Pepper Building is back in play

The new push by downtown advocates to develop the Pepper Building is just the latest piece of a 10-year-long struggle to make the building a part of the city's downtown revitalization.

The Downtown Winston-Salem Partnership announced Wednesday that it would solicit proposals for the building and two adjacent lots from developers at the start of 2010.

Until then, the building had fallen under the umbrella of developer Kerry Avant, whose condominium complex, One Park Vista, sits across a city park from the Pepper Building. The condominiums, Pepper Building and park are all pieces in a larger development, called Civic Plaza.

Although One Park Vista was finished in 2008, developers have tried -- and failed -- since 2000 to develop the Pepper Building.

"We know that the Pepper Building has some attractiveness to developers," said Jason Thiel, the president of the Downtown Winston-Salem Partnership. "We've decided to take an incremental approach to the same long-term vision.… It's kind of an important change in how we're going about approaching the development."

The Pepper Building, on the southwest corner of Fourth and Liberty streets, is one of the cornerstones of the Civic Plaza development, the central anchor of an area the Downtown Winston-Salem Partnership has labeled the "core district" of downtown. That core district stretches west on Fourth Street to Spruce Street and north on Trade Street to Seventh Street.

The Pepper Building was built in 1929 at the request of Thomas Pepper, who owned tobacco warehouses around the city. The building opened just before the Great Depression and was for a time home to the Davis-McColum Department Store.

The building was one of the first in North Carolina to be built in the art-deco style, with terra-cotta walls and lion's head spouts.

In 1999, Piedmont Federal Savings Bank donated the building to the city. The bank bought the building in 1976, intending to tear it down and build a new office building on the lot. Almost immediately after the city acquired the building, city officials and developers started planning for its renovation.

The city hired developer John Elkington, who was responsible for the popular and successful Beale Street project in Memphis, Tenn., to create a master plan for Fourth Street.

Elkington's plans for Fourth Street were large in scale, calling for a 100,000-square-foot block of restaurants, clubs, stores and offices.

Mayor Allen Joines, who worked for the city for almost 30 years before retiring in 2000 to head the Winston-Salem Alliance, said that the plans might have been too large.

By 2005, the Downtown Winston-Salem Partnership was searching for a new developer for Civic Plaza.

"When he was not able to carry it out, we dropped back," Joines said, referring to Elkington. "And it's been more of an incremental development rather than the one big development that Elkington had proposed."

The partnership hired a Durham development company, Niemann Capital, to be the lead developer for Civic Plaza. Niemann led plans for the project until the spring of 2008. The city dumped Niemann after several years of failing to move ahead.

The partnership turned to One Park Vista LLC, the development company that built One Park Vista, to propose a plan for Civic Plaza. Avant, the managing partner of One Park Vista, has been asking city officials for months to finish the park between the condominiums and the Pepper Building. The plan for the park includes underground parking and trees. Right now, the park is a lot of manicured grass.

"I think the park really needs to get built," Avant said. "That's the centerpiece of the plan and could be the centerpiece of the downtown area at Fourth and Trade. But it's probably going to take some public funding to get that done."

The Pepper Building could wind up getting caught in a tug-of-war between historic preservationists who want to see it saved and downtown advocates who say the most important thing is economic development.

Rence Callahan, the chairman of the Downtown Partnership's board and a partner with Walter, Robbs, Callahan and Pierce Architects, said that developing Winston-Salem's downtown has to be the priority and that a fundamental shift in thinking will be required.

"Until we as a community are more inspired to have downtown really revitalized, then that's the issue,'' Callahan said. "It's not preservation or nonpreservation of the Pepper Building. It's having tower cranes be all over the place and downtown building new development as opposed to building it out in the suburbs."

lgraff@wsjournal.com


727-7279