Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

Lately the thing to do rather than remodeling an aging store is to simply build a bigger one right next door and move shop.

That's what happened to this Piggly Wiggly on Garners Ferry Road. The trouble with that, although it gives me something to take pictures of, is that it leaves behind a dead or dying strip mall as seems to be the case with "Garners Ferry Plaza". On the other hand, I would in general rather shop in a store like the new one (seen across the street in the last photo) than in a run-down store, and building a new store avoids a lengthy period of remodeling which can drive away customers. A remodeling store, even one open for business is like a road with ongoing construction -- you know you could get through, but you'd rather plan another route and avoid the hassle.

UPDATE 3 March 2010 -- some sort of work is being done on the old Pig and plaza:

UPDATE 9 March 2011: Updated closing date based on the comments (and added full street address).

UPDATE 16 July 2013 -- Garners Ferry Plaza has ben renovated now, including the former Pig site:

Also, The Pig is closing at its new location.

I said in another post that Asian Buffet is the last stage a restaurant building goes through.

I didn't mean that in any disparaging sense -- I have a lot of admiration for the folks who, often as a family effort, can take a marginal location and make a go of it. Unfortunately, as we have seen before, it doesn't always work.

In this case, the building was the former Red Lobster location next to the former Olive Garden on Decker Blvd. The Red Lobster closed in the general flight from Decker towards Sandhills which also took the neighboring Olive Garden. I'm not sure why Jumbo Buffett failed in this case. It could be that the established buffet on Two Notch by Lowes was too nearby, perhaps the Red Lobster building was just too large for an operation with less traffic to pay the utilities or perhaps people never got past the "jumbo shrimp" jokes. Whatever the reason, I recall this operation as rather short lived, no more than a year or so.

UPDATE 19 Feb 2010: Added full street address to post title.

UPDATE 26 August 2024: Add Red Lobster to the post title, edit tags, add map icon.

UPDATE 9 July 2026: Both this property and the neighboring former Olive Garden were subject to arson recently. This site on 10 June 2026 and the Olive Garden on 9 June. I didn't see any exterior damage to the Olive Garden building, but this one is clearly much worse for wear, and is, I think, beyond recovery though that has probably been true for a while.

You can read about the fires & investigation in The State here and here.

Parkland Plaza is on Knox Abbot Drive just across the bridge from USC (and now, though not then, The State Museum). It's an interesting retail venue, neither thriving, nor totally down on its luck. Over the years lots of businesses have come and gone. Probably the most significant of these was Parkland Pharmacy, which was an old-fashioned rural style drug/general/we-do-everything store which also housed a contract post-office with a wall full of PO Boxes. It eventually sold out and a CVS now occupies the spot.

The other significant business, or significant to me at any rate, was the Gamecock Theater. The Gamecock was on the East side of the plaza and was always a rather small operation rather than anything with pretensions to being a "Movie House". At some point, even the rather limited original space was partitioned, and the place became a duplex with the name becoming, if I recall correctly, The Gamecock Twin Cinemas or something to that effect.

Since The Gamecock was on the other side of town from where I grew up, we only saw a couple of movies there when I was a kid, and I can't recall now what they were. However, when I was in college, it was fairly accessible from The Towers, where I was living. Of course, the Russell House was even closer, and while the theater there was in its glory days, I sometimes saw 4 movies a week there, but those were all classics and The Gamecock was first-run. At various times, a group of us would find a car and go over, but I can clearly recall only two movies that I saw there during college.

The first was The Seduction, a 1982 flick starring Morgan Fairchild. At the time, Morgain Fairchild was in a very popular TV series, which I never saw, and the name of which I forget. I was aware that she was the show's sex symbol and when my roomate and I saw that she had her first big screen outing and that it was rated 'R', we figured (especially given the title!) that there was a good chance that she would not be over-burdened with clothes, and that seemed like a sufficient reason to scrape up the bucks and transportation.

Well, that was true -- in fact several times she was not-overburdened to the point of not being burdened at all, but while that was nice (very nice actually) we gradually became aware, as we looked at each other with incredulity from time to time, that this was an awful movie. Not, "well, it really wasn't that good" awful, but "did they really shoot that whole scene with the boom mike clearly in view?" awful. It was something of a trifecta in fact: Bad writing, bad acting and bad production values. I still don't understand how Fairchild couldn't leverage her small-screen popularity into a decent vehicle. I mean, it's not like she couldn't take her clothes off in a movie with a competent crew and a script that at least made sense!

