Columbia Closings   What’s not in Columbia anymore

1101 Harden Street was the address for PT’s Cabaret, The Punch Line and Greenstreets as well as a gaggle of other businesses over the years including tax preparers, nightclubs, eateries, and military recruiters.

The building sat on the corner of Harden and Senate Streets (a corner I believe many people would be surprised exists..) across from Time Warner Cable and next to Food Lion. The ongoing demolition is supposed to result in a Cook Out restaurant being built, and although it was a separate address, the old Bob Andrews Motors building was also knocked down as part of the project.

Lots of pictures from three different days follow..

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s another storefront in the strip with Clydes / This That ‘n’The Other and Miss Sun Fun Headquarters. The last tenant was apparently Liberty Tax Service, a tax preparation chain which still has a number of Columbia offices.

Before that, it’s a bit murky in that I can say something that wasn’t in this storefront, but not anything that was.

In 1998 (or perhaps late 1997) a party store was trying to locate here, but the liquor license application was contested. According to this SC Administrative Law Court Decision, the applicants apparently gave up on that idea before their appeal and rented the property to someone else. That “someone else” could plausibly have been Liberty, though no name is given.

Liberty had to have been gone by 2006, when tattooing became legal because Cap City Ink applied for a zoning exemption to establish a tatoo parlor at 946, but later changed their minds (something usally harder to do when tatoos are concerned..)

Actually, I don’t remember this place as a Caribbean restaurant at all, but that’s what google is turning up for it. Apparently it was an attempt at doing well by doing good, as this 1999 ABC permit hearing decision notes:

The permit was granted despite some misgivings by a neighbor business, but as far as I can tell, the restaurant did not last long at all. I have not verified that by any phonebook research, but note that the only “Five Points Association Member Sticker” in the window is for 1999. The building certainly has not seen much if any work since then, and appears to be in a fairly advanced state of disrepair.

Now, despite not finding any online evidence for it, what I remember this place as is some sort of night club which used the roof as a deck. You can see the hutch that presumably terminates a staircase from the ground floor, and the roof is also directly accessible from the side street as the building is more or less cut into a hillside. I can remember thinking that it was pretty neat though I never visited the club.

I did find this 1998 zoning board minutes which implies that the place was some sort of restaurant in 1990 which was forclosed on at some later point, but no other details are offered..

I think I also remember some sort of drumming studio here as well.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

“What Good Is Sitting Alone In Your Room?”

Actually until the last year or so, I didn’t even know there was a drag cabaret in Columbia. I think I had kind of a vague idea that a nightclub was in Punch Line location, but I figured in Five Points it was probably a college hangout.

The building is PT’s was in never seemed to really thrive. It’s at the way outside edge of Five Points, and aside from The Punch LIne, I can’t recall ever stopping there. The address for PT’s is Harden Street, but the building also fronts on an odd little section of Senate Street which is totally unconnected with the rest of Senate Street. (Come to think of it, the State House also cuts off Senate Street, so it actually has three discontiguous segments.)

The Free Times says the next tenant in the PT’s space will be a burgers and milkshake operation, soooo..

“Right This Way, Your Table’s Waiting..”

UPDATE 25 July 2010: OK, the PT’s building at 1101 Harden Street has now been demolished. See the link for details.

This closing has been talked about long enough that I actually got these photos last year, knowing I would have to deploy them eventually. This Hardee’s has been a fixture in the old Five Point’s Sears parking lot for years. I think it may even date back to when Gene’s Pig & Chick across College Street would have been its competition. (It certainly does not date back to Hardee’s original space-age designs such as at Silver City or The Eggroll Station though).

This story from The State last year tells how the Hardee’s is going to be replaced with a Chick-Fil-A, and how it will all be carefully landscaped in accordance to the new Five Points streetscaping guidelines. Color me unimpressed. You have only to compare US-17 as it passes through Mount Pleasant where everything is set-back so far and blends in so blandly that you can’t even tell you are passing stores that want to sell you something with US-17 in the Myrtle Beach area where even failed and vacant storefronts are exuberant to see how guidelines can suck the life out of a road. Not to mention this quote:

“Chick-fil-A is a business of high quality and we anticipate this development will add great character to the already diverse and eclectic makeup of Five Points,” she said.

