A Day Trip to Winston-Salem

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A few months ago I read the book, Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco. The book is a gripping account of the leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco in the late 1980s. The conglomerate comprised of the iconic food company Nabisco and R.J Reynolds Tobacco Company, based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. It was the first time I was introduced to Winston-Salem and despite being just two hours away from Blacksburg, it seemed like a world apart.

Coincidentally, a week before my spring break, I received an invitation from an architecture firm in Winston-Salem for an interview. With no plans other than to work on thesis, I saw it as an opportunity to go in person to the interview and see a city I knew nothing about a few months before.

Winston-Salem is a city of about 250,000 and is exactly two hours from Blacksburg. It is in the middle of nowhere and according to my friend from North Carolina, “it’s in the boondocks.” Raleigh lies an hour and forty minutes to the east, while Charlotte is an hour and fifteen minutes to the South. It’s the home of Wake Forest University and Salem College, a private women’s liberal arts college and one of the oldest women’s colleges in the United States. It has been a while since I’ve done any traveling, so I was excited to explore the city.

There were a few things that I wanted to see while I was there:

The Reynolds Building

The Reynolds building, constructed in 1929 in the art deco style, was the model for the Empire State Building. I’ve heard every year for Father’s Day it sends a card. Now that I think of it, I read about Winston-Salem at the end of 2022 when I read Higher: A Historic Race to the Sky and the Making of a City, a book about the building of the Chrysler and Empire State Building. Being from New York, the Empire State Building holds a special significance. Growing up, driving over the Verrazzano or the George Washington Bridge, my dad would always point it out, “there’s the Empire State Building.” Soon, you might not even be able to see it, as towering skyscrapers continue to be put up around it.

Bailey Power Plant

Bailey Power Plant is located in the heart of downtown Winston-Salem. Historically, it provided coal-fire power to the tobacco warehouses that surrounded it. Now, it stands as symbol of adaptive reuse, the process of breathing new life into an old building, transforming or converting an existing building for a different purpose from what it was originally used for. The exciting thing about adaptive reuse is the juxtaposition of old and new, where remnants of the past serve as vestiges of a bygone era.

AFAS Center for the Arts

The AFAS Center for the Arts stands out from the historic brick facades of the downtown. It’s a beacon of modernist design, a cube of transparent and opaque glass with vibrant highlights. It houses a ground floor public gallery that extends to an adjacent green space and art part. The second floor has two artist studios and the third floor is the office of the architecture firm who designed it. The AFAS Center for the Arts creates a harmonious blend of art and urbanity.

Moravian Village

The Moravian Village, also known as Old Salem is located just outside of the downtown of Winston-Salem and is the location of Salem College. The Moravians, a protestant denomination that began in 1457, were the original settlers of Winston-Salem. The village itself is an architectural time capsule. They had a unique way of building, where they used large timber post for a frame with brick in between. The village includes a mix of architectural styles, some of which reminded me of the shaker village in Kentucky because of the two-door entrance on the façade. In the shaker village men and women were expected to use different entrances, I wonder if it was the same for the Moravians? They both stem from Protestantism.  

The Downtown

There’s nothing I love more than walking around a city and exploring with my camera. Wandering leads to the accidental discovery of moments and places within a city. As a student of architecture, the possibilities when exploring a city are endless. The historic downtown which includes the Reynolds Building, The Bailey Power Plant, the AFAS Center for Arts and the office of the firm I interviewed was all easily walkable. The proximity of these made Winston-Salem feel more like a large town than a city. I was there on a Monday from 9 in the morning to about 3 in the afternoon and it was surprisingly empty. I barely came across anyone on the streets and hardly saw a car. A lot of business were closed, the Gallery on the bottom floor of the AFAS Center for the Arts was unfortunately closed. Perhaps as a college town, Blacksburg has more movement than it should, but it felt more alive than the downtown of Winston-Salem. The downtown is a mix of architectural styles, the historic brick that dominates old towns in the United Sates, some Brutalist buildings peppered in, 80s and 90s modern glass skyscrapers mixed with some newer contemporary buildings.

I also had the best vegetarian burger I’ve ever had at Barcelona Burger, a restaurant in the renovated Bailey Power Plant. It was not a store-bought frozen patty, that most restaurants tend to have, this was a thick homemade delicious vegetarian patty. It had two whole cherry tomatoes in the burger! I’ve never seen that before. The fries were amazing. Cooked to perfection. I have never had a better burger and fries combo. The server even gave me a free cannoli and tiny ice cream. Not to mention the outdoor back patio had a wonderful atmosphere of the old tobacco factory and new construction. There had to have been like a hundred potted plants, I don’t know how they find the time to water them all, but it really adds to the ambiance.

Here’s some more photos of the city: