TONIGHT: Underground Columbia briefly coming to light

VIDEO AT END OF STORY

The small tour group carefully progressed down one leg of the dark, L-shaped catacomb under Columbia last week, rousing a pigeon that startled the visitors as he flapped down the hall just above their heads.

That pigeon is one of the few creatures to spend much time in Down Under Columbia since the briefly popular entertainment complex under the Arcade Mall shut its doors in 1974.

Thursday, a few lucky people will get to tour the old haunts as part of the Historic Columbia Foundation’s 50th anniversary behind-the-scenes tour program.

Historic Columbia has been given permission to offer limited tours in coming months of Down Under, the W.B. Smith Whaley House/Dunbar Funeral Home, the Woodrow Wilson Family Home, the Lorick House, the Curtiss-Wright Hangar at Hamilton-Owens Airport, the Powell-Wright House in Melrose Heights and the Guignard Brick Works kilns in Cayce. The tours are limited in size because these aren’t private structures and aren’t designed and maintained for public tours.

“We think we’ve got a nice collection ... that would appeal to Columbians, whether they’ve been around for generations or just been around a few weeks or months,” said John Sherrer, director of cultural resources for Historic Columbia, which kicked off its 50th anniversary celebration in November.

Anybody can drive by and see the outside of most of the structures on the tours.

But the short-lived, fun-while-it-lasted Down Under Columbia in recent years has been little more than a memory of longtime residents. Several restaurants, bars and speciality shops opened in the basement area under the Arcade Mall in 1971, Columbia’s attempts to copy the wildly successful Underground Atlanta complex that opened in 1968.

Down Under Columbia was open only a few years, a victim in part of conflicts between USC students and Fort Jackson soldiers during that anti-war period, Sherrer said.

The staircase entrances leading down from Main and Washington streets, once marked by a stylized logo of a mustachioed man in a red-and-white-striped jacket, now are covered with slabs of metal and blocked by metal rails. The Historic Columbia tour will enter from an elevator at the elbow in the L-shaped basement, where visitors will have to duck under exposed pipes and dodge low-hanging lights.

They’ll find frozen in time a 14,000-square-foot entertainment district — the Vista a generation earlier and on a much smaller scale. Most of the facades remain. There are faux brick walls, diamond-shaped windows, the edge of a wood-shingled roof, and even a replica trolley converted into a bar. Together, they created an old-world streetscape — with no street and a low ceiling instead of sky.

Historic Columbia is trying to learn more about the individual businesses. Sherrer hopes some of the people on the tours will provide those details.

“What I find for me as a historian and historic preservationist is the most interesting things are stories people tell,” Sherrer said. “While it was short-lived, I think it lives on in a lot of people’s memories as a very fond time for them.

“It was a short-lived stage for Columbia entertainment, and I wish I had been a part of it. I hate that I was a generation behind.”

The building’s owners, the Robison family, have kicked around the idea of resurrecting the basement businesses, but bringing everything up to current building codes would be extremely expensive, said Robison family spokesman Ned Barnes. Instead, the family’s short-term plan is to make improvements upstairs to the entrances and the atrium of the Arcade Mall, which was Columbia’s first indoor shopping center and recently has found a new niche as a home to artist studios.

People who have passed the arcade’s doors on Main Street and Washington Street but never gone inside would be stunned at the Renaissance Revival-style columns and balconies inside. The building is in the National Register of Historic Places, and the spruce-up comes just in time to mark the arcade’s 100th anniversary. The upstairs part of the arcade building is open to the public during business hours, but it could have been on the Historic Columbia tour even without its secret Down Under.

As Sherrer said: “We wanted to focus on places where people say, ‘Hmm, what’s that?’”