Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

I admit to being a little confused about the status of this place. I have never seen any cars there, and the Facebook page shows no recent activity. Furthermore, I recently drove by there at 10pm on a Saturday night and everything was dark. But there is no indication on the door that they are out of business, the street sign seems fairly new, and there are recent google reviews.

Can anyone confirm whether they are open or closed?

UPDATE 27 January 2023 -- Initially this post was a request for information as I could never tell if the place were open. (One commenter supplied the tidbit that they did not open before midnight). Now it is a closing, as the shopping center has suffered a fire, centered on this club.

As reported by commenter Ralph, HobbyTown USA, home of

Radio Control, Models, Rockets, Games & Toys and more!

has left Two Notch Road for the former Tuesday Morning location at The Clusters Of Whitehall:

At one time, I was very into model rockets, having only the slight problem that my father was adamantly against my ever having any (I believe now, having read more, that he was probably thinking of "amateur rocketry" from the 50s where people would regularly manage to blow themselves up rather than "model rocketry"). There used to be a store on Forest Drive with either Centauri or Estes rockets, and a store at Boozer with both if I recall correctly, and I would go to look whenever I could. In the end, he kind of had to agree when it was an approved school project, but darned if one guy didn't manage to set the polo field on fire anyway..

All of which is to say, I'm sure I would be checking out out HobbyTown if I were still 14!

(Hat tip to commenter Ralph)

This 9 May 2017 State story is a bit inspecific, but we can conclude two things from it:

1) Tuesday Morning is opening a store in the old Hancock Fabrics location on Harbison, and

2) As of May 2017, this store on Saint Andrews Road was still open.

What they *don't* say is that *this* store was moving to Harbison, but given that the Harbision store is apparently now open, and has the same phone number that this one did, I think we can safely conclude that.

Also somewhat interesting, is that the story still refers to this plaza as The Clusters of Whitehall.

(Hat tip to commenter Andrew)

UPDATE 9 October 2017 -- Here is the new location of the store in Harbison Court:

UPDATE 22 June 2018 -- The old Tuesday Morning is now HobbyTown USA:

UPDATE 2 March 2023: Updating tags and adding map icon.

When the sun is just right, you can look at the "tower" at the north-west corner of St Andrews Center and almost read the outlines of the lettering that has been taken down from the top. If you actually could read it, it would say The Clusters of Whitehall.

The way I remember it, at one time, The Clusters of Whitehall was a very tony place. It seemed to me that many of the shops had radio ads on the old WIS radio, and when the announcer would sonorously intone "...located in The Clusters of Whitehall", it sounded as though he might as well be saying "...located on Rodeo Drive".

Times change and areas go up and down. Saint Andrews Road as a whole has certainly seen better times, and The Clusters were really convienient neither to I-20 nor I-26 as traffic in the area increased and more stop-lights were added. By the 1980s, The Clusters were in decline.

I'm not really sure of the original store roster (we rarely went to that side of town at all) but I think they had a Fresh Market as sort of an upscale anchor. This report says that as of December 2000, The Clusters were only 55% occupied and that a new call center and Tuesday Morning would bring them up to 94% occupied. It also gives a partial list of former stores: Heavenly Ham, Nocturnal Home Diagnostics, Gregory's To Go, Gold Leaf Gallery and Avant Gardener.

After that, google turns up another hit for the property being sold to Ziff Properties Inc in April 2006. There is another story from The State that was widely linked, but is no longer generally available. There is enough text left in the google hit, however, to say that by May 18 2008, the place was being referred to as "the former Clusters of Whitehall", leading me to guess that the new name St Andrews Center was probably coined in 2007. Currently while the place doesn't appear in any terminal distress, it is obviously now a lower rent type operation than before with correspondingly lower expectations for the quality of tenants and level of occupancy.

Finally, I was always confused about The Cloisters of Whitehall vs The Clusters of Whitehall. I haven't made a deep study of the matter, but my googling for this post suggests that the Cloisters is a real-estate subdivision in the area while the Clusters was the mall.

UPDATE 27 January 2023: Adding tags & map icon, adding the full street address in the post title.