West Columbia’s ‘heart and soul’: Eclectic Triangle City district braces for redevelopment

True BBQ is ingrained in West Columbia’s Triangle City neighborhood.

The smoker out front billows constant clouds Thursday through Saturday as chicken and pork and more are slow-cooked to perfection. Pig statues stand beside it, and signs trumpeting the business as home of the “Pretty Lady” and “Sexy Lady” sauces (tomato- and mustard-based, respectively) hang above, all comfortably yellowed by the passage of time and exhaust. Judging by its outward appearance, one would likely guess the restaurant’s been there far longer than the 14 years it actually claims.

On a recent Friday night, owner Milton Zanders ran around hurriedly but pleasantly, zipping from the smoker to the kitchen to the dining room to converse with the many regulars who made their way through the door. Equal parts host and chef, he was fully in his element, seeming for all the world like he could keep doing this forever.

But he fears that won’t be the case.

“Because this building, you know, obviously,” Zanders said. “There’s gonna be new ownership to it, from my understanding, so I don’t know what their agenda is, and that may create some decisions that has to be made in terms of if I’m going to stay here and hunker down through the new structure of the owners or look for another location that maybe is more suitable for True BBQ and keep my costs down.”

Redevelopment and the change that comes with it are rampant in West Columbia right now, but they haven’t really touched Triangle City, an eclectic retail district more readily associated with Zesto of West Columbia’s towering dipped cone than the fountain the city maintains at the center of its namesake triple intersection. But the wave is likely to come crashing on its shore in the near future.

The city’s River District, which sits about six blocks down Meeting Street from Triangle City, witnessed a trio of prominent departures in December:

▪ New Brookland Tavern had been the longest continuously operating music venue in Lexington County, having hosted shows since at least 1998. It relocated across the Congaree River to Five Points, choosing to leave when new owners raised the rent at its longtime home on State Street.

▪ Chinese takeout staple Jin Jin, open for nearly 30 years, also closed, leaving its shopping center vacant.

▪ New Brookland and Jin Jin were joined by Italian fine dining mainstay Al’s Upstairs, open for more than 40 years, which closed when the restaurant sold its building.

Those closures all happened around the intersection of State and Meeting streets, just across the Gervais Street Bridge from downtown Columbia. That area is booming, with the addition of the Brookland condo development and its restaurants, Black Rooster and Another Broken Egg Cafe, along with a bevy of other recent additions — D’s Wings, Savage Craft Ale Works, Breakfast at Ruiz, etc.

This activity is poised to start pushing up from the river.

A $3.5 million project, paid for with federal American Rescue Plan funds, will soon see the city transform the drab but rejuvenating stretch of Meeting Street between the River District and Triangle City with stamped crosswalks and mast arm traffic signals to increase walkability and landscaped medians to make it a prettier road to navigate.

That should further fuel activity along Meeting Street, already kindled by recent additions including WECO Bottle and Biergarten and the jazz club Chayz Lounge.

The city blew more oxygen into the fire with the addition of its Meeting Street Music Festival, which drew an estimated 7,200 to the area in its first outing last September and is poised to bring a big crowd again when it returns for 2024. That’s in addition to the popular Kinetic Derby Day, the soapbox competition the city sends racing down the Meeting Street hill each April.

And just up from all this is Triangle City.

It is, in many ways, the heart of West Columbia. It’s located roughly at the city’s geographical center, and three key thoroughfares — 12th Street, Charleston Highway and U.S. 1 (Meeting Street until it becomes Augusta Road) — pump traffic through it. West Columbia’s City Hall is located there, sitting a couple blocks away from the neighborhood’s central intersection.

The neighborhood is very much part of the city’s ambitions for future revitalization. Decades ago, it was the city’s economic core, and Mayor Tem Miles seems keen to breathe new life into its aged buildings.

“We’ve tried to be focused and go from one area to the next and then try to link those together,” he said. “So as we’re working up Meeting Street, the next logical area that we’re going to come to is Triangle City. But it is the heart and soul of town.”

