Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

The bakery which was the first tenant I can recall in the Triangle Rent-a-Car building must have set some sort of record for opened and closed. I barely had time to notice that it was there, and then it wasn't. I think the concept was sort of Atlanta / Panera but with a drive-through. From this Richland County delinquent tax spreadsheet for 2004, which lists the business entity as Buns Spring Valley LLC, I'm guessing that the place was probably called Buns, though I can specifically remember that.

I don't know why they didn't make it, but my own theory, based on seeing the place but yet not stopping, is that the location was too hard to get too to make an attractive drive-through combined with the fact that the strip mall it's in is not really a "destination", and the fact of it's having a drive-through kind of devalued it if you were in the mood for a Panera type sit-down experience.

UPDATE 5 May 2009: Consensus in the comments is that this place was also a Schlotzsky's deli at one time, so I have added that to the post title.

UPDATE 7 Sep 2010: Got the correct name for "Buns" and updated the post title with Panino Bakery and Cafe. Also added Hardee's -- see the comments!

UPDATE 19 June 2021: Adding tags and map icon.

This non-descript outbuilding in the ill-fated strip mall which now houses mainly The Comedy House was the first "mailbox" operation I ever saw outside of the Post Office. I don't think it was actually called The Mailbox Store, but that was the gist. The idea was fairly simple, but new (at least to the Columbia market): The store would provide a unified reception service for all your mail and packages. This differed from the service you get with a Post Office P.O. Box in that you in addition to "mail", you could also have UPS and other services deliver packages to the address, and a representative would sign for them in your stead. (Nowadays, UPS will just leave stuff on my porch, but I think they used to be more strict). I guess the main appeal was to on-the-go small businessmen who couldn't always stay in one place to receive important packages, and didn't have the staff to detail for it. I had their brochure at one time, but never actually went in the store -- I imagine they also did shipping and packing.

I'm not sure what happened to this outfit. I think the niche is viable, it's amongst the services the UPS Store offers today, but for whatever reason, I think they folded after a couple of years. I believe there was another operation in the storefront before the Army recruiting office that now occupies it set up shop, but I can't recall what it was.

UPDATE 4 May 2009: It appears from the comments that this place was a Holly Farms chicken restaurant before the mailbox place, so I have updated the post title accordingly. Apparently Tyson bought out Holly Farms in 1989 -- up until then, there was a NASCAR event called The Holly Farms 400 and after that it was called The Tyson Holly Farms 400 (though according to wikipedia that is now also defunct). I am sure however that this Holly Farms was gone before 1989 because I can remember the mailbox place from when I was in college.

UPDATE 5 May 2009: The consensus in the comments is that the mail service was The Mailbox Etc, so I have changed the post title from Mailbox Store to reflect that.

UPDATE 21 May 2009: Turns out there is still a sign for the (long departed) store on the Decker side of the strip, so I have added a picture of it above.

Well, I'm on the road, so posting may be erratic the next few days, but I thought this one was interesting. I think I've been off of most of the I-26 exits between Columbia and Charleston at one time or another, but I don't think I'd ever taken exit 165/Bowman until today. Actually that's probably because there isn't really anything there, at least going west, except one rather lower-tier gas station / convenience store -- and a honking big open lot across the street that was obviously a Shell / Blimpie / truck stop at one time in the recent past.

I didn't really expect to be able to find out anything about it, but Google is a strange and wonderful bird, and searching "I-26" "exit 165" Blimpie immediately pulled up the going-out-of-business auction info for the place:

Going Out of Business Auction
10:00 AM May 17, 2008
Rain or Shine

Bowman Shell - Food Mart
GOING OUT OF BUSINESS AUCTION
Selling contents of business. Property has been sold.
This sale will be a combination of restaurant equipment plus (Blimpie Sub Shop Equipment), and gas pumps, diesel pumps, walk-in coolers, canopies, signs, a pickup, and many other items.
Inspection-May 16, 2008 12:00 PM - 6:00 PM and on the Day of Sale from 8 a.m. until Sale Time

Interesting that Property has been sold, but almost a year on, there's still nothing happening with it.

