Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

Driving down Millwood the other day, I noticed that longtime fixture Branham's appeared to be closed. Closer inspection reveals that while the building is indeed up for sale, Branham's has consolidated operations with the next door DeLoache.

I believe the El Cheapo branding for this Millwood laundromat is fairly recent. Before that, it was Suds or something like that. I don't think the convenience store was an El Cheapo until recently either.

At any rate, apparently both were now under the same ownership and failed together early this month.

I wonder if they will sell off the commercial washers -- those can be quite hardy units.

This building is a good ways off the front-street side of Millwood and I had driven by many times without quite thinking about what was back there.

I'm a bit unsure of the story here, there is a Groomingdale's pet grooming business at 1015 Butler Street, and it's been there at least as far back as 1996, with no listing for this location. My initial thought was that it moved to Butler from here, but that would mean this spot has been vacant at least 17 years, which seems hard to credit...

UPDATE 5 June 2013: OK, ignore the above... Got to playing around with google maps and realized that this *is* 1015 Butler street, or at least the front of the building is. That means that Groomingdale's (the original post title) is still there and OK and the vacant spot will have been some other, unknown, business. Anyone know what it was?

DRAKES RESTAURANT
Columbia, S. C.

Best food on Highway One, north of Columbia. A spe-
cialty Restaurant serving good clean food. So duck in at
Drakes and enjoy a delicious meal.

DRAKE'S RESTAURANT
Columbia, S. C.
Best food on Highway one, north of Columbia. A specialty
Restaurant serving good clean food. So duck in at Drake's
and enjoy a delicious meal.

"Good Clean Food" -- I'm not sure I've ever seen that exact phrase used as a selling point before..

Over the years I've been running Columbia Closings I've gotten a number of requests for Drake's Restaurant on Taylor Street. I've never done much about it because we never ate there, and I really didn't remember the place, and because the building was gone.

Recently though, I was searching an online postcard site, and found two good postcards of Drake's. As fate would have it, commenter Dennis emailed me the same day with a copy of one of the same postcard images, saying:

This is Drake's Restaurant that stood on the southeast corner of Two
Notch/Millwood and Forest Drive. It's been long demolished and is now
a Church's Chicken. This view is from the south on Millwood. My family
ate there a lot in the early 1960s. It was a nice, quiet, "white
tablecloth" place that I truly miss. The Drakes ran a florist business
in the same building, no doubt doing a lot of business with Providence
Hospital patients across the street. And Yes, there is a connection to
Drake's Duck-In on Main Street, or at least there was originally.

I'm not sure what years these cards are from. I'm confident however, that the first card is earlier, as you can see that the roof air-conditioning units are the old wooden-slat type, while in the next card they are more modern.

I'm not sure when Drake's was started either. It *is* listed in the 1954 Southern Bell phonebook, the first one available at the RCPL. That, and subsequent phonebooks up to 1960 give the address as simply "Taylor Street". The December 1961 book is the first one to give the street number of "2436 Taylor Street". As far as I can tell, the place never bought a full yellow-pages ad. However, also starting in the December 1961 book, it did start buying a small box ad (pictured above) touting its "Go Service" wherein you could phone in your order and pick it up to go. This continued (with the same design and text) through the final listing for Drake's, which was in the January 1977 phonebook.

As Dennis mentions, the Drake's address is now a Church's Chicken fast food outlet, which is a completely new building.

One thing about the whole situation which blows my mind is that Drake's had (and Church's has) a Taylor Street address. If there was anything I thought I knew, it was that Taylor Street was West of Millwood and Forest Drive was East of Millwood. Full stop end of story. There's probably some sort of street re-routing story there...

(Hat tip to commenter Dennis, and a few others over the years)

I was driving down Millwood the other day and noticed that most of this strip mall at the corner of Millwood and Woodrow is vacant. The place doesn't appear to have an overall name, but I like the old-style A&P steeple in the middle.

The first closing I did for this building was when it was Mary Ella's -- Well, actually most of that closing came from commenter Dennis, as does the first picture above.

Cafe Millwood opened in the space shortly after Mary Ella's departed and was having a grand opening by February 2010. Curiously, the pictures on their still extant web site are all dated 2007, which is not possible, so apparently the camera clock/calendar was not set correctly. Along with the pictures, the site has copies of the menus and some background on the cafe.

It's pretty easy to approximately date the closing by looking at the newspapers in the inside racks. In particular, the copy of the Columbia Star with the story about the beauty queen who is promoting Harvest Hope food bank ran on 28 October 2011, and was apparently the last issue to be racked. There is no sign or indication on the door or elsewhere giving a formal closing notice, but the phone is disconnected, so I'm fairly sure this is permanent.

UPDATE 15 February 2012 -- Apparently it's to be Old Shandon Pub & Pizza and will have a beer or liquor license.

(Hat tip to commenter Mary Douglass)

UPDATE 21 May 2012 -- Apparently the Old Shandon Pub & Pizza is not going to come to fruition. There were no signs of interior work for a long time, then a "For Rent" sign went back up. The sign is still there, though it seems to have fallen down:

I first wrote about this building when it was NAPA Auto Parts. By September of 2010, Triumph had moved in, after repainting the place.

I'm not sure whether Triumph disbanded or simply moved elsewhere. Google suggests they were on Taylor Street before they were here on Millwood, but I'm not pulling up any hits that suggest a followup location. Their Facebook page (which I can't fully access without joining Facebook) seems to say that they were having events here at least until 17 October 2011.

The sign on this former Bank of America branch dates the closing to 8 April 2011, but if I hadn't seen that, I could have almost sworn I used this ATM several months after that. At any rate, I certainly didn't notice that the place was gone until this week. (And it has been gone long enough that the grass is unkempt, and the building starting to deteriorate [though someone is still tending the flowers in the sidewalk patch]). The building is on an odd triangular shaped lot at the sharply angled corner where Millwood Avenue hits Devine Street, and as I recall, it could be a chore to get in and out of, depending on where you were coming from and trying to get to.

I'm not sure why the branch was closed, but from what I can tell of the news, Bank of America in general continues to be in a pickle due both to bad luck and bad practices during the run-up and aftermath of the housing boom. Anyway, it will be interesting to see what goes in here. It might be a nice place for a restaurant as this stretch of Devine doesn't really have any.

UPDATE 13 March 2014 -- It's to be a Dunkin' Donuts, the sign was going up today:

It looks like Elegante Wig Gallery, in the old Electrolux location on Devine Street has closed. I'm the wrong gender (and still have my hair so far..) so there's not much more I can say about it, other than it was not there too long as seemingly it started around 2008.

I just noticed that the South Carolina Federal Credit Union on Millwood is gone, or mostly gone as their ATM is still there. The nice little building is at the corner(s) of Millwood, Washington & Heidt, not too far from the former NAPA auto parts building. If the lot does sell, I don't see much future for this building -- it's hard to visualize it as anything other than a bank.