Right now, it’s filled with the kind of heart and soul you’d expect for a neighborhood dominated by aging buildings and dotted with vacancies. Beyond the iconic Zesto, it’s got True BBQ and a few well-liked Hispanic restaurants. It’s home to one of the area’s few remaining dedicated comic and record stores in Scratch N’ Spin and a variety of other longtime local businesses. Many of these are likely to have trouble if building owners change and rents go up.

At the same time, all of the local leaders and business owners The State spoke to said improving Triangle City is very much needed. How to do that without stripping the neighborhood of its local character is a looming question.

“That’s obviously kind of a balancing act with a neighborhood like Triangle City,” Zanders said. “There’s a lot of long-term cultural institutions here that are here because the rents have allowed them to stay.”

Benefits and drawbacks

A big project, one the mayor has said could be the city’s “most transformative” ever, could be landing on Triangle City’s doorstep sooner rather than later.

The historic former Colite Industries factory that sits vacant and crumbling behind the 12th Street Plaza shopping center has been announced as the future home for Colite City.

The mixed-use development would overhaul the old factory, inspired by invigorating co-working spaces that have taken over unoccupied industrial buildings in spots such as Austin, Texas and Durham, North Carolina, helping to turn those areas into hotspots.

The plans include a food hall, two restaurant spaces, an event space, maker/designer spaces, an entrepreneur hub featuring flex office space, studio spaces, and pocket parks. The project was announced in the fall of 2022, with no specific tenants or a timeline for opening having yet been announced.

The factory’s location adjacent to Triangle City and the highways that zip through and around it was key to Jams & Stark, the real estate development company behind Colite City, deciding its plans could work there.

“It’s so accessible from all parts of our area,” said Wade Caughman, the company’s director of development. “It’s like the center of metro Columbia.”

Right at West Columbia City Hall, S.C. 12/Jarvis Klapman Boulevard becomes a freeway to easily navigate the 3 miles into downtown Columbia, while the proximity to U.S. 1 puts the area right on the road to Lexington, which sits about 10 miles away. The neighborhood sits close to access for all three of the interstates that come to Columbia along with the Columbia Metropolitan Airport, which would facilitate people getting to Colite City from out of town.

But Triangle City’s nexus of highways comes with drawbacks, both for West Columbia in looking to improve it and for potential developers who might look to do projects there.

“The intersections, all of this has to be coordinated with (the South Carolina Department of Transportation),” explained David Moye, a West Columbia city councilman who represents part of Triangle City and who works as a real estate broker.

“We’re looking for smaller sites within the Triangle City that can create localized revitalization,” Moye said. “And this requires cooperation with DOT and multiple property owners and is fairly complicated, but there are efforts on City Council and city staff to make that happen.”

The mayor describes those ambitions as being very much in line with the type of life the city has seen take hold down by the river.

“Our interest is seeing it’d be a retail/restaurant type environment,” Miles said. “I recently moved my office a couple of years ago, and I’m moving my house over Charleston Highway, right outside of Triangle City. I’m long-term very, very positive on the redevelopment of Triangle City.”

Tim James, the president and CEO of the Greater Cayce West Columbia Chamber of Commerce, sees things similarly, explaining that with the amount of activity in the area, the redevelopment wave arriving in Triangle City is just a matter of time.

“There are folks that are looking every single day to be able to bring businesses into (the Cayce/West Columbia area), 12th Street Extension, Triangle City,” he said, explaining that the relatively low cost to do business in the area compares favorably to the amount of people who live there and come there.

To his point, the average daily traffic along 12th Street coming through Triangle City is 12,000, per SCDOT, while 11,800 drivers scoot by on Jarvis Klapman Boulevard and 12,900 drivers roll through on U.S. 1.

“I see a great deal of potential for the Triangle City area,” James said.

Anticipating the future

Local business owners in Triangle City are eager for the improvements and increased traffic that would likely follow new development in the area. But they’re also wary of the increases in expenses that could also come along with it.

