When I moved to Winston-Salem in 2002 to start a new job, downtown Winston was pretty depressing. Very little to do, not too many places to eat and no real incentive to hang around after work. In the past four years though, through steady persistent work on behalf of the city, developers, and businesses and more than a bit of hope and good fortune, downtown Winston is recovering and poised to return to something of its former glory.
The original centerpiece of downtown development was the Restaurant Row program which has succeeded quite well despite some notably losses like the Indian restaurant Kababs. The Arts District is coming along nicely with art gallery and craft stores with a few restaurants tossed into the mix.
Yet restaurants and art galleries is not enough to create a vibrant self-sustaining downtown that can take care of itself without the need for civic funding. People need more of a reason to come downtown other than seeing a painting or grab a bite at Mellow Mushroom. For the people living downtown, there has to be enough things downtown so that they do not have to travel to Stratford Rd or Hanes Mall.
So what are the sort of things that downtown Winston-Salem needs to be more well-rounded and be an alternative place to go for shopping and entertainment?
Let me throw a few things out there:
- Upscale men’s salon – I used to go to American Male salon when it was in the tower at One West Fourth. It was great getting a hair cut during working hours and get a relaxing shoulder massage as necessary. But the location killed it as few people knew that it actually existed. So now it is gone and there is no other place downtown to get a great hair cut. So now I go to Great Clips at a strip mall. A street level barber shop/hair salon along Fourth or Trade will do well I figure. There is a new Spa opening up at the Embassy Suites for the ladies but gentlemen do not have an alternative.
- Performing Arts theatre – this was considered to be one of the main structures for Unity Place when the initial plans for that re-development came about. With that failure, troupes like the Little Theatre housed in smallish community type theatres scattered around Winston have remained far from downtown where I think they will thrive through better attendance and visibility. A small theatre with the ability to hold small and mid-size productions for upwards of three hundred people in attendance is required. The Steven’s Centre as a venue is too large for many of the community style productions these troupes perform. As it is, the Steven’s Centre in the prime months od September through April usually has a full calendar. As for location of the new theatre, it is important to leverage all of the new restaurant development along Fourth and in the Arts District because people going to plays will make a night out of it with a dinner and a show and they probably would like to walk from the restaurant directly to the theatre without returning to their car. I would favor the Arts District area over Fourth primarily because there is more land available there for redevelopment particularly along Liberty St and I think the Arts District is going to see an surge in restaurant dining if a theatre with regular productions is located there. However, the Sawtooth Center is getting a make-over which would include a new theatre that would meet this need provided that the funding holds. With corporate donors originally signed on as sponsors of the new theatre, the economic collapse may affect these plans. For now, it is a wait and see approach.
- Film theatre – similarly, a film theatre geared for downtown audiences may also work well. There is a need in this city to see films that would not normally get a wide release but would attract a nice audience here in Winston-Salem. The film series held at the Stevens Centre did well initially in bringing in films that were ignored by other multiplexes in town. I can imagine a 3-4 screen theatre that sits 150-300 people with a cafe lobby and perhaps some nice touches like bigger and plusher seating. The theatre will also serve as a venue for the River Run festival which tends to scatter its films all over the downtown area in venues that were not set up as theatres in the first place. Again, this gives downtown another entertainment option which if it brings people in from outside of the downtown area, will give a boost to the clubs and restaurants.
- Book store (new or used) – I like to think that a downtown without a bookstore of any sort can not be considered a true downtown especially one with an arts district. Despite being the Internet Age, people still read books, magazines and newspapers. Yet there is no outlet downtown that sells these items inclusively. I would like to think that as part of the downtown experience, someone living at the Gallery Lofts gets up on a Saturday morning, stroll over to the Arts District, buys a few papers, walks to Chelsee’s for a cappuccino, have a relaxing read of the news and smile to himself that it is moments like this that he was glad that he moved downtown. As for the type of bookstore, I would favor an used bookstore with a newspaper and periodical section as I think people would still go to Barnes and Noble or Borders to pick up the new releases of books unless this bookstore specialises in a certain subject like cooking or children’s books.
