The City of Arts: How Winston-Salem Reinvented Itself

By the nineteen eighties, the story of Winston-Salem looked like the story of many American industrial cities: decline. R.J. Reynolds had shed thousands of jobs. Hanes was acquired by Sara Lee. AT and T closed the Western Electric plant that had employed seven thousand people. Piedmont Airlines was absorbed by US Air. The tobacco factory complexes near downtown sat partially vacant, and the population of the urban core was shrinking.

What happened next is not a simple comeback story, but it is a genuine one, and it began earlier than the crisis.

In August of nineteen forty-nine, representatives of twelve cultural groups in Winston-Salem formed the Arts Council of Winston-Salem and Forsyth County. It was the first arts council established by a local government anywhere in the United States, a model of public and private partnership for cultural support that eventually spread to more than four thousand similar organizations nationwide.

In nineteen sixty-three, when the state of North Carolina decided to create America's first public arts conservatory, Winston-Salem residents raised nearly a million dollars in a two-day telephone campaign to win the school for their city. The North Carolina School of the Arts opened in Winston-Salem in nineteen sixty-five. It is now the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, training more than eleven hundred students in dance, drama, music, filmmaking, and design and production.

The old tobacco factory complexes near downtown have been transformed over the past fifteen years into what is now called the Innovation Quarter, a three-hundred-thirty-acre urban research park combining medical research, technology firms, arts spaces, and housing in the buildings where Camel cigarettes were once manufactured.

Winston-Salem still calls itself the City of Arts and Innovation. The claim is not empty marketing. It describes a real choice the city made, over decades, about what to become when what it had been was gone.