Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

This Food Lion in Airport Square at the intersection of Airport Boulevard and The Charleston Highway, was open as recently as 3 March 2009 when they posted a want ad for a sales manager.

I posted a number of closings in this general area lately, though not all of them actually happened lately. On the whole I think its fair to say the business climate is not good there. I'm not super familiar with the local stores, but I'm drawing a blank on a grocery store closer to here than the Bi-Lo in Parkland Plaza, which is a fair drive down Knox Abbott. I guess there's the Wal-Mart and Bi-Lo on US-1, but that's about the same distance.

UPDATE 4 Feb 2011 -- It's now a "Save A Lot" grocery store. I went in the one in Aiken once and didn't see any brands I had heard of..

(Hat tip to commenter Andrew)

UPDATE 7 Feb 2011: Updated the post title with a more precise closing date based on the comments.

UPDATE 13 January 2021: Update tags, add map icon.

Well, I suppose it's a bit of a cheat to do a closing for an event that will repeat this weekend, but hey, it's a closing for the 11 December viewing date only.

If you can make it to the coast this weekend (17th, 18th or 19th) the show is well worth your time. The gardens are lit as you see, and there are singers, bagpipers, food and drink.

I took my tripod with me this year, set the aperture to f2.0, the ISO to 80 and let the camera set whatever exposure it liked. Often it worked quite well, other times not so much (these are some of the ones I think did OK). The long exposures mean you can see blurs for people walking by in some pictures. It was supposed to be much warmer on the 12th than the 11th, but it was also supposed to rain, so I went out on the colder night. It wasn't too bad except when I was trying to feel the little buttons on the camera and could not find them at all in some cases!

It's all pictures after the jump.

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While going out towards Sumter to cut a tree recently, I noticed that the Ole Timey Meat Market on Garners Ferry Road (opposite the new Walgreens) is gone.

I have to admit that I've never been in an actual "butcher shop" -- we always got our meat from the supermarket growing up and inasmuch as I have any concept of a butcher, it would be Alice's boyfriend on The Brady Bunch.

I believe there is still an Ole Timey Meat Market open on Saint Andrews Road.

UPDATE 31 December 2009: It turns out this location has not closed but has moved to Rosewood Drive (see the comments).

UPDATE 16 August 2017 -- Now a pawn shop:

I don't know when this Burger King went under, but it may have never come back from that time in the 90s when the local franchisee (who owned all the Columbia BKs) got in a dispute with corporate and all Columbia Burger Kings closed. Eventually new ownership was found and a number of them came back (with special commercials featuring "Blues Doctor" Drink Small..), but several never did.

I'm not sure when the follow-on business: TitleMax/CheckMax closed, but I believe it was this year.

I find it rather interesting that the street number displayed on the building is clearly 1402, but google is adamant that the real number is 1400.

My memory of The Trestles is now rather hazy, but I'm pretty sure they were along Gadsden Street, at the lower end of The Coliseum parking lots.

As the name suggests, they were elevated train tracks, but instead of crossing a river, they crossed Blossom Street. At this remove I can't recall the sequence of events, but I suppose that the current arch on Blossom Street which lets train traffic run under it was done so that the trestles could be demolished. The demolition itself was controversial. Many people considered The Trestles to be a huge eyesore in the middle of the city's new development project, The Congaree Vista. Others considered them an important Columbia landmark and a visible remider of Columbia history. I was living in Fayteville NC at the time The Trestles came down, but I came home fairly often and noticed story after story in The State about it. I came down on the side of leaving The Trestles because I hate for anything to change ever, but that side lost and a search of The State's archive suggests that demolition began 28 Janurary 1991.

Of course, the historicity aside, what I really remember about The Trestles is that is where everyone when to practice parallel parking. I'm not sure exactly why this was other than there was not a lot of traffic under the structures, but I clearly recall driving down there around 1976 to try my hand at it. (I was, and remain, so-so). I don't think the activity was officially sanctioned by anyone, but nobody seemed to have a problem with it. I'm sure today it would be an insurance issue for somebody.

UPDATE 24 November 2009: Corrected typo/thinko for "Gadsden Street".

UPDATE 10 October 2025 -- Commenter E Mathis sent this Trestles picture long ago in a message I just found again:

This Blockbuster Video Rental on Decker Boulevard, across from the old Decker Mall has has the going-out-of-business signs up for a few weeks now.