- Gourmet Food Shop – for better or for worse, the new residential developments downtown seem fixated on the higher end of the price scale which tend to be the market for young upscale professionals and well-off retirees. One aspect of this market is that they take their dining seriously but probably can not afford to eat out all of the time. A gourmet food store like a Fresh Market and not a grocery store per se like Kingz Downtown Market, that can offer a variety of expensive food stuffs like imported cheeses and meats may do well. 6th and Vine I think has a side business in retailing wine and there is the Farmers’ Market nearby on 6th Street during the growing season. That helps provide for part of the need. Being a high margin type of store will go part way to address the low volumes of the local market. It may act also a store of last resort for the restaurants in the area if they run out of something during the course of the day.
This is by no means an exhaustive list. There are far more types of things downtown Winston-Salem needs to become more fully rounded and not necessarily retail either. A park or two and a new library are also important I think to bring downtown Winston up to the level of great downtown cities.
Technically any municipality can be called a city as long as they provide all of the essential services as required to manage it like police, health & sanitation and emergency services. Population is not supposed to be a factor so you can have a city as small as 8000 people in size or as large as 10 million.
I suppose there should be more of a clarification on what defines a city as oppose to an urban environment. For most cities, the heart is the traditional downtown core surrounded by older densely packed residential areas and as you travel further out from the city core, you will be in more spreaded out suburban areas.
That is the matter of most large cities in the world today but for many people, a city is not truly a city unless it has a downtown core spiked with skyscrapers of towering height but for me, a city is more than that.
Here in Winston-Salem, there is a new development called Civic Plaza located in the downtown core. In the past few weeks, several older structures have been torned down in preparation for the first phase of the project, One Park Vista, a luxury condo development. The second part of the project is a tower located at Liberty and Fourth on the other side of the block where the abandoned Pepper Building currently sits. This tower was originally planned at fourteen stories then increased to twenty stories and now as of today has been scaled back to the original fourteen stories.
Along Fourth Street, near Town Run Lane, passers-by peer through fencing at a construction site during lunch breaks. A crater of dirt, stone and wood marks the area where a group of buildings used to stand in downtown Winston-Salem.
The former Davis Department Store building is gone. So is the Mother & Daughter Store building.
What the lunch crowd sees taking place is the construction of a $17 million building called One Park Vista, which is the first phase of a public-private project known as the Civic Plaza plan. That plan calls for a downtown plaza flanked by One Park Vista and another condo building on a 3-acre tract.
One Park Vista is on schedule, but the second phase still has holes in it. Financing, and the city’s possible use of tax-increment financing, is being discussed. In addition, the size of the second condo building, which would sit on the southwest corner of Liberty and Fourth streets, has been reduced.
Niemann Capital LLC, the lead developer on the Civic Plaza plan, had proposed a building of 21 stories, similar to the height of the Nissen Building. But the latest proposal made in September changed the height to 14 stories. Tom Niemann, the company’s president, could not be reached for comment.
Jason Thiel, the president of the Downtown Winston-Salem Partnership, said that the change in the height of the building was presented last month at the partnership’s development meeting.
Thiel said that the proposed building, which does not have a name yet, started off as a 14-story building.
“When it was presented at a larger scale, they were trying to show potential of the market. It (the change in size) really is simply a reflection of budget risk and market forces,” he said.
The building would probably go at the southwest corner of Liberty and Fourth streets, down the block from One Park Vista, which is being built by other developers, Kerry Avant and Thad Lewallen.
The two condo buildings would have a park between them, on a tract from Town Run Lane to Liberty Street. To make space for Niemann’s building, the developer has suggested that the vacant Pepper Building be demolished.
Whatever the height of Niemann’s building, Ginger Baldwin McCollum, a real-estate agent working on One Park Vista, said that demand is running high, with 19 of the building’s 34 units reserved, sold or under contract.
(Source: Second downtown condo in Civic Plaza plan shrinks – Winston Salem Journal)
The reason for the reduction in the plan is I think that the real estate reality is starting to sink in that the market for high end condos is reaching saturation point in Winston-Salem’s downtown. West End Village, 248 Main, Gallery Lofts are all new developments that will scores of new residential units downtown. It may not realistic to put an additional 6 stories of condos on a building if the developers can not sell them.
