The building at 701 Poinsett Highway has had many iterations. Originally a Pepsi bottling plant, it became the site of Hartness International until the 1970s, after which it was a machine shop and the home of the Greenville Woodworkers Guild, among other uses.
Today, the historic 56,000-square-feet structure sits vacant, the debris of its history piled up inside. Tens of thousands of old soda bottles fill the rooms. Ancient computer monitors are stacked beside piles of lumber. Boxes overflow with discarded machine parts. Puffs of insulation litter the floor.
“We honestly thought about just tearing the place down,” said Sean Hartness, CEO of Hartness Development, the company that owns it.
Walking through one of its many massive rooms, beneath high ceilings and exposed steel girders, Hartness tries to paint a picture of what will come next. He describes a wide open atrium with natural light spilling through skylights along the ceiling. Open office space. Collaboration rooms. A social commons area. And most importantly, people — more specifically, entrepreneurs — all gathered together.
This community will make up the heart of Crescent SC, the planned entrepreneurial innovation district that Hartness Development and a team of local stakeholders is envisioning for the space.
“Make no mistake; this is not a real estate project,” Hartness said.
The former Pepsi bottling plant, which will be preserved to ensure its historic attributes are remain, is not the only tie to history for Crescent SC.
The land adjacent to the building, on which future buildings will rise in the second phase of the project, is the site of the Piedmont Shirt Company building. Only the second garment factory in Greenville’s history, the company was founded by 28-year-old Russian Jewish immigrant Shepard Saltzman. He was the first Jewish textile mill owner in the Upstate.
During WWII, Saltzman helped Jewish immigrants escape from Europe and brought them to Greenville, where he offered them employment at the factory. He later worked to support the establishment of Israel after the war.
Saltzman died in 1955, but his son-in-law continued to grow the business. It eventually was incorporated at Piedmont Industries in 1971 and went on to become the 4th largest manufacturer of shirts in the nation, with $30 million in sales in 1984. It closed suddenly in 1990, unable to compete with the drastically lower prices of imports.
The original building was demolished in 2015.
Crescent SC will be created in close partnership with Flywheel, a company founded five years ago in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, that designs and operates innovation centers and which will be the anchor tenant of Crescent SC.
While the term “co-working space” might be what first comes to mind based on the image of a group of individuals gathered together in one community-oriented hub, Flywheel founding partner Peter Marsh shies away from the term.
“We do provide co-working space as a part of our infrastructure, but our business model is very different,” Marsh says. “We’re totally focused on economic development through stimulating the startup ecosystem … especially early stage companies. We’re focused on getting things started.”
Consider it, then, a physical co-working space whose secret sauce is its programatic underpinnings — such as assisting with access to grants and early capital; legal aid and advice; mentorship; in-depth entrepreneurial curriculums; pitch events and more.
Marsh, who also runs the architecture firm Workplace Architecture + Design, which will be designing Crescent SC, said the business model has always been to serve as a complement to the existing ecosystem of the communities in which Flywheel operates. For Flywheel’s first innovation district, that ecosystem was anchored by Wake Forest University.
In Greenville, however, that ecosystem is anchored by a number of entities, including Furman University, NEXT, CommunityWorks, Venture South and the South Carolina Research Authority, among others.
Hartness said the goal is to fill the gaps in the local ecosystem.
“There’s already a robust ecosystem here,” Hartness said. “What we have to do is program and provide the space and tech and the things they need, and working together with all these organizations, it allows us to go and figure out where those gaps are.”
Crescent SC won’t consist of just what’s inside the building. Outside is an old industrial shed that will be converted into an outdoor working area and covered event space. An open lawn and pavilion, a patio with seawalls and a pedestrian plaza with a foundation will create a welcoming ambiance. The future spur of the Prisma Health Swamp Rabbit Trail, planned for right behind the site, will offer increased connectivity with the rest of Greenville.
Jim Burns, chief operating officer of Hartness Development, imagines major economic development events, catered by food trucks with big crowds, to serve as an alluring showcase of Greenville’s opportunity to visiting companies considering relocating in the area.
“To attract the big elephant, the first thing they ask is, ‘Do you have an innovation district?,’” Burns said. “We quite frankly don’t have that place to bring people and say, ‘Yep, here it is.’ We’ve got lots of assets we like to talk about, countless success stories, but this is really the place to bring everybody to say, ‘This is the district where you’re going to go when you’ve got an idea and want to grow it.’”
The building is just the first phase of what is planned to be a major project covering about 7.2 acres, including the spot of the former Piedmont Shirt Factory. The entire district has the potential to cover 15-20 acres in the coming years, Hartness said. What those future developments look like remains undetermined, if only because the goal is to learn along the way.
“We’re even talking to some national groups about master planning and land-planning the whole thing,” Hartness said. “Let’s get people to work and play here in this community and then provide access to all these things for all the neighborhoods around us.”
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