I stopped in about two weeks ago, and it seemed that they were continuing to do a normal rental business on some titles while selling out the rest of the store to the walls. I thought the prices were good, but not great, and picked up a couple of DVDs.

As I drove by today, I saw them carting off the sign, so as of now, Decker has lost yet another business. As with Hollywood Video, I guess Redbox, Netflix and the Internet have done a real number on their business model. Lately they have been trying to adopt the Netflix model while leveraging their store network ("Bring your DVDs back to the store for immediate credit!") but so far it doesn't seem to be working.

UPDATE 7 Jan 2010: Here is the store at night after being totally cleaned out:

UPDATE 12 Jan 2010: Added another picture.

UPDATE 30 August 2011 -- work is underway to turn this location into The Chabad/Aleph House:

UPDATE 5 October 2020: This place is now Chabad Of South Carolina though I don't have a picture yet. Also updating post tags and adding map icon.

I wrote a few days ago about the Sunset Boulevard location of Maurice's Gourmet Barbeque closing. This location, on Garners Ferry Road / Sumter Highway just past I-77 also closed about the same time. In the second picture you can see that it sits next to the former Fantasy Lingerie, which itself closed recently.

I've never been in this, or indeed any, Maurice's location, but what strikes me looking in through the window of this building is how little it looks like a former restaurant inside. It could almost be a generic office building just judging by what's left. The flowers are a nice touch though.

Hat tip to commenter Terry for the heads-up.

UPDATE 22 September 2020: Updating tags and adding map icon.

I'm pretty sure this building, on the North side of Knox Abbott Drive just past Silver City was once a Popeyes Chicken & Biscuits. I think various folks have tagged it as such in the comments, and it has that odd "Why not cover our store with a facade of fake rocks?" 1970s look of the other two older Popeyes locations in Columbia that I know of: This one on Farrow Road and this much restauranted building on Decker Boulevard (which has actually just had the rock facade ripped off in the last month or so).

Currently the building hosts the Vacuum Center vacuum cleaner store, but I'm unsure if this was the immediate follow on to Popeyes or if there were one or more other tenants intervening. I have the vague feeling that Vacuum Center may once have been in Parkland Plaza and that I may have bought a reconditioned Electrolux from them, but that may have been another store entirely. Popeyes in the meantime is still around in some form and has Columbia Stores on Augusta Road and Garners Ferry Road. (And, yes, they spell it without an apostrophe, which really grates on me..)

UPDATE 26 January 2022: Updating tags and adding map icon.

I first wrote about this building when it was a former Quincy's. Now it is a former Maurice's. It seems the current recession has made a hash of the barbecue business, as this is the second Maurice's to close recently.

To me, the location seems a little awkward to get into and out of. I can't remember if that were the case when it was a Quincy's or if it is an artifact of all the road work that's been done on the I-26 / US-378 interchange over the last couple of years. However, the selling realtor is apparently quite upbeat about the plot as the the current asking price is $1,350,000.

UPDATE 8 November 2009: Forgot to hat tip commenter B.C.

UPDATE 22 September 2020 -- This place has been razed. Also, updating post tags and adding a map icon.

Shoney's is a place we often went while I was growing up. They were affiliated with "Big Boy" then, and always had "Big Boy" comic books as free premiums for the kids, and they had what was at that time my favorite desert, the Hot Fudge Sunday Cake.

Disaffiliating from Big Boy was supposed to help them grow, but somewhere along the line they went wrong. Perhaps it was when they overextended themselves trying to establish a hotel brand, but whatever it was, they started closing stores. Right now, the only fully operating one I can think of in Columbia is the one on Garners Ferry. (I believe that the one on Bush River Road, while still open, no longer does dinner).

I can only recall eating at this Shoney's once, more or less by accident. Our troop was coming back from a camping trip somewhere, and I believe we had some sort of van and several dads driving regular cars. Something (the van I suppose) broke down, and a good part of the troop was stranded at Shoney's (I forget whether we actually made it to the parking lot or had to walk a bit) while other transport was arranged. None of us boys had any money, so the adults brought us a meal while we waited. It never occurred to me until years later that that must have been an unexpected and unwelcome financial imposition on them. Perhaps my parents settled up later, at any rate, in the way adults had back then, nobody let on anything to the kids, and we all had a *great* time.

I guess that would have been around 1974, so the restaurant still had years to go at that point. I'm not in fact sure when it went under, but I think it was sometime in the early 1990s. At any rate, it has been a Mexican operation for a number of years now.

UPDATE 10 September 2020: Update tags, add map icon.