Scratch N’ Spin stretches back far more cavernously than it would appear from the small storefront it has facing 12th Street, and owner Eric Woodard said he’s actively looking at expanding. But whether that will take the form of carving out more room in a neighboring storefront or moving elsewhere will depend on how the neighborhood progresses in the next few years.

He’s grateful for the neighborhood streetscaping efforts West Columbia has made in recent years, sparked by state and matching city funds that came in about a decade ago. And he’s excited for the increase in traffic that a project like Colite City can bring.

But as any record store owner should be in 2024, he’s concerned about new activity in the area upsetting the delicate balance that allows his business to succeed in Triangle City.

“We can’t control the rents, we can’t control the bigger picture, like a Colite thing, aside from going to a town meeting and voicing our concerns and things like that,” Woodard said. “I’ve been here for 20 years, and whenever I first came here, Triangle City was on low, and, I’ve always felt like, long-term, Triangle City would be able to come up.”

Around the corner on B Avenue, Southern breakfast and lunch staple Compton’s Kitchen cited not actually having any parking of its own and no sufficient parking in the neighborhood as a contributing factor to its recent closure after 47 years in business. Owner Asia Dove said the restaurant could come back, but that’s uncertain.

Beyond parking, she said she was stuck somewhat in a no-win situation, with longtime regulars having trouble accepting new ownership when she took over in 2022 and changes to the menu forced by supply chain issues, while a negative perception of the neighborhood from those looking in from the outside kept her from reaching new customers.

“How do you make progress, and kind of rattle the cage simultaneously without losing key or core components of your community?” Dove said.

Jose Manuel Vargas transitioned from a food truck to open Manny’s Shaved Ice as a brick-and-mortar shop along Augusta Road in 2017. He said he’s excited for the increased traffic that new developments could bring — particularly Colite City, as he speculated the traffic light right at his business could end up being one of the main access points for that development.

But he’s also bracing for increased expenses, explaining that he’s already looking at growing his menu by adding Chipotle-esque food items in addition to his core sweet treats as a way to bring in additional revenue and offset potentially escalating costs to do business in Triangle City. He said he’s also looking at improving the look of his space to keep up with potential new development.

“I see it the positive way, like this is good for everybody around here,” Vargas said. “Maybe the rent will go up. The city is doing a great job improving the city, and that will bring maybe more quality of life if they know how to manage it.”

As to Triangle City’s most iconic business, the aforementioned Zesto, owner Anastasia Manos said it’s too early to tell what a development like Colite City could mean for the area.

“I would need to see financial projections, plans, other businesses’ commitments, time frame, and much more to really know enough,” she said.

For his part, Moye, the city councilman and real estate broker, said the setup of Triangle City would make it hard for the kind of development that would really disrupt the neighborhood’s character to make a go there.

“Triangle City is built where the character has to be a certain way,” he said. “Parking solutions have to be met at the neighborhood level and not at the individual lot level. And that doesn’t fit the model that national retailers and national chains necessarily want to see. They want to drag and drop with a big parking lot out front.”

The mayor emphasized that businesses shifting in the neighborhood is nothing new.

“Triangle City’s ever changing,” he said, spotlighting the departure and subsequent demolition of another local restaurant a few years ago when it moved to another spot in West Columbia, which ended up bolstering another beloved eatery. “If you back up five, six years ago whenever Bogarts and the other places that were there, Zesto consolidated their ownership and expanded their parking.”

Indeed, while there was at least some wariness on the part of all the business owners The State spoke to, none of them described a sense of doom or gloom in assessing their outlook on Triangle City’s future.

Not even Zanders, as he contemplated potentially having to move True BBQ.

“I think Triangle City is moving in the right direction when it comes to economic development,” he said. “I know that there’s some areas that (the city’s) focusing on trying to improve upon, which is going to make it better for the whole structure. Business brings business, and so we’re just looking forward to seeing what the future holds for West Columbia.”