Of really? Replacing one national fast-food chain (which is actually currently on the rebound) with another national fast-food chain will add character and diversity to Five Points? I guess character and diversity aren’t what they once were..

(Hat tips to commenters Tom, Mike D, Larry & Jim)

Read the rest of this entry »

This rather handsome brick building on Harden Street in Five Points was, according to the Historic Columbia Foundation, built as a laundry in the 1930s (this city property valuation report claims it was actually built in 1930). I’m sure it has been many things over the years, but most recently, it seems to have been a used furniture store called Habitat Store which was associated with The Habitat For Humanity charity. I used to love going to used furniture stores, back when they were “junk stores” rather than “antique stores”, but I can’t ever recall this one, so I’m guessing it probably started after I left town in the mid 80s.

This is kind of an interesting one in that it was totally unexpected. I know this Harden Street storefront has been a number of things, but I couldn’t bring any of them to mind. Googling turns up virtually nothing — except a page from the Spartanburg Herald Journal for 21 Feb 1962:

MISS SUN FUN South Carolina will be selected March 31 in Columbia as contestants throughout the state vie for hte title Sponsored by the Columbia Chapter of the American Business Clubs, winner of the state title will enter into competition for the national finals to be held in June at Myrtle Beach. The national winner will receive $10,000 in prizes. Application forms and rules have been sent to newspapers throughout the state. They may also be obtained from contest headquarters by contacting Miss Sun Fun South Carolina Pageant 942 Harden Street Columbia. Entry applications must be mailed before March 1.

I kind of remember the Sun Fun Festival and Miss Sun Fun being a big deal when I was little (though at the time of this article, I would have been 1 year old and oblivious). I had always thought of it as strictly a Myrtle Beach thing though, and didn’t know it had state-wide entrants, and apparently even a national reach.

Indeed, while The Sun Fun Festival & Miss Sun Fun still exist, they now appear to be owned by the Myrtle Beach Chamber of Commerce, and I can’t really recall hearing much about either since the 1970s.

It’s still something nice to think about during dreary Februaries though..

When I was growing up, comedy was something distant. You saw it on Ed Sullivan, or The Tonight Show if you got to stay up that late. There were a lot of classic comedy bits I would hear from time to time on WIS. Bill Cosby’s “Noah? Build me an ark….. Right!” was a favorite as was a Tim Conway prison-warden routine and Alan Sherman’s “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah”. I know there were travelling comedians in the days of Vaudeville and burlesque, but all that was long gone by the 60s and the idea that you could go pay money and go see someone do comedy was kind of alien to me. That was TV stuff.

Then The Punch Line opened in Five Points in this odd little strip mall next to the old Sears building. I’m not now totally sure of it’s location in the building, but I think it was in the space now occupied by PT’s Caberet.

As always, I’m fuzzy on dates, but I believe The Punch Line started in the mid-80s. I’m pretty sure I was still an impecunious college or grad-student at the time, and then started working in Fayetteville, so in the event, I only ended up going to one show there. It was a total introduction to the format for me: Local guy, feature and finally headliner. I can’t remember who I saw, but it was certainly the hardest I’d ever laughed (over an extended period) in my life!

I don’t know what happened in the end. It seems to me that Five Points would be a natural for a comedy club, but The Punch Line folded, and the new venue The Comedy House set up shop in a distinctly non-entertainment-district, non-foot-traffic location off of St. Andrews Road (followed by a move to Decker Boulevard — also a non-entertainment-district non-foot-traffic location). As far as I know, that’s currently “it” for regular comedy venues in Columbia. Charleston seems to be a much more fertile area with The Have Nots in their own theater and regular events such as The Charleston Comedy Festival.

UPDATE 25 July 2010: OK, the old Punch Line building at 1101 Harden Street has been demolished. See the link for details.