Then and now: what downtown Wake Forest’s buildings used to be

Downtown Wake Forest runs on second careers. The brewery was a car dealership, the apartment building was a company store, the concert lot was a train depot, and the street itself exists because a college paid to move the railroad's front door. Learning the previous lives of the buildings turns an ordinary errand downtown into time travel, so here's the then-and-now register: address by address, what stood there, what stands there, and what the change says about the town.

The street the depot built

Start with the ground truth from our railroad history: White Street's commercial row exists because the college's 1874 depot relocation spurred development, with lots sold on the east side of the tracks for new stores and businesses. The founding cast is documented: a hotel rose next to the drugstore Dr. Benjamin Powers built across from the depot, and pharmacist Thomas E. Holding, first Powers' partner, left to build his own drugstore up the street. The then-and-now payoffs: the 1897 Powers Store survives as a contributing structure of the historic district, Holding's name migrated onto the avenue and the park where the town now swims, and the depot ground itself became the Depot parking lot at 120 S. White, the food-truck staging ground of Friday Night on White and, in the neatest full circle in this whole series, the site of the planned S-Line passenger station. Then: trains. Now: tacos. Next: trains again.

The dealership that pours beer

The district's showpiece conversion is White Street Brewing, opened September 2012 inside a 1930s car dealership, where founder Dino Radosta stripped the facade to restore the structure's original character, leaving the exposed brick, beams, and an exposed brewhouse. The building's arc is the downtown's arc in miniature: built for the automobile age that nearly killed Main Streets, restored as the gathering place of the walking-district revival, and the original brewhouse still operates where the service bays were.

The company store that became apartments

A few blocks northeast, the most complete then-and-now stands at Brick and Brewer streets: the Royall Cotton Mill Commissary, built around 1900 as the mill's company store, later listed on the National Register in 1991 and converted to apartments. The building where mill families once shopped on scrip now houses residents of the same 45-acre mill village district whose 82 contributing structures went from worker housing to some of the town's most character-rich addresses, the whole neighborhood being one continuous then-and-now, described by preservationists as among the most intact mill villages in Wake County.

The utility building, the mercantile, and the warehouse row

The register's supporting entries: the former Water and Light Building of 1909 survives in the historic district from the era when the town generated its own; The Cotton Company's historic mercantile building now houses the multi-vendor shop with the Yum Yum and History of Wake Forest murals inside and attached, commerce continuous for a century with the inventory upgraded from dry goods to local art; the warehouse tier found its third acts as The Loading Dock's coworking-in-a-warehouse and the Cardinal's bar in the 535 Warehouse complex; and south of downtown, the industrial-scale version, The Factory, whose management describes it plainly as industrial roots transformed into community space, swapped production lines for two sheets of NHL ice and 15,000 square feet of laser tag.

The houses that moved

Wake Forest's then-and-now includes buildings whose "where" changed along with their "what." The champion traveler is the Calvin Jones House, now on its fourth site, moved around 1835 for the College Building, again around 1842, and rescued in 1956 from demolition for a cafeteria, the founder's plantation house become first classroom become museum. The counterpoint that never moved: the Ailey Young House on North White, the circa-1875 saddlebag standing where it always stood, rediscovered in a 2008 survey and rehabilitated in place, proof that staying put and being forgotten can be a closer brush with demolition than any cafeteria plan.

Reading the district yourself

The self-guided version of this article is a walk with three habits: look up, where second-story facades keep original dates and details the street level renovated away; look for the district's protected inventory, the 1915-era brick with its Colonial Revival and Art Deco notes, and ask what each storefront's proportions were built to sell; and cross-reference the museum's downtown walking tour or the architectural survey when a building's story resists guessing.

The moral the register keeps repeating: Wake Forest's downtown works because almost nothing was built new and almost everything was built again, dealership to taproom, commissary to apartments, depot to festival ground to depot. Adaptive reuse isn't a preservation slogan here; it's the business model of the whole district, and the reason a Friday night on White Street happens inside a photograph your great-grandparents would mostly recognize. The buildings kept their bones. The town keeps finding them new jobs.