Harbison Boulevard

I've lived in the same town, Columbia SC, most of my life. Every time I go out, I marvel at the drastic changes that have occurred here over my lifetime. (I sometimes marvel at the changes that have occurred since my last shopping excursion.) Condominiums stand across from my childhood home, where once lived an old couple in a farmhouse who grew corn in their yard.

No place exemplifies the transformation of my hometown more than Harbison Boulevard. In the 1980s, I attended Irmo High School, which is positioned near the intersection of St. Andrews Road and Harbison Boulevard. Riding home from school with a friend (I didn't have my license yet), we rode down the long, empty, recently-paved road to his subdivision. A small corner sign indicated that a short, empty street was named "Mall Road." When I commented on the odd name, he informed me that there were plans to build a shopping mall on that very spot one day.

"Really? Way out here?" I asked with surprise. Unlike the developers, I didn't foresee the population explosion that was to take place in the coming decades. There was a big mall on the other side of town to which people would make an annual pilgrimage for Christmas shopping, but for the most part Irmo residents made do with the relatively modest retail options available in our own area.

By the time I graduated from Irmo in the late eighties, there was a single stop light and a brand new Walmart (the first one I had ever seen) on Harbison Boulevard. And over the next few years, each time I came home from college to visit, I noticed new buildings slowly but steadily popping up along the road like mushrooms after a rainstorm. 

Eventually, the long-planned Columbiana Centre mall appeared. Columbiana was now the "good" mall in Columbia, the new destination of shopping pilgrims. It also became the subject of contention between different local government jurisdictions. The mall sat on the dividing line between Richland and Lexington counties, and for a time, differing Blue Laws in the two counties meant stores in one part of the mall were required to open an hour later than the others. More consequential, the city of Columbia, coveting the tax revenue of the popular suburban shopping area, annexed a slice of Harbison Boulevard  - populated with lucrative retailers - that had belonged to Lexington County. The encroachment of city government into the county not only siphoned off what could have rightly been considered county resources, but it also led to confusion about jurisdiction with regards to law enforcement matters.

In subsequent decades, Harbison Boulevard has continued to accumulate chain stores and restaurants at an impressive rate. Buildings and parking lots cover every square inch of space, and the traffic congestion is some of the worst in the city. A few weeks ago I made the regrettable decision to pick up a last-minute gift in the area during the shopping frenzy a few days before Christmas, and it took me about an hour and a half to traverse a mile of the road. I had plenty of time to ponder the fact that teen boys had raced their cars on the long, empty stretch in this exact place when I was in high school forty years ago.

The population has changed as well. One one recent shopping excursion, I noted that I heard fellow customers speaking four different foreign languages. Unsurprisingly, crime has also become commonplace in the formerly "good" area. I was at a church event a couple of years ago when news spread amongst the alarmed congregants that there had been a gang-related mass shooting at Columbiana Centre. "I was just there earlier today!" I heard someone remark. And when I googled "Harbison Boulevard" for this blog, the top hit was a story about a boy being shot there a few weeks ago on Christmas day. 

The golden era of Harbison as a shopping destination has certainly passed, in accordance with the familiar life cycle of American cities in recent decades. The changes I have observed over the past half-century in my own back yard are probably similar to those you have seen in yours.