Will the Bermuda Triangle Strike Again?

A Letter from the Publisher

Every city has a piece of ground that refuses to cooperate. Ours has a name, and we owe it to the mayor, who looked at the triangular parcel at 250 North Church Street and started calling it the Bermuda Triangle of downtown development.

It is one of the better things anyone has said about Greenville real estate. Funny, and unfortunately accurate.

Everyone entering downtown Greenville from 385 drives past it. Just under two acres, landlocked between Beattie Place and East North Street, across from the county courthouse and beside the arena. It is the first thing a newcomer sees. I drove past it again this week. It is still a flat lot.

So here is the question I keep turning over. Does the triangle claim another one? Or do Knox White and the city of Greenville finally chart a safe passage across two acres that have swallowed everything sent into them for twenty nine years?

Eleven Months

The calendar is what raises the question.

In December 2024, the Design Review Board approved lighting and landscaping, the last design item standing between the project and permitting. Every approval the city can issue was in hand.

In March 2025, the Post and Courier asked about a construction start date that had appeared on posters around the site. Jeremy Pino of Walker and Dunlop, the project’s financing partner, said his team had not put those posters up. His understanding was that they were made to promote the SEC Women’s Basketball Tournament at the arena across the street. The remaining steps, he said, were to capitalize the project and break ground.

In August 2025, City Council voted unanimously to approve up to $7.256 million for sidewalks, crosswalks, landscaping, a public plaza and a public art gallery. Construction was expected to begin in September.

In December 2025, the Upstate Business Journal reported that site work continues. Site work. Not steel.

Today is August 5, 2026. Eleven months past the announced start.

As Far As I Know, Nobody Has Called It

Let me be clear about what I am working with. I have no inside connections on this project. I have not spoken to NR Investments, to the city’s permitting office or to anyone at the lender. Everything below comes from public reporting and from a man who drives past the site and looks left.

With that said, as far as I know, nothing has been cancelled. I have seen no announcement that NR Investments has withdrawn, no report that the development agreement with the city has lapsed, no news of a redesign, a downsizing or a walk away. If any of that has happened quietly, it has happened without the local press catching it, and the local press has been paying attention to this lot for twenty nine years.

We also know what a cancellation looks like in this city, because we got one in March. The Beach Company scrapped its tower of 19 stories at Academy and College outright, replaced it with six stories of wood frame, and told the Post and Courier plainly that capital markets and cost increases drove the decision. That is what a dead project sounds like in Greenville. Somebody says so, on the record, with a reason attached.

To my knowledge, nobody has said anything like that about 250 North Church.

So quiet is not the same as finished, and I want to resist the temptation to read the empty lot as an answer. From the sidewalk, a financing close in progress and a financing close that will never happen look exactly alike. I cannot tell you which one I am looking at. I can only tell you that eleven months have passed and the dirt has not moved, and that this is a question, not a verdict.

What the Triangle Has Swallowed

Still, history argues for caution.

The Greenville Memorial Auditorium came down in 1997. People who were here talk about that building the way people talk about a first car. Since then, according to Greenville News archives, the site has drawn a federal courthouse proposal, an entertainment district, a high rise hotel and multiple rounds of apartment plans. Every one sailed into the triangle. None came out.

Even this attempt has been reshaped twice by the site. NR Investments and Johnston Design Group first proposed two interconnected towers at sixteen and seven stories with 294 apartments. Rising costs killed that. It returned as a single tower of 25 stories. The board deferred it in spring 2024, and by June it had become two towers at 29 and 24 stories with 342 apartments.

Three names. Two full redesigns. Two acres of dirt that has beaten a federal courthouse, a hotel and a Miami development firm holding every permit it asked for.

Then You Look at Columbia

Go stand on Main Street in Columbia. A tower of 26 stories is climbing out of the ground, just under three hundred feet, a $225 million project from Core Spaces. Final city approval came in July 2025, one month before our Council vote. Crews broke ground that December. By the first week of May, concrete and steel had reached about three stories.

Their approval and ours came within weeks of each other. They have a building. We have a lot.

The honest answer is not that Columbia wanted it more. That tower is student housing, bringing more than two thousand beds to a downtown beside a flagship university, supported by Richland County tax breaks. A lender sees something close to an annuity. Our triangle has never had an anchor. It is a hard, landlocked geometry financed on market rate rents alone.

The Record

Which is why, if I had to answer my own question, I would answer it hopefully.

In 1989, a Greenville city councilman named Knox White suggested the city tear down the Camperdown Bridge. It carried four lanes of perfectly good highway, built in 1960, paid for by the state. Most Greenvillians then had never seen the falls underneath it. He was proposing to spend real money erasing a bridge to reveal a waterfall people had forgotten existed.

Council did not vote to remove it until 2002. Two years and eighteen million dollars later, Falls Park on the Reedy and the Liberty Bridge opened. Thirteen years from the idea to the vote. He never let go of it.

He came up in a good era for this state. Carroll Campbell Jr. was a Greenville man who went to Congress and then served two terms as governor, from 1987 to 1995, leaving office with an approval rating of seventy two percent. He steered South Carolina through Hurricane Hugo and he brought BMW to Greer. White spent six of those eight years on Greenville City Council, a young councilman in Campbell’s hometown while Campbell was rebuilding the state’s economy from Columbia. Campbell left office in January 1995. White became mayor that December.

