The first phase of Crescent Startup Community, a sprawling mixed-use innovation zone on Poinsett Highway north of Greenville, is still undergoing renovations.

The site’s longtime owner, Hartness Development, intends to turn the seven-acre plot of land into a central location where nearby startups and business owners may obtain funding and development resources.

It is projected that the first phase of development will be finished by late spring of 2024.

The project’s first phase involves transforming the former Pepsi-Cola bottling facility into Crescent One, an innovation hub. The building’s anchor tenant is Flywheel, a firm that creates and manages innovation centers for entrepreneurs. Within the 23,000 square feet of the company’s facility will be:

• forty individual office spaces
• Numerous venues for co-working
• A spacious venue
• seminar spaces
• Social common areas both inside and outside
• An exercise facility run by Fitness with a View

Startups or complementary businesses that offer services to startups, such as Furman University’s Hill Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, will occupy the remaining space in the building.

Hartness Development’s chief operating officer, Jim Burns, stated that the first phase’s completion is anticipated to come with a $16 million price tag. The project’s expected cost for the next phases, which will encompass 150,000 square feet of brand-new mixed-use buildings, is between $60 million and $75 million.

After the demolition is complete, the project is presently in the preliminary stages of rebuilding the building, according to Burns. Re-installing walls, finishing the roof, and running electrical conduit are all underway.

According to Burns, “We removed the undesirables, which included some asbestos and other items that needed to be removed from the building.”

Peter Marsh is an architect with Workplace Architecture and Design, which is planning the new innovation district, and the founding partner of Flywheel. He said that a lot of the building’s historical features, such the original steel framework and painted walls, will be emphasized in the new layout.

According to Burns, they are having meetings with additional possible partners to forward the project’s second phase.

“Phase two is more dependent upon the needs and the great part of this is that we get to get into the revitalized historic building there and then determine what needs there are in the entrepreneurial world,” Burns said.

Historical significance

August 2023 saw the addition of the 56,000-square-foot Pepsi-Cola bottling plant facility to the National Register of Historic Places. It was built in 1940, and during the 1950s and 1960s, it was expanded.

More to come

In later stages of the project, three more buildings, each roughly 50,000 square feet in size, will be constructed to increase the scope of activities in the innovation zone.

Whereabouts

At 701 Poinsett Highway, Crescent Startup Community will be situated 1.4 miles from Greenville’s downtown.