Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

Enterprise is not one of the car rental firms I've ever used, though their promise to deliver the car to you rather than have you come for the car is appealing. In the event, the one time I needed such a service (stuck in Beaufort with a busted alternator) the local branch was closed on Sunday and I just ended up staying until my car was fixed. Of course I never get a rental car that's a model I would drive by choice, so it was probably just as well.

The phonebook and google say that there are still several other Enterprise locations in town.

(Hat tip to commenter Matt)

UPDATE 19 October 2012 -- As commenter Matt notes in the comments this location has moved to 1307 Assembly Street a few blocks away.

UPDATE 14 November 2012 -- Here is the new Assembly Street location:

UPDATE 5 May 2018 -- At some point the 1436 Taylor Street building was razed:

I noticed a For Rent sign on this nice little building at Taylor & Henderson Streets a couple of weeks ago as I was driving downtown.

To me the place looks like a former house, but more like a 1950s house than the older homes you often see converted to offices downtown. If so, they were building residences in the area later than I would have expected.

At any rate, clients of the law firm shouldn't worry, they have moved just a bit up the block to this building at 1614 Taylor:

UPDATE 3 October 2012: Update the move date from "2012" to "circa 2007" based on the comments.

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)

Well, it appears that the old Big-T/CVS at the corner of Pickens & Taylor Streets is once again a pharmacy, as Hawthorne Pharmacy & Compounding Shoppe has moved down the block from its long-time home at 1500 Taylor and into the Big-T building.

Well, that's not quite true as the whole building isn't a pharmacy: It appears that during the refit and remodel, it was split up into two suites, and that one of them is an endoscopy clinic. Since Hawthorne has always been something of a specialty shop, it makes sense that they wouldn't need the space to sell all the extraneous non-medical stuff a CVS does. It will be interesting to see what happens to the old Hawthorne building. As of yet, there is no For Sale sign.

UPDATE 6 October 2017 -- Here is the old building about to be demolished:

and here is the hole where the building used to be:

UPDATE 8 May 2018 -- A new building is going up here:

Here's a nice little Main Street storefront that was a jewelers at one time -- notice the "display case" window on the right front side.

Colonial Finance was the last operation there, and apparently decamped to the Bi-Lo strip mall on Devine Street at the end of August 2011. I got the name Reyner's Jewelers from a 1948 Columbia Bible College yearbook which is on line for keywords, but which I can't really see without joining a yearbook site. However, notice that you can still see part of the name in the flooring in one of the pictures.

The building as a whole (not just this storefront) is apparently the "Berry Building", the site of the old Berry's On Main.

UPDATE 2 February 2012 -- Here is Colonial Finance's Devine Street location:

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.

According to their still extant web site, Auto Trim Design was founded in 1973 and introduced auto window tinting to Columbia in 1983 (As I recall, there was a legal problem with window tinting before then).

Interestingly, Google StreetView shows them with a different paint job, so the current "rising sun" look must be fairly recent. It's definitely a little more eye-catching.

UPDATE 20 September 2011: Commenter Tom points out that the building was a Texaco, which I was able to confirm from the 1961 Yellow Pages.

This little fast food joint has been a fixture on the Northwest corner of Harden & Taylor Streets for years, and with its location across from both Allen and Benedict, it comes by the name College Corner honestly.

A Subway opened on the Southwest corner fairly recently, which may have put some pressure on it, though the food mix is not the same. I'm not sure if the place is gone for good, or will be coming back after an uplift. Some work is going on for sure, and not all the fixtures have been removed.

UPDATE 21 Jan 2011 -- Open again:

UPDATE 2 December 2013 -- Closed again, for good. It's now Empire Grill:

The College Corner sign is still legible from Harden Street, but sort of painted over from Taylor Street

I first wrote about this building in a closing for The Big T (Taylor Street Pharmacy).

After The Big T sold out, CVS ran the old pharmacy as one of its stores for a number of years though it was no longer a 24-hour store, and in fact was not even open on Sundays. I guess the rise of 24 hour Wal-Marts pretty much obviated the need for an all-night store, and the downtown location was just not a draw anymore for residential shoppers.

As of today (10 Feb 2010) it appears that they are still moving things out of the building. There was a rental truck in the lot, and I saw a couple of people go in and out.

UPDATE 9 March 2011: Added the store number (5766) based on the comments.

UPDATE 10 March 2011 -- Remodeling work is ongoing, and some of the original Taylor Street Pharmacy signage is visible now:

UPDATE 5 July 2022: Updating tags, adding map icon.

From what I understand, Eckerd was long an arm of J. C. Penny, which was looking to dump the thing for years before it was able to. That notwithstanding, Eckerd went on a building spree in Columbia a few years before the chain was finally taken over by Rite-Aid.

This included building a number of new stores which went under even before the take-over was in the works, and this building, at 1720 Taylor Street (between the train tracks and the old Big-T) was one of them. My memory is that it closed down almost as soon as it opened, though that may be something of an exaggeration. I'm not sure if it was caught in the chain's problems, or just not a viable location. Dollar General proves retail can work in that spot, but Eckerd's was a bit pricier.

UPDATE 15 May 2011: Changed closing date in post title to April 2000 based on commenter Andrew's research.

UPDATE 10 August 2020: Add map icon, update tags