The final movie I saw at The Gamecock was Yellow Hair and the Fortress of Gold. This was in 1984, and if I recall the timing correctly, I had just finished final exams and was exhausted and wanting a fun popcorn flick. The whole ad campaign for Yellow Hair, inasmuch as it had one, was to position it as a low budget "Indiana Jones" type movie, which was fine by me. As it turned out, the campaign had little to nothing to do with the movie, which was really (as comments on IMDB suggest) a late Spaghetti Western. The titular character "Yellow Hair" was a blond Indian "half-breed" and the rickety plot reached its climax with her finding out that her parents had loved one another (rather than her being a child of rape as she had been led to believe). Along the way, she had some Zorro-ish adventures (Disney Zorro-ish), but really not the non-stop cheesy action the posters implied. I was let down, but this movie was a first for me in a way -- it was the first time I was the only person in a theater! That's happened several times since and sometimes for good movies, but I distinctly remember thinking "Not a good sign!"

With graduation, I took a job out of town and kind of lost track of the Gamecock for a while. The next time I became aware of it, I found that it had closed, had been sold, and was operating as an "Antique Mall". That's the ReSale ReVue you can see in the pictures. As such things go, it was OK (I think I bought an old phone there), but with several very large Antique Malls in the Vista, and one just down the street, I suppose they really couldn't make a go of it. Now the space is empty, and I can't think of any theaters at all in West Columbia or Cayce.

UPDATE 12 September 2009: Added an ad for The Gamecock Theater from the 15 April 1973 State newspaper.

UPDATE 2 September 2020: Change the post title address from "Parkland Plaza Cayce" to the full street address. Add map icon, update tags.

The Impulse Club was a small private club on Two Notch Road, just past Food Lion, and behind the This Is It! lingerie store. It's set well back from the road, and I always imagined it as a rather laid back little nightclub, though that's pure conjecture on my part as I have never set foot inside.

I noticed some while ago that it seemed to be closed, and finally got around to taking some pictures on one of the warmer days we have had recently. When I got to the front door, and felt the cool breeze coming out the (missing) view panel, I thought at first that the AC was still running inside and that I was mistaken about the club being closed. A closer look established that it was just the lingering cool of an enclosed space which hadn't fully warmed to the outside temperature.

Through that front panel, I was able to see that the club had some nice wood fixtures and stick my camera through to get a little idea what was in the bar area and the left side of the club. I don't have any idea why the place closed down, but the sign over the bar implies that some of the patrons, at least, were trying to take advantage of the management's good nature.

UPDATE 29 April 2010: Add full street address to post title.

UPDATE 18 May 2020 -- Add map icon, more tags and new pictures. I wish I had made myself go inside the place back in 2008 when I made this post. It's impossbile now because the deck and other lumber has been stripped, or fallen, and there are hidden nails all around. The roof is shot and the building is ready to fall down. I can see what must be a "condemned" notice by the door, but could not get close enough to read it.

UPDATE 7 July 2020 -- Welp, this place is gone, razed to the ground along with the other building on this back lot:

The Key West Grill is another entry on the list of restaurants I meant to eventually get around to, but in the event never did. In this particular case, since "Key West" is an island, I figured that the menu would be largely seafood, something which I don't eat at all, so I wasn't chomping-at-the-bit to go there and order the token burger or whatever the landlubber fare was. Since I never did, it's of course possible that I was wholly mistaken about the cusine. Taking the pictures above, I was impressed with the building, which seems as though it would have had a very nice dining ambience.

At any rate, Key West always seemed to have a fair number of cars in the lot, so I was somewhat surprised when they closed up shop. It's still a fairly good corner for restaurants though: I like both Fudruckers and El Chico which are across the street and next door respectively.

I do think at this point enough years have passed that Coca-cola probably ought to accept the fact that they aren't getting their equipment back.