I was a kid at Fairforest Elementary in Spartanburg when BMW came to the Upstate, and Carroll Campbell was my favorite governor. He still is. What that announcement did to a child’s sense of what was possible here is hard to overstate, and I have never entirely separated the two men in my mind since.

What followed is a record I do not think has an equal in this state. The Greenville Drive came downtown and Fluor Field opened in 2006, built with private money on city land, turning the West End from blight into the most desirable address in the Upstate. Mixed use development filled a downtown that had been empty after five o’clock. Unity Park opened in 2022 across sixty acres, with eight acres set aside for affordable housing and a Housing Fund built to close the gap. Last August, Mayberry Park reopened inside Unity Park after a $3.2 million restoration, rebuilt on the footprint of the field that opened in 1925 as the only park in Greenville where Black children were allowed to play. He asked whether the city could bring it back and keep the name. It did both.

Eight terms. The longest serving mayor in the city’s history. The Community Foundation of Greenville named him its 2025 Visionary Leadership Award recipient.

In modern South Carolina, only Joe Riley Jr. and his forty years in Charleston belongs in the same conversation. That is the standard, and I do not invoke it lightly. My own opinion, offered humbly and held firmly, is that Knox White is the finest mayor Greenville has ever had, and I would put him against anyone in the history of this state.

I had lunch with him once and told him that with his record he could run for mayor of any city in America and win. I meant it.

The Clock

He won his eighth term in November 2023 and said plainly it is his last. He will not run again in 2027.

So the man who named the Bermuda Triangle has roughly a year and a half left to see it crossed.

I do not know whether the money at 250 North Church closes in time. Nobody outside that deal does, and I have already told you I am not inside it. But when he said this project would light the match, I noticed he did not say it would be quick. He has said things like that before about ideas that took a decade to land, and he was right every time.

Will the Bermuda Triangle strike again? It has never lost. It is undefeated against a courthouse, a hotel and every apartment plan anyone has floated across it.

Then again, neither has he.

I am betting on the mayor.

For the longer view, see Downtown Greenville, 2030 and Downtown Greenville’s $1.7 Billion Triple Transformation.

About the Author

Jim Toppe is the founder of Toppe Consulting and serves as publisher and editor of South Carolina Manufacturing. He holds a Master of Science in Management from Clemson University and teaches Business Law and Marketing at Greenville Technical College. The views expressed here are his own.

About Toppe Consulting

Toppe Consulting provides digital marketing and public relations for law firms across South Carolina and the nation. Websites, SEO, Google Ads and earned media, built for solo practitioners and small firms. Contact us for a free consultation.

Editorial Disclaimer

This article is an opinion column and reflects the personal views of the author. It is not reporting, and it should not be read as a statement of fact about the status, financing or future of any project or party named here.

The author has no inside knowledge of the development at 250 North Church Street and no relationship with NR Investments, Walker and Dunlop, Johnston Design Group, The Beach Company, Core Spaces, the City of Greenville or any official, employee or representative of those organizations. Every factual statement in this piece is drawn from published news reports and public records available as of August 5, 2026, and each source is listed below. Observations about site conditions are the author’s own, made from public streets, and are not a substitute for permitting records or statements from the parties involved.

No claim is made or implied that any project has been cancelled, delayed, abandoned, or that any party is in financial distress. Development timelines shift routinely for ordinary commercial reasons, and the absence of visible construction is not evidence of a project’s failure.

Circumstances may have changed since publication. Readers seeking the current status of any project should consult the City of Greenville, the developer, or current news coverage. Nothing here constitutes legal, financial, investment or real estate advice. Toppe Consulting is a digital marketing and public relations firm and does not provide legal advice.

Works Cited

Bozard, Caleb. “Columbia Reaches New Heights: Construction Goes Vertical on Downtown’s Tallest Building in a Generation.” The Post and Courier, 6 May 2026, www.postandcourier.com/columbia/business/oliv-apartment-tower-construction-columbia-sc/article_3daa4cb8-ffd0-4325-84fd-95f9f8678d43.html. Accessed 5 Aug. 2026.

“Campbell, Carroll Ashmore, Jr.” South Carolina Encyclopedia, www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/campbell-carroll-ashmore-jr/. Accessed 5 Aug. 2026.

Donovan, Spencer. “Plans Scrapped for 19-Story Tower in Downtown Greenville. Here’s What Could Come Instead.” The Post and Courier, 23 Mar. 2026, www.postandcourier.com/greenville/business/canvas-tower-beach-company-greenville/article_0b479cc8-b059-470d-9801-af6e773d6368.html. Accessed 5 Aug. 2026.

“Gateway Tower, Memorial Auditorium Construction.” The Post and Courier, 14 Mar. 2025, www.postandcourier.com/greenville/business/gateway-tower-greenville-spartanburg-growth-main-street-office/article_fec17cb0-ff6c-11ef-bb80-cbef77b2daac.html. Accessed 5 Aug. 2026.

“Knox White Receives 2025 Visionary Leadership Award.” Community Foundation of Greenville, www.cfgreenville.org/about/news/knox-white-receives-2025-visionary-leadership-award/. Accessed 5 Aug. 2026.

“Mayberry Park.” City of Greenville, www.greenvillesc.gov/mayberry-park. Accessed 5 Aug. 2026.

“Vacant No More: Greenville’s Gateway Project Moves Forward.” 98.9 WORD, Aug. 2025, www.audacy.com/989word/news/local/vacant-no-more-greenvilles-gateway-project-moves-forward. Accessed 5 Aug. 2026.

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