Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

Site of the 5437 Forest Drive DQ:

The old 1366 Rosewood, DQ building:

The old 135 Sunset Boulevard store (now an Eggroll Station):

This fish market at 3939 Beltline Boulevard isn't on the phonebook list above, but was clearly a Dairy Queen at one time:

Actually the ad lists a lot more Dairy Queens in town than I was aware of back in the day. The one I remember was the one on Forest Drive at Percival Road, about where the oil-change place is now. I'm not even sure we ever stopped there -- after Bell's closed, we were more of a McDonald's family as far as fast-food burgers went back then.

The main reason I remember this Dairy Queen was because of the national ad campaign featuring Hank Ketchum's Dennis The Menace. Dennis was one of the comics I always read in The State, so it really caught my attention when he and his pal "Joey" started doing radio spots for Dairy Queen. Most of them were not that memorable, but there was one where Dennis & Joey were discussing all the "brazier" treats that it was possible to get at Dairy Queen in those days, and Joey delivered the line

Yeah, Dennis, like a super-brazier chilli-dog!

so memorably that it became sort of a catch-phrase with my friends. Almost any conversation could be punctuated by dropping Yeah Dennis, like a super-brazier chilli-dog! into a lull.

I'm not sure what happened to the Forest Drive Dairy Queen. I have it in my mind that it may have burned down, but I know that happened to the very nearby Forest Drive Pizza Hut, so I may be confusing the two stores. At any rate, the whole brazier thing which was supposed to propel DQ into the top ranks of fast food joints didn't really work, Dennis The Menace or no, and the chain exists today under much reduced circumstances.

UPDATE 22 April 2009: Added pix of the Forest Drive site, and the Rosewood building.

UPDATE 13 May 2009: Added pix of the Sunset Boulevard building.

UPDATE 25 May 2009: Added pic of a Beltline location

UPDATE 12 June 2024: This post is a mess since it was still fairly early days for the blog, and I tried to shoehorn four different locations into one post for some reason. I should separate them out and put a map icon on each, but for right now, I am just going to update the tags a bit.

I noticed on the electronic sign you see when you're at the Harden Street light heading downtown on Gervais a month or so ago that Peter Glenn Ski & Sports was going out of business.

The only time in my life I've even almost gone skiing was in, I think, ninth grade when we had a class trip to a North Carolina slope but I got sick and had to give my place to a cousin. It's probably just as well as I'm sure I would have broken something. All that is to say that I never went into, or considered going into, Peter Glenn.

The window "murals" were nice though!

UPDATE 16 April 2009: Commenter Brian notes that this place used to be "Jeff Price Tennis & Ski". I have updated the post title to include that. He also notes that the last day of "Peter Glenn" was probably 8 March 2009, and I have made that update to the post title as well.

UPDATE 13 May 2010: Rearranged Post title to put "Jeff Price" first, and added the "& skate"

UPDATE 4 February 2016 -- As noted by commenter Joe Shlabotnik, this place has been torn down:

UPDATE 13 July 2017 -- The new building is up:

Kester's Bamboo House occupied the spot on Harden Street now held by China Garden and Jungle Jim's. The first (rather unflattering) image comes from the 1963 Southern Bell directory and the second from the 1970 one. I'm not sure when the place closed, but I suspect it was sometime in the 1970s. I'm pretty sure I recall hearing about it as a child, but don't recall seeing it after I began to drive myself. A posting to a genealogy website says that the original Mr. Kester passed in 1966, but I don't know if the business stayed in the family after that or was sold at that point.

I also don't know if 724 Harden was split into two businesses at that point, or if Kester's occupied the whole space by itself, though the 1970 Yellow Pages ad claims banquet seating for 100, which seems larger than the current China Garden capacity. At any rate, I'm pretty sure the current China Garden building was at least part of Kester's and does date back to that era, and is somewhat responsible for the closing of The Parthenon.

As I remember it, the story in The State was that when the interminable Five Points road work of a few years ago reached The China Garden a snag developed. As the work crews went to replace the infrastructure under the building's foundation, they found that the building had no foundation! The front wall was basically supported only by the sidewalk, so before they could go under the building to work, they had to shore everything up and this took a lot longer than they expected -- and all the while they were there, access to The Parthenon was very difficult.

UPDATE 24 June 2019: Add tags and map icon.

You don't tug on Superman's cape, you don't spit into the wind, you don't pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger, and you don't open a restaurant at 2630 Decker Boulevard.

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You can still see the empty placard in the K-Mart sign showing where the Advance Auto Parts sign used to be -- If K-Mart were in better shape itself, they probably would have pulled that down, as it looks decrepit and bad for their brand.