I do not think fourteen stories buildings is a small building which you can find in the suburbs. There are a few towers downtown now that exceed that height such as the Wachovia and Winston towers. It is a reasonable height and considering that its neighbouring towers like One West Fourth and RJ Reynolds towers are of comparable height, placing the fourteen story tower at Civic Plaza will not not seem to far out of place. My preference is for buildings to occupy as much of the area as possible creating a dense effect. Winston-Salem is not Charlotte or any other type of large city and having a few towers scattered here and there does not make it a large city. Then you have to consider that having such large towers is that they require setbacks from the street which result in these windblown plazas which to me are one of the reasons for the decline of cities in the dark age (50’s-80’s). These plazas created dead areas in many downtown cores and is not something I like to see in Winston.
I have lived in many large cities around the world and what defines urban living is simply density of people and architecture. Image if you will a street lined on both sides with buildings ranging from 6 to 14 stories with wide sidewalks but no plazas. Commerical enterprises at street level, apartments & offices on top. Such a compact living arrangement brings the jostle of urban living close up to you every day. You can feel that you are in a city as you walk past blocks and blocks of such building. Compressing all of that urbanity into a tower or two takes away that experience.
Winston in its heyday was considered to be one of the premier cities of the south and looking at photographs from that era and even as late as the 1950’s, you could see how dense the city was at its core with factories, offices and homes all in close proximity to each other with nary a tower around except for the RJR building. Perhaps the rise of skyscrapers in many urban cores, along with the rise of suburban shopping malls, was the factor that lead to the decline of downtowns as offices scattered throughout the downtown consolidate at this new gleaming edifice which lead to the abandonment of buildings throughout the rest of the downtowns. With the same number of downtown workers housed in fewer buildings, you will get these vacant buildings and surface parking lots that seem to rise up.
Fourteen stories is a good height for this development. There is another phase of the project that could see the removal of the old courthouse in favour of another tower of comparable height. However as there is significant amount of commerical space downtown available right now I can not see anyone building office towers on speculation. What I would like to see after this spate of condo building and conversions is more infill development downtown to help use up all of that empty space particularly on Liberty St. Spreading out the density of the downtown core help makes tratransitre efficient and may lead to the building of the oft-discussed streetcar line.
There are many things that can define a city: the ability to sustain a vibrant art scene, opportunities to learn, bountiful and diverse job prospects, the number of interesting and unique restaurants and cafes. To focus on just one visual aspect of a city, the number of tall buildings it has is to me the wrong premise to judge whether a city is worthy of the term.
One thing I enjoyed living in the many cities I have had in my life is the ability to go to a museum to satisfy my intellectual curiosity. Whether it is the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto ON or the Frankfurt Art Gallery, or the Cummer Art Gallery in Jacksonville FL, I appreciate going to the museum or art gallery and lose myself amongst the exhibits for hours on end.
Winston is not without its own museums and galleries like the SECCA on Reynolda Rd, the Horton Museum and the Children’s Museum in Old Salem but I wonder if Winston can support a grander museum dedicated to some special theme like Natural History or Science or a speciality Art Gallery. I remember going to Reynolda House and in conversation with the curator was told that much of the American Art collection that is part of the Reynolds collection is in storage or on loan to various other galleries or museums because the Reynolda House had no room to display it all.
A museum does not have to be high brow as witness by the success of the Winston Cup museum dedicated to NASCAR racing on Martin Luther King Drive. There are far too many museums in various cities that are merely mausoleums in their downtown areas because of a poor understanding of what brings people to them.
But Winston needs to draw people downtown and one sure way of doing it is providing entertainment attractions and that is what a museum or an art gallery essentially does. Along with the traditional role of conveying culture and knowledge, it is also a way for us to entertain ourselves.
So what would work downtown and what scale? In my opinion, an art gallery located in the Arts District in a revitalised building on Liberty or Trade dedicated to early American Art with contributions from the Reynolds collection will be a good start. Another is the SciWorks currently located on University and relocated downtown as the core of an Interactive Science Museum that collaborates with the school district in providing knowledge to school age children.
It does not have to be an elaborate setting or housed in a building that seeks out international recognition. It should not massive endowments or a world -renown curator to run it. But it should be known to everyone locally and be a source of pride for the community for Winston-Salem.
When I walk down Fourth St in Winston Salem, or drive through the small towns around North Carolina, I am saddened to see so many boarded up store fronts and empty streets. Obviously, it was not always this way. Downtowns were once the heart of these cities and towns but like most elsewhere in America most of the businesses migrated to the office parks, strip malls, big box stores and the shopping mall. In larger centers like Winston, there is some life to the downtown if you know where to look but in a town like Statesville with its early 20th century architecture lining its streets, there is nothing there.
