Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

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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Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce... And everything else now too.

This Burger King is on 8th Street in Fernandina, which is the main road coming onto the island from the mainland. That makes it a high traffic location, and the store was in a decent area (there aren't any really bad spots on 8th), so I'm not sure what happened here.

Well, OK, apparently the place was just bad: The google reviews are sprinkled with one-star reports, including the classic

I recommend taco bell or starve.

and the Yelp reviews are worse. The question is how does that happen? I get that the franchaise system means local ownership, but at some level corporate has to take care of the brand.

Anyway, as I said it's a decent location, so I would expect something else before too long.

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Bennigan's never came to Columbia, but were pretty big elsewhere in the 1980s. I remember that when I was living in Fayetteville, it was a standard place to unwind when the out-of-town crew was visiting to help us set up for field exercises. After that the chain kind of lost its way, and ended up going bankrupt in 2008 which drastically reduced the number of locations.

Nonetheless, things survive & thrive in Florida when they don't elsewhere, and this Melbourne location, on US-192 just East of I-95 opened on 28 January 2016. I always meant to drop in and see if it was as I remembered, but always had some place I would rather eat with my limited time in the area. However this guy did and was a bit underwhelmed.

At any rate the place gave up the ghost in February of 2023, and is now a Mexican eatery, Agave D'Oro. I'm pretty sure I have a picture of it in operation somewhere, and if I find it I'll add it up top.

During my most recent trip to Fernandina, I noticed that this eclectic antique, book & decor shop on 8th Street had closed.

Over the past seveal years, I got a number of Christmas and other gifts there, in particular some interesting cookbooks, neat umbrellas and blown glass decorations. It was a fascinating place to walk through, though it was a bit out of the way in relation to the main shopping areas of the town. That may have had something to do with the closing, as I never found that many people inside while I made my visits. That's just speculation, the closing could be a retirement or any other reason, I can't seem to find anything about it in the local media. The google reviews point to a closing date sometime around early June.

In the meantime, the shop's Instagram remains up, with some nice pictures, and this is their archived web page from February 2023.

I have to embed the video in an odd way because if I put it on youtube, I get copyright strikes because of the DJ music! Anyway, lots of focus issues, but it is what it is...

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This decrepit trailer is on the south side of US-76 (the right side if you are heading to the beach) somewhere in the area of Marion not too far past the intersection with US-301. I found it on Google Maps, and set the map icon below with lat/lon coordinates. I never stopped here when it was in business, which it has not been for some years now, but always wondered what services they offered.

Normally, in this sort of situation, I might get up on the deck and try to get some pictures of the interior, but there was no way I was going to have anything to do with *that* deck. It does appear that people have probably been going in from the back, so I suppose it is all stripped.

Looking at Google Streetview suggests that this trailer replaced a small building hosting a fireworks stand around 2008, and shut down sometime after 2012.

The question of what replaced this location is not entirely clear. It could be here:

here:

or even here:

The first option has a similar "I" logo, but the second location has the "gator" character from the sign in the trailer parking lot. The third option looks a bit more upscale.

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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