Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

LoopNet says this nice little building on the corner of Laurel & Sumter streets was built in 1950. Given its rather art-deco look, with rounded corners and inset glass blocks, I would have guessed earlier myself. These drive-by pictures, taken through the windshield, aren't great, and the color scheme in the LoopNet picture is better as well, so take a look there if you are curious.

The last tenant was Print House Plus who have moved to 1519 Taylor Street.

I just noticed that this print shop on Two Notch by the old Mayo's Suit City was vacant. They list in this year's phonebook, so I'm going to 2016 on the date.

The name caught my eye because when I first started work, we had a bunch of Imagen printers on our network and would deploy them to various clients. The engines were 300dpi Canon behemoths that would keep working through flood, fire or the zombie apocalypse. It was the same engine, in fact, that Apple used shortly thereafter for the first LaserWriter. The engine however, sat on top of a cpu box with a 5.25 floppy that booted the printer operating system and provided Imagen's page description language: Impress. After the LaserWriter came out, suddenly Diablo 630 daisy-wheel emulation wasn't enough, and we spent a lot of time and effort trying to make those sunk-cost Impress printers work like Apple PostScript..

Crowson Stone is a name that was a constant presence when I was growing up. Since nobody in my family, and in fact nobody I knew ever needed a printer's services, I can only think this was because they (along with R. L. Bryan with whom I often got them confused) advertised constantly on WIS AM.

You don't really hear much of this anymore, but it used to be that a lot of non-retail operations would advertise on the radio. I guess the theory was that while it was unlikely that any given listener would need a printer (and back in the days before digital, that was no casual purchase!) keeping the name out there was good business in the "Oh yeah, I've heard of them, they should be OK" sort of way.

I'm not sure when this building, at the east end of Shop Road, was built. The February 1997 phonebook lists Crowson Ston at 819 Main Street, while the February 2006 book lists both Main Street and Shop Road, so this location probably came online in the early 2000s.

In early 2012 they were bought by Indexx Printing of Greenville, and by the February 2014 phonebook were listing the only the Main Street location again.

(Hat tip to commenter badger)

Moving across the street from yesterday's Bingo Parlor, we have a vacancy in the back of The Shops Of O'Neil Court as the former Americal Speedy Printing Centers location has closed with the merger of that company into Allegra (which still sounds like it should be an allergy remedy to me..) with the merged office on Broad River Road.