UPDATE 3 November 2011:

Well the building is going down hill a little bit, or at least has started to be a target for "tagging". From the view through the front door, it appears that some work took place at some point, as ceiling insulation is all over and most of the ceiling tiles are missing (and the murals look like they were nice). Coke still hasn't gotten their equipment -- I'll bet it's not worth having by now, and the front door has that ubiquitious sign of non-occupation: unclaimed phonebooks.

On the plus side, the Piracantha bushes are doing really well.

Looking at he pictures below, you can tell immediately that the "feel" of photos from Closing-Cam 1.0 (above) and Closing-Cam 2.0 is completely different.

(Also added the full street address and tags).

UPDATE 5 November 2011 Added full 24 September 2011 photoset.

UPDATE 9 January 2018 -- As reported in the comments, this building has now been razed. Here are some pictures from 18 November 2017 of the then partial demolition and highlighting the murals:

Photoset 24 September 2011

The Movies at Polo opened and closed while I was living in Aiken. I can't recall specifically that I ever saw a show there, though I was in town more weekends than not. I think this place is another example of Pat Berman's underfannied theory of the Columbia movie market. There are simply not enough fannies-on-seats week-in-and-week out in Columbia to support the number of theaters we used to have. Of course in this case, it probably didn't help either that a new theater was in the offing at the nearby Village at Sandhills, though I'm pretty sure The Movies at Polo gave up the ghost before that multiplex opened.

Unlike the Capiton Centre Theatre we can't see with any specificity which movies actually closed this operation, but there has been no lack of bombs in recent years. I like to think it was Son of the Mask.

At any rate, we can see that, as usual, it wasn't a shortage of parking that did the place in:

For restaurant buildings, the last stage is the "Asian Buffet" stage. For other retail space, the last stage is the "Self Storage" stage:

As an aside, The Movies at Polo was actually a rather misleading name, as the place is not that close to Polo Road. The Movies Near Sesqui would have been better.

UPDATE 11 September 2011 -- As mentioned in the comments, there has long been a sign indicating that a funeral home is coming to the property. In fact, the sign has been there long enough that it seems unlikely now. I guess there might be enough room in the old parking lot for such an establishment and its own associated parking, but it would seem rather crowded. The self-storage place mentioned above has been open in the old theater building, and several adjacent new buildings for a good while now.

Also, as indicated in the comments, commenter Andrew has pinned the closing date for this place as July 2005, so I have updated the post title to indicate that. Also added the full street address.

UPDATE 27 February 2014 -- Well, I'm not entirely sure what happened here. I always wondered how Shive's could possibly build a funeral home on this site given that Monster had the old theater building, leaving only the old parking lot open -- and funeral homes need lots of parking for visitation and organizing the funeral processions. At any rate, the sign proclaiming this as the new Shive's site sat there for years with no action, and it has finally been replaced with one saying that the new funeral home will be built on Trenholm Road Extension instead (but Monster's sign still welcomes Shive's..)

UPDATE 21 April 2014 -- Just for the record, Shive's has broken ground on Trenholm Road Extension & Dawson Road now:

UPDATE 7 June 2016 -- Either vandals, the wind or the property owner have done a number on the old sign:

UPDATE 22 March 2017 -- I see the parking lot has finally been sold:

I first became aware of this building when it was "Po Folks", and I think that was the original tenant. Po Folks was, the name suggested, a sort of fauxy-down-home type of place where they served "country cookin'", served the drinks in mason jars and wrote the menus in misspelled "Southern" dialect. That's not really a criticism; there's a place for that type of thing, and I remember the food as being pretty good. Certainly my parents liked it a good bit, and we ate there fairly often. I don't know exactly what happened to Po Folks -- they are still around as a chain, but apparently they have contracted a great deal and no longer have any locations in South Carolina. I do know that they continued to have a Myrtle Beach location for a while after the Columbia location closed, but it's gone now as well. Today the chain seems to be largely a Florida operation with a few other restaurants in Alabama, Arizona and California.

After Po Folks left, the building went through a long period of "musical concepts". I think next it may have been the original Fran's location (Fran's later opened "Little Fran's" on Forest Drive as a smaller second store, which became simply "Fran's" when the original Fran's closed and which itself recently closed). After Fran's closed, the building was vacant for a while prompting some distruntled former patrons to put up a "Bring Back Po Folks" sign on the property. I lose track after that, but at some point it was one or possibly two different night-clubs and then an urban-comedy club. The Jim Moore used car dealership has been there a couple of years now, so possibly the site now has a stable tenant, though it's doubtful they can supply you a Blue Ribbon Chicken Dinner.

