Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

This church sits on top of a hill at the corner of Arrowwood Road & Gracern Road. Their driveway, in fact, connects those two roads, and winds through a pretty big lot. (The real estate sign says 13 acres). As far as I can tell from the church website, they had a very focused mission and must have closed up shop in late July or August of 2012. (I'm guessing that if they had moved, the site would reflect that, and a new location).

(Hat tip to commenter Justin)

UPDATE 4 April 2013: Fortunately, it looks like they may be moving to Assembly Street rather than closing.

I had thought that Eat More Tees had left Elmwood a good while ago (they are now located on Rosewood across from the Fairgrounds), but I see that the Elmwood location is still listed in the new (Feb 2013) phonebook, so I'm guessing they must have moved out sometime in mid-2012 (after phonebook entries are solidified..).

The building now houses a violin store, Palmetto Strings. It's rather an interesting building. In fact the whole area is interesting. To the best of my recollection, I had (somehow) never been in the Elmwood neighboorhood around Park and Gadsden Street. It is housing unlike most of the rest of Columbia, and strongly puts me in the mind of the historic district of Georgetown, parts of Charleston and downtown Fernandina Beach.

UPDATE 2 March 2013 -- Commenter Bo has some more information on this building, such as that it was a pharmacy and originally larger. Here's an additional view from the back:

I have to admit I was not really aware of The Village Gourmet, but according to the nice little note currently still on their web site, the place had been there over 17 years. I have to say the lunch menu looks quite good, and I wouldn't have minded trying a grilled four cheese croissant at all!

It looks as though another eatery is already setting up shop in the space, Spork Food And Beverage Cafe.

(Hat tip to commenter Jason)

Commenter Jamie pointed out this closing some time ago. In the event, I didn't have a mental image of where the place was, and didn't get around to going over there in a timely fashion.

Later, in March of last year (2011) commenters 59 Ford Wheelman and tonkatoy noted that the place was being torn down.

That time, I did get over there and got a fair number of pictures (including the first set below), but still never got around to doing a closing on it.

Yesterday I was coming in on I-126 and finally noticed the place again. This time I saw the whole thing was razed to the ground, and that it was a big complex, taking the whole block bounded by Elmwood, Gadsden, Calhoun and Wayne. Furthermore, the lot has been sold, so presumably something will be happening here soon.

(Noland itself remains in business in other places.)

(Hat tip to commenter Jamie)

[Don't click through unless you want to see too many pictures..]

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I didn't know much about Green Hole back in the day. In fact I didn't even know where it was. I just knew that it was a place where the cool kids hung out and did cool things. Listening to some stories at various class reunions, I'm a little surprised that all the cool kids managed to live to grow up.. :-)

Since I started Columbia Closings, the topic of Green Hole has come up a number of times in the comments, and finally someone mentioned where it was and I was able to locate it on google maps. Apparently the hole itself is an old abandoned quarry pit, and is located between Greystone Boulevard and Stoneridge drive, bounded by Clear Channel Radio, Greystone Boulevard, Jim Hudson Hyundai, the old Stivers Lincoln-Mercury, and a condo complex.

Back in the 70s I think that the place was regarded as rather remote, and was just off in the woods, undeveloped. Nowdays, the condo complex has surrounded it and put boardwalks over parts of it -- I probably could have brazened my way onto those, but I decided to leave that for another day, and stuck pretty much to taking pictures around the edges.

OK, cool kids! Now is your chance to tell your stories in the comments. I gather that they mainly involve minimal adult supervision, maximal beer and deep, deep water..

UPDATE 8 March 2012 -- OK, I wasn't really happy with the way the pictures above came out. Actually looking down at the place, I could get the details, but in a picture it just looks like a bunch of clutter. To fix that, I went into the condo complex and got the much better shots below:

UPDATE 10 March 2012: Here is one woman's memory of Green Hole.

And here is a short video of some kids taking the plunge around 2010 (some nsfw language).

UPDATE 16 June 2020 -- Please check this comment for some of the very interesting history of this quary from commenter Paul Armstrong.

While the Queenstown name rather intrigued me, with its New Zealand connection, everything I ever heard about the place led me to believe that it was way too seafood for me. I do seem to remember it getting rather good reviews though, and thus was a little surprised when I drove by a week or two ago and noticed that it was gone. Judging from their sign, the new operation Mayflower Bistro (just given as Mayflower in the phonebook) also seems seafood heavy for my tastes.

Before Queenstown this spot was Fatz Cafe ("Our secret sauce? Mayonaise!") a totally generic or worse place that I have never been able to warm up to despite its SC origins.

This little strip mall, Colonial Villiage across Bush River Road from Dutch Square and on the access road (Colonial Life Boulevard [which used to have a different name, I think]) for I-126 has never really seemed to thrive with about the only constant being the stalwart Melting Pot fondue restaurant.

UPDATE 20 July 2011: Added Garfield's to the post title based on the comments.

UPDATE 31 August 2020: Update tags, add map icon.

For a while in the 1970s, we were a Mercury family: Mercury Comet to be exact. The first car of my father's that I can remember was some sort of 1950s Plymouth, very rounded -- and that's just about all I can remember about it. The first car of my mother's I remember was what I believe actually was her first car: A 1950s Willis.

I remember that one much better than the Plymouth since my father drove his to work while our mother dragged us everywhere in the WIllis. In particular I can recall that the Willis had a manual choke, a radio with tubes that took forever to warm up and never really worked right, and that when the rear floor fell out, my uncle replaced it with some sort of grate, and we could watch the road under the car as we rode along in the back seat.

When the Plymouth keeled over, my father bought our first Mercury Comet. It was an early 60s model, a white coupe with pseudo tail-fins, and he had aftermarket seat-belts installed, making it our first car with them. (Not that we ever used them). Then, when the Willis became a Willisn't, my mother got a late 60s or early 70s Comet coupe as well.

I don't remember too much negative about my father's Comet (and again, it was not the one we kids rode in much), but my mother's was a constant source of repair bills. We bought it at about the time Detroit was forgetting how to make cars in general, and three-on-the-tree cars in particular. They would still sell you one, of course, but Ford seemed to have no real idea how to build a clutch or manual transmission, and the dealer certainly had no idea how to fix one. Even leaving aside the transmission, the car had a host of issues like the radiator heat sensor that left us stranded on US-301 somewhere between here and Florida, and the cigarette lighter that almost set the car on fire despite the fact that nobody smoked. Add to that the whole "coupe" concept when trying to run a car pool, and admittedly, the unsightly mess of cables I added trying to compensate for the lack of a radio by jury-rigging a cassette player didn't help matters.

At some point my parents completely lost faith in the dealer (I don't think it was Stivers), and we started taking the cars to Bob Andrews on Harden Street, but in the end it was Mercury that converted us to a Toyota family.

Early this summer, Ford lost faith in Mercury as well, and announced that the brand would be phased out by the end of 2010. Interestingly, by then, Stivers had already lost the concession. This 2009 year end story from The State is a little vague on exactly what happened, but says that the Lincoln-Mercury concession was moving from Stivers to Classic Ford. However the article also says that the Stivers location would remain open, selling sell Mitsubishis and Subarus and was looking to add another brand as well. Apparently that didn't work out, and as of late September the mercury was falling and the whole corner lot was up for sale.

UPDATE 2 July 2011 -- Here are some night shots of the place from 24 October 2010:

UPDATE 22 June 2013 -- It's now an Enterprise Rent-A-Car: