The historic, eponymous main street of Columbia, South Carolina offers an abundance of smartly preserved three-story buildings, some of which no doubt reflect an effort to preserve the character and details from their post-Civil War time of construction. Most of them look great, and vacancy rates, while far from perfect, are certainly better than a number of larger cities that are still struggling to recover from multiple years of social distancing lockdowns, civil unrest, and consumer unease toward both the macroeconomics (provably ephemeral) and toward traditional bricks-and-mortar shopping (likely permanent). Amidst these ruptures, Main Street Columbia soldiers on, providing wonderfully scaled streetscape: slow speeds for cars, convenient on-street parking that doesn’t overwhelm pedestrianism, broad sidewalks, and mature trees whose canopy provides release from South Carolina’s eight months of summer heat. As good as it looks at the macro-level, Main Street in the Palmetto State’s capital city still lobs a few sour grapes, mostly in the form of fake façades—cladding that hides the original 19th century appearance through a presentation that intended to “improve”. These fake façades don’t age well.
“Fake façades” may seem like a tautology, since a figurative use of the word “façade” beyond its original architectural semantics can imply a phony presentation—a disingenuous appearance that conceals the truth underneath. It’s often appropriate even from an architectural standpoint. Take this example on Cola’s Main Street:
My photo is, admittedly, sub-par. I didn’t realize the implications of what I captured until after I left Columbia and started writing this article. (Here’s a more direct view of the relevant buildings from the street.) But even from this oblique vantage point, the contrast is obvious: in the dead center of the photo is a coral-colored building with its original façade dating from the later half of the 19th century. And on the left, in the foreground? It’s a fake façade redolent of the wonderland postwar positivity of the Eisenhower or Kennedy administrations. The densely gridded micro-pyramids generate their own shadows and create a busy houndstooth appearance that no doubt morphs as the day goes by, so the light creates patterns akin to a glittery sheen, which evokes a bling that likely befits King Jewelers. Therefore, old though the cladding might be, the businesses has maintained it, hiding the original brickwork underneath.
Though this fake façade is unlike anything else on Columbia’s Main Street, it’s hardly an oddity when one surveys the medium-sized and smaller buildings of historic downtowns. Simply put: the coral building on the right is bona fide, and the one on the left reflects an attempt to “modernize” aesthetics in the mid 1950s—a time when historic downtowns were hemorrhaging market share to those suburban novelties called strip malls. I’ve featured at least two articles on the topic: one many years ago in Louisiana and another more recent one in West Virginia. Property owners invested in a mid-century sheath for those upper levels, in large part to comport with architectural fashions. But this space-age cladding often included a sadder ulterior motive: the upper floors of these old commercial buildings were often woefully underutilized, if not outright abandoned, and had fallen into neglect and disrepair. By deploying shiny new bling on the fake façades, the 1950s owners piqued the customers’ interest with these baubles, bangles, and beads…then steered the eyes downward toward the ground-level retail space. And these building owners strove to keep those first floors fully tenanted, even amidst all that competition in the burbs, where parking was abundant, loading docks were in the back, and those superfluous upper levels were virtually nonexistent.
These 50s and 60s fake façades have merely survived all these decades. In more recent years, as cultural tastes have shifted back toward the authenticity of old main streets, many property owners have stripped the faux-futuristic cladding to reveal the original façades underneath, deeming them both more aesthetic and possessing greater intrinsic value. But some, like King Jewelers, linger into the 2020s. And others go halfway.
This façade, a block or so away from King Jewelers, houses a tenant that, as far as I can tell, has been on Columbia’s Main Street for decades—at least as long as the oldest Google Street View (August 2007)—and, judging from the age of the signage, probably decades before. Yet it features few reviews and no website; it’s most likely a relic from yesteryear that has endured amidst Main Street’s vicissitudes. It’s not clear to me if Coral’s Ladies Fashions owns the building from which it operates; in fact, I’d say it’s unlikely. One characteristic is evident: whoever owns it decided to apply an unaesthetic fake façade many years ago and kept it up ever since. The black sheath appears to be some precursor to EIFS, a synthetic stucco that offers a weather-resistant finish that requires minimal maintenance. EIFS (Exterior Insulation Finishing System) has achieved notoriety in the last decade for its ubiquitousness, degrading its reputation even as it confers advantages to developers over other, costlier building materials.