This Quincy's, which now houses a Maurice's Barbeque, was I think the first in town to close. The way I recall it, and I'm very often wrong about anything involving dates or time, this one went first, the one on Forest Drive went second, and the one on Two Notch went last.

This Quincy's was on the far side of town from us, and I think I only ate here once, when we were coming back from the airport -- it was fine. I had the opportunity a few weeks ago to check out a surviving Quincy's in Florence at US-52 & I-95. It was not as nice as I recall the Two Notch store being in the beginning, but it was perfectly acceptable.

This building, now a Marshall's can't really be considered as a Columbia Mall outparcel store because it predates the mall. It was definitely a grocery, and I'm pretty sure it was Winn Dixie. We went there only very rarely, since we considered the area to be something of a boondocks and a long way from our house. Of course this was a time when a "long distance" phone call was something you saved for special occasions, and the area now seems quite close to me even though I live in the same place.

I'm not sure why the place failed to thrive after Columbia Mall went up -- on the surface that seems like it would have driven more traffic, but apparently not. I'm pretty sure that Winn Dixie moved out of here before coming back to the area with the ill fated Decker store in the 1990s. After that, a number of things went in -- I think it was a party shop at one time, but Marshall's has been there for several years now.

UPDATE: Updated the date in the post title from "1970s" to "Late 1990s" since commenters recall this store being open until the Decker store opened.

This real estate report says this building was built in 1986 -- I would have guessed a bit earlier than that. I was first aware of it when it was a Garcia's Mexican restaurant. I'm pretty sure that this was the spot anyway, though the facade was different (the real estate link says the place was remodelled in 1996..). As I think I've written somewhere, Columbia has a hard time getting and / or keeping "national" Mexican chains. We never had a Rio Bravo, Chevvy's, Chi-Chi's or On The Border, and we lost Garcia's and Don Pablo's. El Chico seems to be the only one that sticks. To be fair though, I think the whole Garcia's chain has fallen on hard times, and they closed their Myrtle Beach location several years ago.

After Garcia's the place became Roadhouse Grill which was sort of a Western place like (but not as good as) The Texas Roadhouse on Two Notch, but that didn't last long either. After that I think the building was empty for several years until it's most recent incarnation as a Bingo hall.

UPDATE 13 May 2010: Just for grins, here's the old Garcia's building in the Kroger plaza off of US-17 in North Myrtle Beach:

In the 1990s, the restaurant chain Krystal started to make a push in to the Southeast. They had been around for a good while by then, but were new to the Columbia market. I think that originally their niche had been as the Whitecastle-like store operating in regions where there was no Whitecastle, and they had a small burger similar to Whitecastle's "slider".

However during their big expansion push, they came up with the selling point that they had menu items not usually found at fast food joints. I think these were mostly vegetables, but the only actuall one I can recall right now is "fried mushrooms", because I like fried mushrooms. (The State Fair is usually the only time I get them though). Anyway, they did a big build-out and opened lots of new stores, but for whatever reason, it didn't work out for them, and the stores all closed. I'm pretty sure the chain is still around, but they've exited Columbia, and I believe the whole state. I only went to Krystal a few times and never to this store. I'm pretty sure that this particular location was a "mini" store with drive-through and takeout only.

I don't know anything about Autogym. I don't recall hearing the name anywhere else, so I'm assuming that it was a one-off local carwash operation, and I don't think it lasted too long. I'm not sure why you would bring your car to a building not fitted out with carwash equipment, especially when there was a carwash, built as a carwash, just across Two Notch on Decker, and perhaps that was a problem for them.

