Loray Mill, a 600,000-sq-ft textile mill built in 1900, underwent the largest adaptive-reuse renovation in the U.S. at the time, transforming the historic North Carolina site into a mixed-use neighborhood with commercial space, 30 renovated mill houses, and a projected $7.50 to $8 economic return for every dollar spent.
It's a 600,000-square-foot old textile mill. It is the largest renovation project in the country at this time. Loray Mill, built in 1900, it was the largest textile mill under one roof in the South, where 3,500 employees worked daily, where everybody who worked in the building lived in the neighborhood. In 1929, we had a huge textile mill strike. Strikers' villages were set up, and 2 people were shot and killed. And then 3 or 4 years later, Firestone took it over. There were a lot of naysayers who did not want to see this project succeed. There were a lot of naysayers who wanted to see the building torn down. When we closed on the project, The second day after closing, our demo team came to us and said, we'll give you $4 million for this today and just walk away. We want to salvage and scrape it. It's tough to do a renovation this size. You have 582 custom windows that we had to replace. They're all different sizes because back in the day they made the window openings and then they fit the window to the opening. At the base, the solid brick walls are about 8 feet thick. And they kind of taper as you go up. The floorboards are about 6 inches thick, and the columns are all round. The architect did that. Fire always catches on the corners of things, so let's make everything in this building round. These projects, there's only so many. Our philosophy is we're reestablishing a once vibrant neighborhood. It's not just renovating an old building. It is reestablishing the Loray Mill Village, and, and what you'll see is in the village itself there's 500 mill houses, and right now there's a pocket of about 30 of them that are being renovated. In the 100,000 square feet of commercial and retail space, this building sets up well for 18 hours a day, and that's really what we wanted. We wanted a fitness club, we wanted a restaurant, We wanted a brewery and we wanted a coffee shop. When we do a project like this, and it's been proven, that for every dollar we spend on a project like this of scale, the local economy benefits between $7.50 and $8 for every dollar we spend. So on a $50 million project, that, that's a lot of money to the local economy. For many years, it was just a project. But as we became closer to the city, closer to the local people here, we understood that the passion that they had for the building. This was the city of West Gastonia.
Congratulations, Billy Hughes, Counselors of Real Estate Carolinas Chapter Creative Thinker 2017.