I don’t believe this is EIFS here at the second floor of Coral’s Ladies Fashions, but it’s clearly a precursor material intending to shield the upper floor, putting it out of sight and out of mind. The black is a weird decision amidst South Carolina’s heat, but whoever installed this did this as an act of desperation at a time when most urban main street fortunes were in a tailspin. The material is starting to decompose in the upper right, revealing something akin to—I dunno—particle board underneath?
It’s difficult to tell what motivated people to apply the equivalent of an architectural patch, but the most facially obvious intent was to cover up windows on what was (and may still be) an underutilized second floor. Windows are expensive to replace, so what’s the point if there’s nobody on the inside to appreciate the natural light?
At the very least, the Coral’s Ladies Fashions has a counterpart in the next door neighbor immediately to the right.
Sharing a pattern at the cornice, these two addresses operate as a pair, perhaps at one point in time functioning as a single business. In 2025, the tenancy gets split at the party wall, though I suspect the building’s owner commands two leases. The righthand address gives a hint of what the entire structure might have looked like at one time, with second-floor windows and all the ornamentation intact. Carolina Hair Studios, the tenant on the right, still hides some of the original architectural details under an awning, but at least it didn’t mothball the second floor. If it seems peculiar that a property owner would invest heavily in one half of the structure while allowing the other to retain ugly, aged features that render it underutilized…then you’ve probably never spent time in a duplex where the owner lives in one half while allowing the adjacent half to devolve to a rental slum.
The fake façades offer an array of solutions that have aged with varying degrees of success. I personally harbor a soft spot for the wonderland futurism of King Jewelers, but it’s hard not to imagine that what originally lay underneath was vastly more aesthetic by the standards of its time, just as it would be today…but wasn’t in 1960. Regardless of one’s judgments of these varying structures gracing the west side of Columbia’s Main Street, they’re all vastly superior to this one on the east side:
Just a big blank gray wall covering the second floor of Doctors Care—and that amazingly bulky three-dimensional sign affixed to it. Doctors Care is out of business; hopefully the next tenant will strip away the soulless fake façade, and then sell that goofy sign to a Cincinnati museum.
14 thoughts on “Fake façades on Columbia’s Main Street: is modern now retro, or vice versa?”
This reminds me a little of my hometown of Preston MN, population ~1400. Many of the buildings downtown sport graceful storefronts from the 1890s, give or take a decade. Or at least they should. For at least 50 years, half of downtown has sported fronts covered by aluminum siding. Not coincidentally, a prominent downtown business at the time was an aluminum siding retailer/installer.
Northwest Aluminum has been gone for a couple decades, but the architectural carnage lives on in slightly muted form. Google Maps street view shows the scars, notably a building whose green-and-black monstrosity has been painted a less garish (but still odd) red and blue.
In an era when tourism from nearby Rochester, the Twin Cities metro area, and expats like me is a growing share of the local economy, some towns have gone all-in on cuteness and charm. Preston actively advertises what makes it a good place to visit, but it’s barely attempted to maximize its visual appeal.
Thanks for sharing. I’m sure the aluminum siding “influencer” (lobby) had something to do with that material as the choice of cladding for Preston back in 1960. But it probably would have happened anyway with some other material.
I took a Street View tour of your downtown and it looks like it still supports the town-square configuration common to most country seats in the Midwest. But since Preston is less populous than many county seats, it’s still impressive that there’s enough urbanism to wrap around the courthouse square fully. Some of the structures, like the (former) Trout City Brewing, but the south and west side of the square seem particularly aluminum-clad. That pharmacy building is a real oddity; is that the one you’re calling a “monstrosity”? Thankfully, the act of stripping the cladding away often reveals largely unweathered brick underneath, which, unless a great deal of moisture got trapped between the two materials, requires little restorative work–the key word being “unless”.
The biggest obstacle I see for Preston in capturing some of that small-town charm tourism is its centerpiece: the courthouse itself. It’s pretty obvious the structure there in the middle is a 1970s-era replacement, and who knows what prompted the original to come down? It may have been through accident or arson, but more often than not, those get demo’d because they were obsolete and a preservationist culture had yet to kick in. I wrote about this many years ago where a much larger city in Indiana (Muncie) did the same thing with a brutalist juggernaut, right in the middle of it all. https://dirtamericana.com/2012/06/economizing-and-downsizing-a-citys-landmarks/
Yes, the south and west side are the worst. And you’re correct – the pharmacy building is what I call a monstrosity. 🙂
As it turns out, the current courthouse was built in 1958. A brief internet search doesn’t state a reason for replacing the original courthouse building, but from the pictures it looks quite small.
