Project Profile
In the late 1800's, three friends from Watertown, NY got together to reinvent the retail concept. A two-price system for all merchandise, later known as a five and dime, revolutionized retail. In 1912, their stores were merged together, creating the F. W. Woolworth Company. When Woolworth died in 1912, the company headquarters was relocated to Wilkes-Barre, PA because of F.M. Kirby and the CFO Fred Weckesser, the other original founding entrepreneurs.
The Woolworth Building, built in 1951, occupies the site of the early headquarters and housed the five and dime until 1993, when the company ceased operations. It was a fitting decision for the Wilkes- Barre Chamber to purchase and use this building as its new home for a business and technology incubator, designed to assist entrepreneurs. The new mixed-use facility consisting of retail, business incubator, and state-of-the-art class "A" office will help breathe life into Center City. As the first facility of its kind in Luzerne County, the Innovation Center will foster new technology and serve as a place to combine energy, ideas, and expertise to encourage entrepreneurs to create quality jobs. It will help launch knowledge-based businesses.
The renovated facility encompasses 60,000 SF with the ground level and basement preserved for retail space, the second floor has been developed as flexible office space housing the Innovation Center, and the third floor is available as 15,000 SF of office space sub-dividable into four distinct units.
The public transit hub is less than one block away and existing structured parking is adjacent to the rear entrance of the building.
The existing building itself is not the original store, nor is it an historic property on the State or National Register. Architecturally, the undistinguished façade lacked significance. The most historically notable feature of the building is an unusual structural system, suspending the upper floors from massive long-span roof trusses to create a dramatic, open sales floor at street level. The Woolworth Company undoubtedly wanted this design to reflect its innovating and futuristic aspirations, qualities that are now prominently displayed in the new Great Valley Innovation Center facility.
Project Merits
Location: Central to Wilkes-Barre’s downtown, the site is within a block of the transportation hub, prominently placed to catalyze redevelopment.
Site Planning: Essentially a zero-lot-line development on all four sides, the project is internally configured to combine workplace and storefront commercial space. The project increased urban density through mixed use. The ground floor and basement have been preserved as retail space and the former storage and break rooms of the upper floors have been converted to office use. This first generation of the modern department store has been converted to a model of reuse of this prevalent building type.
Building Design: While an undistinguished façade was replaced, the design capitalizes on extraordinary structural and spatial qualities unique to this building. The massive trusses of the upper floor that permit column-free retail space on the ground floor have become the character defining elements of the office space.
Building Environmental Impact: Although not submitted for certification, the project’s siting, material selection, HVAC system and daylighting implement LEED’s sustainability principles, including a community effort to salvage the clear pine shelving once used for the store’s inventory to be reused by local service organizations.
Innovative Policies and Financing: Working in conjunction with the Great Valley Technology Alliance, Northeastern Pennsylvania colleges and universities and the Ben Franklin Technology Partnership as well as the local banks, County and State Agencies, and the U.S. Economic Development Administration, the Greater Wilkes-Barre Chamber of Business and Industry financed this renovation as a true community project. As in many of their other projects such as their brownfield development at Hanover Crossings, the Chamber used profit centers to help finance a less profitable, worthy project.
This project is exemplary in meeting the objectives of 10,000 Friends:
The project was designed as a trendsetter in revitalizing the community and business district of greater Wilkes-Barre:
Despite favorable economic indicators for the region, downtown Wilkes-Barre has experienced a severe decline since the mid 1990’s due to the city government’s dramatic failure to cultivate a favorable business climate. Nonetheless, fundamentals for a successful downtown are strong. It is located at the heart of a large population center, has a significant inventory of office-space, good public and automotive access, and large residential communities within walking distance. The downtown is immediately adjacent to two institutions of higher education, Wilkes University and Kings College. In spite of these assets, the storefront vacancy rate has approached 100% and there has been a significant flight of office employment in favor of outlying communities and office parks.
Now, catalyzed by the region’s business community and by changes in the City’s policy, a range of organizations has come together to foster a major redevelopment of Wilkes-Barre’s downtown business district with the goal of making it, once again, the centerpiece of the wider Luzerne County community. In 2002 the Great Valley Innovation Center anticipated the revitalization process that is now unfolding.
This was the key reason that the Great Valley Innovation Center chose the abandoned Woolworth building as its new home. With its extraordinary column-free retail space and two floors of state-of-the art technology and office space, the renovated building brings together the major economic forces that will drive the resurgence of downtown Wilkes-Barre: street-front commerce, employment, and the knowledge-based assets of a city center dominated by two institutions of higher education.
The Great Valley Innovation Center opened its new facility in June, 2004 at a time when Wilkes- Barre’s other downtown revitalization projects are still in pre-design and planning phases. The new Innovation Center, with its elegant façade and innovative interior represents the community’s hopes for its downtown, and sets high urban, environmental and design standards for the projects that will follow it.
The project strengthens land use planning goals.
