Brick and mortarboards

By Anna B. Mitchell  

MAY 21, 2010 12:35 p.m. (0)

The best minds in business don’t need to be hidden in an ivory tower miles from Spartanburg’s commercial district, University of South Carolina President Harris Pastides said.

They need to be brought to Main Street – or at least in this case, St. John Street.

By this summer, USC Upstate will have a handful of business classes taking place at “The George,” the university’s newest building finished this month in downtown Spartanburg. The College of Business and Economics will transfer all its classes to the building by fall 2010 – and roughly 900 business majors will be taking shuttles back and forth from the main campus.

“The placement of this school downtown was not a matter of convenience,” Pastides said. “It was not a matter of real estate. It was the right thing to do for Spartanburg.”

Parties and ribbon-cuttings have celebrated the $18 million accomplishment over the past seven days, Business Dean Darrell Parker said, but the real test of all the new equipment and classrooms will come with students and faculty arriving in the next few weeks.

He moved into his own office this past Monday.

Building the school in 18 months, Parker said, was possible through innovative funding and private partnerships. An LLC was formed to take up ownership of the building and its financing. USC Upstate, in turn, is leasing the structure – an arrangement helping to pay down its debt.

“Construction was on time and under budget,” Parker said.

The rust-colored masonry and brick structure blends seamlessly into the St. John corridor that includes the Chapman Fine Arts Center and Barnet Park. An LED stock ticker over its front entrance indicates the building’s purpose. Inside, steel, glass and dark wood dominate the décor among a collection of modern art donated by the building’s namesake, George Dean Johnson.

Symbols for the euro, pound and yen are incorporated into the ground floor’s custom marble floors.

“Spartanburg has been great to me. Great to my family,” Johnson said. “This is just a little bit of payback.”

He and former mayor Bill Barnet were the top donors for the project, which gathered $14 million in private gifts. Johnson credited cooperation among the private sector, the USC system, the county’s Commission for Higher Education and the city of Spartanburg – which built a 750-space parking deck to accommodate the school and neighboring arts center and hotel.

“It’s so easy to say, ‘No,’” Johnson said. “But so many people said, ‘Yes.’”

The total cost for the school and associated public infrastructure: $30 million.

Everyone, he said, who can make a difference wants to help turn around Spartanburg’s high unemployment and struggling post-textile economy. Early signs of a new identity for Spartanburg, he said, are The Granary, Hub Bub, the many restaurants choosing downtown and the coming medical school.

The business school, he said, is especially important to retail – “everything you can think of to serve active young people.” Parker, the school’s dean, anticipated students moving downtown to live, and he said the school deliberately left dining services out of the building’s design.

Papa’s diner across the street is now advertising free Wifi service.

“I think that has more to do with future clients than past ones,” Parker said.

The college of business expects a 20 percent spike in enrollment with the new facility, Parker said, Now, he, said, he will concentrate on attracting top professors – and endowments to keep them here.

“We’ve got to keep the faculty up,” he said.

A mock stock-trade lab on the first floor has 36 stations, each equipped with two monitors, so students can make trades in real time with $100,000 in play money.

Nine classrooms, seven conference rooms and three art galleries on the first two of the building’s three floors were furnished with donations from BMW, Wachovia, South Financial Group and several prominent business leaders in town – including Valerie and Bill Barnet (William Barnet & Son), Hugh and Jane McColl (Bank of America), Clarke and Bob Brannon (Extended Stay), Amy and Corry Oakes (Extended Stay) and Laura and Claus Foerster (Morgan Keegan).

The rooms have smart screens and projectors and are equipped for simulcasts of presentations direct from the Darla Moore School of Business in Columbia.

The 20,000-square-foot third floor, as yet unfinished, will be built out once the school identifies several beginning businesses to house in an incubator setting – meaning they will have access to the school’s facilities, technology and people power.

“That’s where it will get exciting, when faculty and students work with entrepreneurs,” Pastides said. “Someday deals will flow and jobs created out of that top floor.”

Contact Anna B. Mitchell at 593-8919 or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Anna B. Mitchell

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