pavilion closed on 30 September 2006, it ripped the beating heart of out the city, and Myrtle Beach has never recovered. The site, once a people magnet, sat vacant for several years but was finally leased by Burroughs & Chapin to this zipline operation. I understand the difference between a property bringing in no money vs some money, but as a draw, from a civic standpoint it was not really a replacement.

In January of 2024, B & C declined to renew the lease, and the attraction shut down, with the pieces now being disassembled and the lot cleared. The story, as reported by The Sun News, doesn't make complete sense. The main mystery is why the zipline operator wanted to stay on when he claims the operation was never profitable. A subsidiary mystery is why B & C chose now:

He confirmed that the lease for Myrtle Beach Zipline Adventures contained language that allowed Burroughs & Chapin to remove the zip line if the company ever chose to build something else on the former Pavilion land.

That would imply that something new is in the works for the site, but aside from that bit of leading language, there are no details.

The only zip I have been on was The Canyons in Florida, which I quite enjoyed, so I thought I might get around to this one some year, but in the event I guess not.

Here is WPDE on the teardown, and here is WBTW.

Finally, here is a promotional video for the site:

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I always wanted to play this old-school mini-golf course in Surfside, across from the old Wild Water & Wheels, but in the event we usually ended up at one closer to Pawleys. Still, you really haven't had the beach golf experience unless you've played a course with an octopus!

The course was opened in 1989, making it a 34 year run. However, it sounds like the current plan is (or at least was) to build two new courses in the space, so we'll have to see what happens. As of December of 2023, the place had been razed down to the ground.

Here is a story about it from WPDE, and also one from WBTW

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Sol was the follow-on in this space (which was built as a Sam's Corner hotdog place) to the idiosyncratically named Joe Loves Lobster Rolls.

It was a rather upscale Mexican place, the kind where they don't have the items you expect, and you don't get free chips & salsa. In the event, I only ate there once, with my college roommate & his wife after we had taken in an evening at Nights Of A Thousand Candles. The only thing I saw on the menu that appealed to me was the Chile Rellenos, which were fine, but on the whole for that type of concept, I prefer Luna in Murrells Inlet.

One thing I did notice driving by in the years after that, was that the hours of the place were rather unusual, and they tended to take the winter completely off. The Sun News has the story on the closing. The given reason is that the rent in this spot is too high, which seems odd as it is a building which has had trouble holding restaurants, and it is a bit off the beaten path. At any rate, the owner hopes to re-open somewhere on the Grand Strand.

I got a late start to this year's Nights Of A Thousand Candles because a) I'm slack, and b) It was raining a bit earlier, but on getting there, found it dry, and the warmest of any of the years I have been there. There have been a number of years that it has been so cold I could barely take pictures since I couldn't feel the camera buttons, but this year I hardly needed a sweater, and the new "S'mores" pits were actually a bit too hot.

The basic theme of candles & lights in trees remains the same, but there are always a few new setups, this year's lighted bottles, for instance to keep things fresh, and I always highly enjoy it. The festival continues through New Years, and if you have a chance to check it out, you really should.

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To my memory, I only ate at Scatori's once, probably about five years ago, and it was fine, though not any better than my normal Strand pizza venues. I did think whenever I heard of it that the name was a bit unfortunate.

The Sun News says that the place had been open 15 years, which would have made it an early storefront in this shopping center, which I still think of as 'new' itself. The chef, who featured on TV's Cutthroat Kitchen has gone on to West Virgina to run a food truck which seems like an odd progression, but I guess that's what he wanted to do.

Both news articles say that Scatori's was sold in January (though it did not close then), but it appears that as of yet, the new owners have not done anything to the interior setup or furnishings.

(Hat tip to commenter Dan R)

I'm not a golfer, though some of my friends are very into the game. That said, I always thought it would be neat to ride the cable-car gondola across the waterway here at the Waterway Hills Golf Club.

This article on the closing of the club says it was designed by Robert Trent Jones and opened in 1975. As it closed in 2015, that's a 40 year run, which is not bad given the pace of change on the Grand Strand. The course was purchased by the company owning the adjacent Grande Dunes, but it appears to me that as of yet, nothing has been built on the former course.

You can see a picture taken from a gondola here. Also, I am going to try something new (for me) here. Google Streeview often has images I am unable to match, as they preserve things that have been long torn down in their year-by-year views of the same spot. My assumption had been that I could link to those, but not embed them, but in looking at the actual terms of use, it appears that embedding is OK. So, below I am embedding an image from June of 2013, which shows the course in operation, and a gondola en-route. You can click on the embiggen square to get fullscreen.

Looking at other Streetview images, I can say that the cable car infrastructure was torn down sometime between January and July of 2019.