This project creates employment in the Central Business District, but its beneficial impact on land use will multiply over time. As a high-technology business incubator, it attracts fledgling companies to relocate into the Central Business District. Concentrating new, innovative businesses in a single location will have great synergistic potential, as these young companies benefit from shared experience and services.
In the longer run, concentrating these companies downtown, rather than elsewhere, will help them understand the advantages of denser urban patterns. By incubating future-oriented business in the old downtown, Wilkes-Barre can look forward to developing new employers who are pre-disposed to a center-city location, offsetting future demand for outlying greenfield, suburban, or industrial park development.
Through its location, and its affirmation of the urban environment, this project reduces traffic, congestion and pollution.
The building is located at the center of the region’s public transit system, and in walking distance from housing, recreation and two institutions of higher learning.
This project strengthens the city's ability to stabalize and increase the downtown's housing stock
Housing is not one of this project’s direct goals. However, the creation of professional opportunities will increase the value of new and existing residential real estate. Stabilizing and enlarging downtown Wilkes-Barre’s housing stock is a primary objective of the city’s redevelopment plan.
As an adaptive re-use project, the Great Valley Innovation Center is a prominent preservation example.
The project creatively re-uses a half-century old building. Although the building is relatively young and is not on the State or National Register, great care was given to preserve and display its most historic features: the column free main floor and the massive long-span trusses that make it possible.
In the Northeastern Pennsylvania environment, where there are relatively few high-profile adaptive reuse projects, the Great Valley Innovation Center dramatically demonstrates how the seemingly obsolete idiosyncrasies of an older building can become both highly functional and dramatically character-giving.
The project conserves both land and resource consumption.
As a downtown business and technology incubator, this project will foster a pattern of new businesses that are disposed to re-use the benefits of existing urban space and infrastructure. The denser urban pattern is inherently land and resource frugal, as compared with the typical new business pattern that favors outlying suburban, greenfield, or industrial park locations. The Great Valley Innovation Center’s architectural and engineering design is itself technologically innovative, incorporating features that will demonstrably conserve energy while allowing future renovation with minimal reconfiguration of systems. The most prominent Green Design features are the building’s innovative Heating Ventilating and Air Conditioning (HVAC) and daylighting systems.
All HVAC service for the office floors is incorporated into a plenum under an accessible raised floor. This system eliminates the use of overhead ducts, reducing the cost and material consumption of traditional ceiling systems. Air moves slowly and quietly through the plenum, which also provides universally flexible access for power, data and telecommunication systems. Introducing cool air at the floor level, comfort is distributed passively, with far less fan energy than conventional systems, and uses natural upward convection to move treated air through the space, delivering comfort to the occupants and moving stale, toxic air up and out of the space. By confining all distribution systems to the Innovation Center’s floor plane, this advanced systems-integration design minimized the need for interior architectural finishes. In addition to conserving fiscal and material resources, this benefits the building’s historic character. Its most significant historic feature, the massive long-span trusses on its top floor, becomes the most prominent feature of the interior design.
In time, as the building’s program changes, this system requires little or no modification to adapt to new occupancy patterns. There are no ceilings or ducts to discard, as the comfort system is uniformly available underfoot. The tiled raised floor system allows air discharge devices to be relocated with nothing more than a screwdriver. Unlike the traditional power and communication systems in fixed partitions, there is no need to discard wiring when the building is renovated. Tiles containing electric, telephone and computer ports are easily relocated, and unplugging from one module and re-plugging into another easily reconfigures the under-floor modular wiring. Equally important is the building’s use of natural light. The original building had been almost entirely dependent on artificial lighting because party walls represented more than 75% of its perimeter. To reduce its dependence on electric lighting, while creating a state-of-the-art workplace, three top-lit light wells were introduced. These glazed enclosures allow linear skylights to serve both second and third floor office spaces. The skylights’ saw-tooth configuration uses insulated, translucent panels on the sloping western side to minimize winter heat loss, and to control heat gain from the setting sun. The eastern side is a vertical, clear glass clerestory window that also gives occupants a strong sense of outdoor awareness. The introduction of natural ambient lighting reduces energy needed for lighting, and further reduces energy demand by minimizing the lighting system’s effect on air conditioning loads. Artificial lighting is limited to a low-intensity indirect system, augmented by outdoor lights that convert the skylights into large lighting fixtures during hours of darkness. The luminous, sawtooth roof profile is one of the Innovation Center’s prominent architectural icons.
The project conserved fiscal resources.
As a renovation, the project offsets significant construction costs. Property acquisition costs were minimal, and there were no expenditures for land development or infrastructure expansion. In Wilkes-Barre’s underutilized downtown, the project capitalizes on existing parking and transit capacity, offsetting the cost of building parking lots or garages.
Additionally, renovating this existing building cost 20 % less than new construction. Renovation costs were further reduced by the project’s innovative HVAC system, which introduced state-ofthe- art services to open Innovation Center loft space, while confining almost all the investment in the building’s floor. This strategy allowed for ceilings, exposed structure and walls to undergo minimal, truly cosmetic, renovation consisting of little more than cleaning and painting.