Bleachery renovation to have its own name

Redevelopment of the site of the former Rock Hill Printing & Finishing Co. – commonly called the Bleachery – will have its own branding effort and name, separate from the Knowledge Park, city officials and developers say.

Selection of a name and branding campaign will be one of the priorities of Sidewalks Rock Hill, a local group partnering with master developer Sora-Phelps.

The Knowledge Park name has caused some confusion since the concept was announced in 2013.

It is the name the city uses for its economic development strategy to create opportunities for people to live, work and play in downtown Rock Hill. The priority of the strategy has been to create high-paying technology jobs.

The city has done a great deal of work to show that Rock Hill already has a highly qualified technology workforce. Many of those people currently commute to Charlotte for work.

Concurrent with the Knowledge Park economic development strategy have been the real estate efforts to renovate the Bleachery site, connecting with Winthrop and downtown Rock Hill.

In a general sense, Knowledge Park has been used to identify the 23-acre Bleachery site.

The vision for the site includes 19 buildings with 1.3 million square feet of retail, restaurant, office and residential space. The site could employ as many as 1,000 people, most in high-paying, technology-related jobs. Sora-Phelps and other investors are expected to invest nearly $200 million in Knowledge Park.

Tim Elliott of Sidewalks Rock Hill said Thursday, “It was never to the intent to replace the Bleachery with Knowledge Park.”

Whether the Bleachery name will continue to be used is unclear.

The initial projects at the Bleachery site are expected to take place in the first quarter of 2016. Efforts will concentrate on the five-story Lowenstein Building, constructed in 1954. It is one of the last remaining structures from the textile plant, which operated from 1929 to 1998. At the height of its operations, the Bleachery had 30 buildings with 2.5 million square feet under roof and employed one of every four or five workers in Rock Hill. The plant bleached, dyed, printed and finished cloth.

This story was originally published January 3, 2016 at 4:42 PM with the headline "Bleachery renovation to have its own name."