Anyway, the way I recall it, this space which apparently dates from 1970 like the K-Mart, was in its first iteration, a Western Auto.

The Western Auto that I remember best was the one at Trenholm Plaza, where I used to browse the Western Flyer bikes and buy those huge 1-volt carbon-zinc batteries with the screw terminals for hobby projects. I know I went into this store a number of times, but I can't really reall anything specific about it. Wikipedia says that Western Auto was acquired first by Sears, and then later by Advance Auto Parts, which phased out the Western Auto name (mostly) in 2003 (though many stores had already switch to "Advance" by then), and in fact this store was an Advance when it closed.

That history is a bit ironic since K-Mart like Western Auto was bought by Sears. If Sears had held onto the Western Auto brand a bit longer (Sears dropped Western in 1998 and bought K-Mart in 2005), they could have had some sort of super-mega store in this building

UPDATE 4 April 2022: Updating tags, adding map icon.

Honestly, what more can I say about Sounds Familiar? I've written about it here, here, and here: Nice Columbia based record store chain that had a good selection, and knowledgeable staff but fell victim to the Internet revolution as did most record store chains. This location, on Parklane near Columbia Mall, was the penultimate one to close, leaving the Rosewood store alone for the last month or so. Note to the almost antique "cassettes and records" slogan given on the sign. I wonder how many of either they sold in the last 10 years?

However little else I might have to say about the chain, I will say that today was a magnificent day for taking pictures, especially if you like clouds -- and I do!

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Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar--

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Here's another closed Eckerd store, although google indicates that this one was open as recently as the Rite Aid transition, which is not how I recall it. This store sits at the intersection of Two Notch and Beltline, and is now a children's dental clinic.

I'm pretty sure this location also once housed the local AMC dealership, name now forgotten, where I bought a really awful, I mean world class bad, car, though all those structures have since been torn down (or if they were like the car, may have just fallen apart..)

UPDATE 25 January 2012 -- Interestingly, the building directly across the street (in the old Payless Shoes/Carzzz location) is also becoming a dental clinic.

UPDATE 10 August 2020: Add tags, map icon, change "Eckerd" to "Eckerd Drugs" & "Rite Aid Drugs" to "Rite Aid" in post title.

UPDATE 17 November 2022: Changed title from "Eckerd Drugs / Rite Aid" to "Rite Aid / Eckerd Drugs" based on the comments.

By all rights, I ought to remember Ravenwood Pharmacy. It was in the 1970 phonebook, so I would have been nine at the time, and I recall a lot of stuff from 1970. It was also near to Trenholm Park where we went from time to time and shared a parking lot with the Covenant Road Piggly Wiggly where my mother sometimes (though admittedly not often) shopped. Add to that the fact that presumably it lasted several years beyond 1970, and I'm a bit mystified by why I can't recall it at all. I suppose the fact that we filled almost all our prescriptions at Campbell's Drugs must explain it.

This real estate listing says the building was built in 1960, and I assume the Pharmacy was the first tenant. The second tenant was Forest Lake TV in its second location. I can't recall any tenants after that (though I would have been living out of town at the time) -- certainly the building has been empty for at least five years now.

UPDATE 31 July 2010 -- Looks like it's to be a thrift store now:

UPDATE 11 September 2010 -- Apparently that's not going to happen:

UPDATE 20 June 2016 -- Something looks to be happening here again:

UPDATE 25 April 2018 -- Well, the 2016 attempt didn't happen, but now there is more work going on:

UPDATE 14 June 2018 -- Hmm, very blue. Maybe a Pelican snocone place?

UPDATE 30 October 2018 -- Now open as DCP Convenience:

I've written before about Capitol News Stand on Main Street and Capitol News Stand on Saint Andrews Road, but this branch was on the other side of town behind the Two Notch Road K-Mart on O'Neil Court.

My memory is that the building (which now houses a fitness center) was somewhat smaller than the Main Street space. It definitely had fewer paperbacks and foreign magazines. I believe that it was the last branch that Capitol established, and I would say it started sometime in the 80s and I had the feeling that it never really established itself. The location can't have helped -- everything that goes into O'Neil Court fails, and it was somwhat lacking in a raison-d'etre. Downtown had the best selection, so if you really wanted a news-stand type thing, that's where you would look, and Waldenbooks in Columbia Mall was just a few blocks away, so if you wanted a book, that's probably where you would look first. It did have the advantage of convienience over Walden's -- you could park close by and dash in if you just wanted a newspaper where as Walden's had no outside entrance.

I forget exactly when the place closed. It certainly pre-deceased the Main Street location by a good number of years, but I think it outlasted the Hampton Street and Saint Andrews Road Locations.