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Pedaling Winston-Salem

Those of us who live in Lewisville, NC are very aware that the Winston-Salem area is a hotbed for road cyclists. Once the weather gets warm we start to see cyclists by the dozen park in downtown Lewisville so they can take off for what I hear are several very good routes for them to ride. So it's no surprise to us that Winston-Salem would be selected as the home for the US Olympic cycling training center. From the Triad Business Journal:

A vacant 42,000-square-foot building at 505 N. Liberty St. in downtown Winston-Salem will house the new U.S. Olympic cycling training center.

The city itself has been home for the last two years to the Winston-Salem Cycling Classic, a road cycling race that attracts national attention and draws racers and fans by the thousands.

“The Southeast has become the hottest, most rapid growth of cycling in the country, and the reason North Carolina leads all that is our geography,” said Dr. Rick Rauckof Carolinas Pain Institute in Winston-Salem and chairman of the Winston-Salem Cycling Classic committee. “Why Winston wins over Charlotte and Raleigh is we have Pilot Mountain, Hanging Rock, the mountains that these cyclists have to ride to compete are very close to us.”

I'd say this is one more step in what has become a nice renaissance for Winston-Salem and its surrounding communities. 

Winston-Salem's Innovation Quarter Highlighted in Wall Street Journal Piece

In today’s (4/16/14) Wall Street Journal, Winston-Salem’s very own Wake Forest Innovation Quarter plays a starring role in the paper’s Deal of the Week segment about the role of historic preservation tax credits in redeveloping mills and factories in North Carolina:

The old plants are worth preserving because they represent North Carolina’s “industrialization at the turn of the 20th century,” said Myrick Howard, president of Preservation North Carolina. “The textile and tobacco industries provided the capital for the rise of our modern banking and energy industries.”

A big user of the tax-credit program is Wexford Science & Technology, a unit of San Diego-based BioMed Realty Trust Inc., BMR +0.66% which has renovated three former R.J. Reynolds tobacco factories in Winston-Salem. The old tobacco factories are part of the Wake Forest Innovation Quarter biomedical-science and information-technology hub, where researchers are working on treatments for smoking-related ailments.

This redevelopment is leading to new apartment communities being developed as well, including one of PTAA’s newest members, Plant 64.

Wake Forest Innovation Quarter in Winston-Salem

*Please note that this is a cross post of a piece I wrote for the blog at work.