Wherever I traveled, I am invariably drawn to the cities more so than anything else. Beaches, mountains, small towns, sweeping vistas also have their attractions for me but it is the cities that fascinate me. The older the city with a distinctive history, the more I am interested in it. A student of history, I sometimes get a thrill or chill when I touch a building or artifact that has been around centuries; to tread upon the path of those came before me. There is certain grandeur about older cities especially those in Europe that appeal to me.
Growing up in the small towns of Newfoundland, I never knew what it was like to be caught up in the dynamic energy of a city. Choices of where to go to shop, eat or be entertained were quite limited. It was not until I moved to St. John’s for university that I had some inkling of what drives a city though in retrospect, St. John’s is more like a really big town in its attitudes and pace. I could do more there than before and the availability of historical sites and museums were quite a draw. It was not until I went to Toronto that I really knew what city living was all about.
Living in Toronto in the late 80’s through the mid 90’s brought me into contact with so many new things in music, art, food, fashion. Cities are a magnet for the arts and Toronto was no different. Walking through the neighbourhoods, you could not help note how diverse they were in contrast to the bland sameness of suburbia. One of the striking things about downtowns is that tucked away into little nooks or obscured by an overgrown garden you will find little shops, unique decorations and mind provoking banners/signs that you will not find in a strip mall or industrial/commercial area. In a way, downtowns are an expression of individuality not suburban conformity.
Downtowns that are truly well-developed provide much in the way in choices: movie theatres, fine arts theatres, museums and galleries, shops of all kinds not just fashion and crafts, dining with cuisines that range from local traditional to exotic experimental and after hours establishments for those like partying late into the night. Naturally, a downtown should reflect the social mores of those who live there but by their nature they tend to be more open-minded than other areas. In a way, downtowns provide a destination for those who want to escape and perhaps live a little before settling down.
When I lived in Europe several years ago, I came to realize how a city could survive just fine without needing a sprawling mall. Cities are compact and much of the buildings extended several stories high but you never felt really enclosed as the sidewalks were broad and greenery abundant even if it was a planter or two. People were drawn to the downtowns and being Europe, they much preferred to walk around the downtown than drive there. One of the keys for a vibrant downtown is that it must be well served by public transit. If people can leave their house and be downtown be a minimum of fuss then an important accomplishment has been attained. In Toronto, there are two main subway lines that intersect downtown and all of the bus routes feed into the various subway stops. In Frankfurt, a ten minute walk brought me to a subway station and when I disembark, a five minute hop to my work or I would be in downtown or would be at the airport. But I have always likes trains for more than their convenience. Trains even a subway have a romance factor to them, a sense of history. Taking the trans-continental train from the Hauptbahnhof station in Frankfurt to Gare d’Est station in Paris has been one of my most memorable experiences.
In Paris, London or even of the many small cities around Frankfurt I found many of the same attributes. Walking along Champs Elysees to the Louvre was majestic but darting around in some of the side streets was also thrilling. When I interacted with the locals, I felt a sense that they like being where they are with no desire to get away from it all. In Jacksonville or in Winston, people could not wait to leave the downtown to get back to their homes not daring to stay around when the sun goes down.
So in the past twenty years or so, I have come to develop an appreciation for downtowns that many others fail to have. So it is always with great interest that I take in news on the redevelopment of downtowns and the events that take place there even in a small city like Winston. For many years, the downtown of Winston has been on the decline but it appears that I have come at a most opportune time as Winston is making strides in returning the downtown as it once was, the centre of civic life.
The renovation of the Nissen Building, the redevelopment of Trade Street as an Arts community, the soaring height of One Park Vista tower, West End Village, the new downtown ballpark have all contribute to the restarting of the heartbeat of downtown Winston-Salem. But it is only a start. There are still far too many empty storefronts on Fourth Street and Liberty Street is a wasteland waiting to be rediscovered. Of course, this economic downturn is not helping as it will put the brakes on new any development and probably was the factor in why a few announced projects have collapsed.
But I can sense a change for the good now when I am downtown, much more so than 5 years ago when I first came to Winston-Salem. Just takes time, money and people with some vision and hope that downtown Winston-Salem is worth investing and living.