Winston-Salem, NC

Former tobacco buildings now hold laboratories, classrooms, offices, apartments, restaurants, and event space on the eastern side of downtown Winston-Salem. The Innovation Quarter's Biotech Place occupies two former R.J. Reynolds buildings, placing biomedical research inside structures left by the industry that once dominated the city's economy. Bailey Park, food vendors, public art, and recurring events bring people into the district outside work hours. The reuse also carries a difficult history: predominantly African American neighborhoods once surrounded the factories, and highway construction and urban renewal erased places such as Belews Street. A marker on Research Parkway and local history programs preserve part of that record, making the research district both a workplace and a visible layer of downtown history. The hyphen joins two settlements with different origins.

Moravians established Salem in 1766 as a planned religious and trading town. Winston formed immediately north in 1849 as the new Forsyth County seat, with a street separating the municipalities before their 1913 consolidation. That year also brought R.J. Reynolds' Camel cigarette, linking the merged name with the product that carried Winston-Salem around the world. Tobacco manufacturing filled downtown plants and drew a large workforce for much of the next century. Beginning in 1976, rehabilitation tax credits encouraged adaptive use of commercial and industrial buildings, setting up the later conversion of Reynolds factories into research, housing, and public gathering spaces. Higher education gives the city another set of centers and traditions. Simon Green Atkins founded Slater Industrial Academy in 1892 with 25 students and one instructor; it became Winston-Salem State University, a historically Black public university overlooking Salem Lake.

In 1925 its predecessor became the first Black institution in the United States authorized to grant degrees for teaching in the elementary grades. Wake Forest University relocated to Winston-Salem in 1956 and now includes law, medicine, business, and divinity schools, with medical research also occupying converted buildings in the Innovation Quarter. The University of North Carolina School of the Arts opened in 1965 as the nation's first public arts conservatory. Research, health care, performances, athletics, and student schedules draw people to different parts of the city. Old Salem provides the clearest surviving view of the earlier town.

Its 1784 Salem Tavern recalls a place built for merchants and travelers, while the 1861 St. Philips African Moravian Church is the oldest standing African American church in North Carolina and the site where freedom was announced to Salem's enslaved community in 1865. Elsewhere downtown, the Arts District, Fourth Street, Industry Hill, and Innovation Quarter adjoin one another as distinct districts. Main and Liberty streets returned to two-way operation in February 2026. That summer, the International Black Theatre Festival brought a free two-night Old School Block Party to Corpening Plaza, extending the city's performing-arts identity into downtown public space. The rebuilt streets now carry traffic and events through blocks shaped by two towns, the tobacco era, and decades of reuse.