UPDATE 22 June 2009:

Well, not that stable! Moore For Less is now gone. (Also added the street addres to post title above).

UPDATE 13 March 2011: The building has been knocked down. See the Moore For Less link for pictures.

UPDATE 29 June 2021: Updating the post title with more former tenants of this building thanks to commenter Paul's research and adding tags & map icon.

UPDATE 17 June 2025: Updating tags.

In the mid-90s, Cucos Mexican Cafe was in the Capitol Centre strip-mall, adjoining Columbia Mall, the same place which was at the time home to Circuit City and Capitol Centre Theaters.

Cucos was a casual Tex-Mex eatery with what I still consider to be unusually good salsa. (It wasn't particullarly hot, but had some unusual ingredients, including carrot chunks to give it a very good flavor). The vegetarian burrito was good as well, and my sister, father & I enjoyed eating there on the weekends when I was back in town.

In the winter of 1995, I made the mistake of answering a technical question on an internal e-mail list just at the time they needed someone else to fill out a work party upgrading computers in Seoul Korea. Having raised my visibility, and being between projects, I was chosen and flew out of Augusta GA to Atlanta, through Portland OR and to Seoul to join the team from the west-coast office.

When I got there, everyone from California was sick and I was fine. Seoul in the winter is the coldest place I have ever been, and I have been in Kansas in Janurary. We were working mainly after hours so as not to disturb the computer users during the day, and I remember one night in particular when we had to leave a warm building (with no key to get back in) and wait 40 minutes in the snow and wind for a cab. Anyway, the point is, as I borded the plane back for the US, everyone else was feeling pretty good and I was starting to feel rocky. The trip from Seoul to Chicago (which was the route back) was the longest trip I can ever recall. When we hit Chicago, I put my watch from Seoul time to Central, meaning that when I got to Atlanta, I was off by an hour and missed my flight back to Augusta. By this point, I was ready to just lay myself down on a bench of Hartsfield seats and expire, but Delta got me on the next flight to Augusta, and somehow I made the drive back to Aiken. I had about enough energy to crawl into bed, and I didn't leave it for two weeks except for the bathroom and forcing down the occasional soda-cracker. I don't know the technical name for what I had, but I called it the Korean Death Flu. After two weeks flat on my back, I was finally able to start making it back into work for partial days, but I was still as weak as a kitten when the annual holiday break rolled around. What does this have to do with anything? Perhaps not much, but I vividly remember that the first day I felt really well again, it was close to Christmas, and I was sitting in Cucos having lunch, just marveling that I had an appitite and didn't ache anywhere. The realization of well-being came over me, and I just sort of sat back and enjoyed it, being in no hurry at all to finish and leave, and as it happened that day, my waitress was a very pretty Southern-Belle of Korean descent.

So what happened to Cucos? As far as I could tell, they did a very good business in that location, but that doesn't matter much if the whole chain gets into trouble. Googling around a bit, I find that in their SEC filing for 1995, Cucos said that casinos in the New Orleans area (their home base) were starting to cut into their earnings (frankly that sounds like a pretty flimsy excuse for doing poorly..) though they were taking measures to counter it. I'm guessing they started to retrench then, and not long after that, the Columbia location closed. Apparently they soldiered on until going into bankruptcy in 2002. I think there are still some Cucos left, but my impression is that they were succesful franchises bought out by the franchisees.

After the local Cucos folded, the corner spot it had occupied became a sports bar which lasted a few years, but is now vacant.

As for myself? -- I make sure to get a flu-shot every year now.

Red Wing Rollerway is on Decker Blvd adjoining and behind Zorba's and the old "Aloha/Los Alazanes" restaurant. I'll admit that I've never been inside. In fact, I haven't put on a pair of skates since about 1979, which wasn't too long after I finally figured out how they worked. We used to skate on the road at home, and I could figure out how to roll down the hill, but the actual "make progress on level ground" part of skating took me another decade to figure out. Timing-wise, I just missed the "skate-key" era on one side, and the roller-blade era on the other. (We seem to be into the "Wheelie" era now..)