We are in aesthetic agreement!
The original courthouse in Preston probably didn’t need to be big, given that Fillmore County isn’t hugely populous; from what I can tell, it has hovered around 23,000 people (give or take) for 150 years. So it’s hard to imagine the County outgrew its old courthouse. Maybe the old one wasn’t particularly grand and seemed dwarfed by its square…but that’s not a good enough reason to tear it down. Small though it may have been, it probably strove for aesthetics more than the current one.
Same with the courthouse in Muncie. I’m hardly one to impugn all brutalist architecture; I think if we keep tearing it all down (which we’re doing) we’ll regret it and will eventually miss some of it. But, if we compare the Delaware County Courthouse in my blog with the original (https://www.reddit.com/r/Lost_Architecture/comments/17eozl1/delaware_county_courthouse_muncie_indiana_18871965/) it’s hard to think that Muncie traded upward. The new Muncie courthouse looks like a university registrar office. Any university. Every university.
I’m in Blaine, WA. In a beach & border town without the diversity of Vancouver, we found an Indian restaurant. Food was just as good as my neighbors, who own a restaurant near home. But the best was the mid century Denny’s or maybe HoJo building. All the furnishings inside seemed original, too, or at least sold to the current occupants that way.
Interior of Namaste Restaurant: https://snipboard.io/5PwFDn.jpg
https://www.namasteblaine.com/
The border is about 500 yards away. https://snipboard.io/q0f2Xc.jpg
What a beautiful interior! It looks like it’s been well cared for.
I’m impelled to think this was a Denny’s because it lacks the iconic HoJo’s orange roof. Then again, roofs need to get replaced and they might have traded out the color. It could also have been some smaller family dining establishment competing with the two bigger brands.
That seems like the perfect place to thrive at a border crossing, where pop-culture nostalgia emblematic of the newly entered country can get tweaked. What a great find!
I did further research. Definitely was a Denny’s, then Big Al’s diner (responsible for yellow seats), and now Namaste.
At a preservation conference a few years back a Speaker argued that many of these “slipcovers” are now significant in their own right. She changed my way of viewing these and now I agree with that. Many are interesting designs and definitely showcase an architectural period.
I agree–in many cases, I have been won over. While it’s tough to sacrifice the aesthetics of the original (for the architectural purists among us), aesthetic novelty is often more noteworthy than mere age. After all, these late 19th century buildings weren’t necessarily conceived to be architecturally striking, but we grew collectively fond of them when we saw them to be threatened, as they often were in 1970, and we didn’t value the stuff getting churned off the suburban assembly line back then, in no small part because it was omnipresent. Fifty years later, and the “slipcovers” are more of a rarity since many of them have indeed come down. I try to cover the ones that I think are particularly strong (like King’s Jewelers here in Columbia) while critiquing the ones that clearly had no purpose other than to shroud the upper floors of old buildings (like the Coral’s or Doctors Care in this article). The mid-century façade I featured this past winter from Wheeling WV drew lots of positive attention; it’s a shame the building can’t seem to find a tenant. https://dirtamericana.com/2024/12/mid-century-modern-facade-wheeling-kaufman/
It looks so different
Agree on the point of MCM buildings and “slipcovers” falling out of fashion and being removed.
Here is a walk through “modern” architectural styles on one site in your hometown, tying together many elements in this post and comments
https://historicindianapolis.com/indianapolis-then-now-vance-blockzipper-buildingbroadbent-building/
Ah yes, the old Zipper Building. I didn’t appreciate those things quite like I do now, even though the façade’s removal only predates this blog by 2 years. I remember reading and shrugging to media coverage at the time. It definitely seems more novel than what has replaced it, but at this point, I’m more peeved by the way that blog of Virginia Avenue has turned into a goes-nowhere street stub, preventing buildings with frontage on Virginia from ever achieving much status.
I can’t help but wonder about the NW corner of Monument Circle–the site of the Anthem Building and its predecessor. I have no memory of it, but wasn’t that what Frank Lloyd Wright called the only decent piece of modern architecture in Indianapolis? Was that a façade removal or a complete demolition? I believe it was the latter.
The Anthem building site was previously a JCPenney store, and I think it just got a “stone and glass” facadectomy when Anthem moved there in the 80s.
The present building is the result of two redesigns. This story has the FLW quote:
https://indyencyclopedia.org/120-monument-circle/