RTP wants the funk.

AuthorBarkin, Dan

Big companies have long dominated Research Triangle Park. Now, park officials see small companies as key to regaining an edge.

Larry Pickett Jr., CEO of RxDataScience Inc., had a problem common to startups: running out of space. His company, which crunches data for health care providers, employed three workers on the third floor of the 800 Building at the Frontier campus, a cluster of '80s-era buildings in Research Triangle Park first used by IBM but now converted into an entrepreneurial coworking hub.

He needed space for 10 more staffers, but the 800 was leased up. Pickett was going to have to move after just three months, which he hated because he liked the Frontier's funky vibe.

"I was panicking," he recalls. He went to Frontier's management, which pitched an idea: On the first floor was a 700-square-foot storage room.

"And I said, 'Well, I don't know if that's going to be enough.' And they said, 'Well, let's just knock out the wall and go out a little bit farther then.'

"I said, 'We'll take it."'

The response impressed Pickett, who calls the Frontier staff "creative and client-oriented." But it was not so surprising.

RTP was founded 60 years ago in the woods and farms of Durham and Wake counties. Its 7,000 acres made it the nation's largest suburban research park. Now, it has staked its future on startups such as Pickett's, following a decade of groundwork for a transformation to keep RTP competitive as a technology and life-sciences mecca. For all of its historic success, RTP is challenged by densely populated center cities, which are favored by many tech workers.

"There are about 280 companies total in RTP," says Scott Levitan, CEO of park manager Research Triangle Foundation. "One hundred of them are located at the Frontier now. That's pretty cool."

After years of delay, Levitan's foundation has taken the first steps to create a downtown for RTP. An upscale retail, office and residential hub is planned at Park Center off Interstate 40, with construction expected to start this summer on a grocery store and restaurants. Over the next decade, officials envision 1 million square feet of new offices, hundreds of luxury apartments and a couple of hotels.

The Frontier occupies the western half of Park Center's 100 acres, while the new development is planned on the east side. The new downtown will be easily visible from 1-40, Levitan says.

Private developers are driving some of the park's transformation: California-based Alexandria Real Estate Equities has turned a million square feet of space--including buildings vacated by plant-science giant Syngenta when it moved to a new RTP campus --into homes for emerging agricultural technology companies. Keith Corp., a Charlotte developer, bought 105 acres for speculative development on land once occupied by Chemstrand Corp., the maker of AstroTurf and the park's first corporate employer.

Then there's California developer Karlin Real Estate, whose Parmer RTP subsidiary bought GlaxoSmithKline's massive campus in 2017 after the pharmaceutical giant consolidated its research and development to Philadelphia. The drug giant now leases several nearby buildings for its smaller footprint here.

Parmer is turning the former Glaxo domain into an amenity-laden campus for companies it wants to lure to RTP's north end. Plans call for a conference center, food-truck pavilion, putting greens and more.

Parmer executive Bart Olds tore out the barrier gates at the entrances to Glaxo on his first day as the landlord overseeing 650 acres. "At GSK, they're like 'What?' And guess what? Nothing bad happened," Olds says.

Those gates were an integral part of RTP, one of the most successful economic-development projects in U.S. history, which today has a workforce of 40,000 to 50,000 inside the park and tens of thousands more in nearby office complexes. Some of the most iconic companies in technology and science have planted their flags there. Nobel Prize winners have worked in its labs.

But RTP was never a place to visit, unless you were an employee or had business dealings. A...

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