UPDATE 27 April 2009:

Well, it appears I was mistaken when I tagged this building as a former Krystal. I've changed the post title to reflect that, but I'm going to leave all the verbiage I wrote about Krystal since the comments won't make sense otherwise -- I reserve the right to cut-and-paste it into a post about a real Krystal sometime!

Commenter Badger identifies the initial tenant as a Rally's. I never ate at (or got takeout from) a Rally's, but it seems to me that sometime in the early 90s, the idea for a very small takeout burger place took off, and suddenly there were about half a dozen different chains working the concept. There were Rally and Checker as mentioned in the comments, but there was also Central Park, and several others that I am completely blanking on right now. In general they didn't last long though I'm not sure why -- personally I hate to do take-out but plenty of people seem to like it.

UPDATE 12 September 2009: Well, it's open again, this time as a Chinese take-out operation, China Garden.

I don't believe I ever shopped this store, but I think it was on Rosewood for most of my life. The building is one of the older style Pigs, much like that of the Covenant Road Pig and the Marshall Street Pig, though in this case the follow-on store has not retained the Pig's marquee letters the way Kimbrell's has.

The current tenant is Dollar Tree an "everything for a dollar store. It appears from this real estate listing that the building itself is again for sale, though Dollar Tree has a six-year lease. I notice that they are building a lot of residences on the other side of Rosewood (and a bit down the hill) -- too bad the PIg didn't hold out another few years, as that would be a new customer base (though the store is small for the current Piggly WIggly concept).

UPDATE 27 April 2009: I have updated the closing date in the post title from "2000s" to the "July 2002" date supplied by Dave in the comments.

Here's another of Columbia's many drive-in theaters that I never went to, or at least I think it is. I don't really have an address from the 15 April 1973 ad in The State, just "at the Fairgrounds gate", and this lot, adjacent to Jaco's, is the only one that looks plausible. It is now, and has been for as long as I can remember, used for parking during the State Fair, and is vacant the rest of the year.

Of the three movies playing, I have never heard of two of them, and would never have heard of Blindman except for a recent retrospective review in Video Watchdog. This is a great magazine if you have any interest in SF/Fantasy/Horror/Low Budget movies. They were quite pleased with Ringo Starr's performance in this forgotten spaghetti western.

I'm not sure when the Skyway closed -- after 15 April 1973, obviously. I'm sure it was gone by the time I was in college around 1980 as I remember taking a bus to the Fair then, and I'm sure I would have noticed a drive-in as they dropped us off at the front gate.

There was a time when I would have known within days that Waldenbooks at Columbia Mall had closed. I guess it says something about the times (and me) that in the event I didn't even suspect until I started getting google hits on this blog for keywords like "waldenbooks columbia mall closed". I went by today to check it out, and it is indeed gone, though there is still a (discount) book store in that storefront.

I'm pretty sure Waldenbooks was one of the original stores in the mall when it opened, and one of the last of those (I believe only Sears is left now, though if you count Macy's through its purchase of Rich's there would be two).

Books were actually pretty well represented in the initial mall. There was Walden's, Zondervan's Christian Books, B. Dalton Books, Rich's had a reasonably sized book department and I think Belk's had a smaller one for a while. While I would often check Rich's for interesting closeouts, Walden's and B. Dalton's were my main hangouts. In those days, you never knew when new books would be out so I would generally stop by at least once a week and make a run through the SF and humor sections. Of course once I moved out of town, I stopped by less often, and by the time I moved back, I was an Amazon junkie, and the brick and mortar shops I tended to hit were either B&N, Books-a-Million or The Happy Bookseller. The last book I can specifically recall buying from this Walden's was (South Carolinian) David Weber's Honor Among Enemies in 1996.

Waldenbooks as a chain is owned by Borders, and the parent company has been closing these smaller outlets for years. According to this Reuters story the company plans to slash its Waldenbooks locations from 300 to 50 or 60, and I guess Columbia Mall didn't make the cut.