You have to love the Red Wing sign. Yes, it could use a little maintanence, especially on the North side, but it really speaks to a vanished design aesthetic that I really like. If someone did one like that now, it would be self-conscious and "retro".

For now, it appears that the place is still open for business while it is for sale. While I was taking these pictures, I saw a pickup deliver some sort of arcade game or pinball machine, and several people were in and out the front doors. I hope that if someone does buy it, they keep it open. It's not like Decker needs another strip mall..

UPDATE 2 October 2008:

Well, it's official, Red Wing Rollerway is gone. I noticed the Sold sign last week and interior demolition is already underway.

I stopped by today, and the folks working on gutting the place were kind enough to let me go in (the first time I'd been inside) and take some pictures. They did not know what the building was going to be used for, but didn't think it would be torn down. It was kind of surreal seeing those two disco-balls sitting down on the floor like that. If you keep watch on the dumpsters you could probably latch on to one. I think somebody alread scored the skates pictured..

UPDATE 31 March 2009:

Well, the Redwing building is open again as KNC Trading one of those companies you see but that you're never sure exactly just what it is that they do. They've preserved about as much of the Redwing sign as we could reasonably expect (probably because since they don't do retail business, a spiffy new sign to lure customers is a useless expense).

UPDATE 13 July 2009: If you enjoyed this blog post, you may be interested that some of the images are available from the Columbia Closings web store.

UPDATE 10 August 2022: Adding map icon.

UPDATE 6 July 2026 -- Here is a video from commenter Robbie Jones, who says

Back in 2000, I helped create a short film called Couple Skate, filmed at the Red Wing Rollerway. The kids in the movie were all students from Ben Lippen elementary school. They made it into a field trip so we could film. The film is cute and nostalgic and captures the magic of skate nights from when I was a kid. I finally got around to posting it on YouTube. Enjoy!

:

Godfather's was in a little strip mall off of Parklane on the one side, and the Columbia Mall perimeter road on the other side. My memory says that the same building (I'm unsure if it were the same suite) was at one time home to Shakey's Pizza Parlor, the first pizza restaurant I can remember in Columbia at all.. I think I recall going to Shakey's once or twice. They must have had pizza, but all I can remember is that they were showing silent-movie comedies in the rear of the store (and I'm not even 100% I remember that -- I may be remembering something I heard later -- it was a long time ago).

Pizza was a fairly exotic dish when I was a kid. My first experience with pizza, if you could call it that, came at Satchelford Elementary School, where from time to time, the cafeteria food line featured "pizza pie". This was a pie shell filled with gound beef and topped with melted cheddar cheese and it distorted my perceptions of pizza for years just as their "submarine sandwich" (a rectangular cut piece of bologna and a piece of pre-sliced American cheese cut into two rectangles all in a hotdog bun) turned me off on "subs" for years.

Later we discovered Chef Boyardee's frozen cheeze pizza and pizza mix (he must know pizza, he's French!) which was actually a step up as was Pizza Hut (though I feel they have cheapened their brand).

By the time I became aware of Godfather's, I was pretty much a Pizza Hut snob, and the few times I ate there, I didn't like the pizza much at all (I don't think this was all callow youth, I had the same opinion years later in Myrtle Beach). Furthermore, if I recall correctly, Godfather's was one of those order-at-the-counter places and I have always preferred ordering from a menu at the table. Be that as it may, I don't know exactly how Godfather's got into trouble, but suddenly it seemed there were a lot fewer of them. I think the one at the beach outlasted this one, but it's gone now too. I did a web search and there are actually a few left in SC, but not in places I go.

If you look at the second picture, you'll see lots of plastic bins inside the former Godfather's. The labels didn't come out well in the picture, but they all say things like "leak #8". I take that to mean that on some very small level at least, someone still cares what happens to the building though it's been vacant so many years now that I don't see much future for a business there.

Unless someone makes them an offer they can't refuse.

UPDATE 30 July 2010: Added Shakey's to the post title as well as the full street address.

UPDATE Friday 13 May 2016: Add *correct* street address.