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The Innovation Quarter: Where it's been and where it's going


Courtesy: Innovation Quarter
Courtesy: Innovation Quarter
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The Innovation Quarter is the heartbeat of Downtown Winston-Salem and recently they announced plans to expand with a second phase just down the road.

Walk around downtown Winston-Salem and you can’t miss it, the Innovation Quarter is a hub of work, life and play for residents of Winston-Salem.

“Most of the younger workers really want to be in an environment that they can walk to work and that they have an interesting urban environment to live in, and particularly in Winston-Salem, very affordable economic situation to work within,” said Innovation Quarter Head of Development Graydon Pleasants.

Right now, the quarter is made up two million square feet of living space, research labs and restaurants, but didn't start out like this.

In the early 2000s, the Innovation Quarter began as a concept to relocate the research wing of Wake Forest University Health Sciences, developers included the footprint of Winston-Salem's tobacco industry into the makeup of the project, after all several of these buildings are old Reynolds Tobacco Company warehouses.

“Wake Forest Biotech Place is about a 240,000 square foot building that was originally a machine shop and then the original building was tobacco manufacturing," said Pleasants. "Now it is top of the line research labs for Wake Forest University Health Sciences top research departments.”

Developer Graydon Pleasants says the need for spaces like these are evident.

“Conclusions are pretty clear that diverse teams are much higher performing and have much better results than non-diverse teams," said Pleasants. "If you take that concept and expand it out to a whole neighborhood, a whole community, or a whole district, you have this opportunity to create a lot of random collisions and a lot of energies and synergies that lead to business creation, job creation and community enhancement.”

Over the better part of two decades the Innovation Quarter grew and grew until they ran out of room, and that’s where Phase II comes in. The new space will be an extension of the Innovation Quarter, eventually becoming seamless with the original project.

Research Parkway will run through Phase II, with the majority of the site occupying the greenspace south of Third St. and north of Salem Parkway. The idea is the same, a mixed-use development with a critical mass similar to what Bailey Park is for the Innovation Quarter.

As Pleasants puts it, we won’t see any dirt being moved until 2023 with construction due to begin later that year or in early 2024. Winston-Salem mayor Allen Joines has seen the Innovation Quarter blossom in his city and can’t wait to see what Phase II will bring.

"It creates a real energy for us," said Joines. "As I said it's the tangible example of what we are trying to build our brand on, that is being innovative and arts of course... You drive through there and you can see the work that is being done on a daily basis."

A goal of the Innovation Quarter was to bring unique minds together into an area, Phase II will only help expand those possibilities, a thought that excites Pleasants.

“Winston-Salem needs to be its authentic self and Innovation Quarter is certainly an expression of that," said Pleasants. "It’s that authenticity that people react to. That’s what brings people to Winston-Salem and keeps them in Winston-Salem because it’s something different, it’s interesting and it’s creative when you walk into a store, or a restaurant, or a park and you don’t know why you like it, but you know you’re comfortable there, that’s the essence that we’re looking for here in innovation quarter and I feel good about our having succeeded in that.”

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