Durham, North Carolina has long been a center for innovation in tech, thanks in part to the universities of the Research Triangle.
But now the city of 286,000 is becoming a hub for young companies looking to get their ideas off the ground.
Much of the activity has focused on the American Tobacco Campus, a former factory complex that has been completely revamped to include hip working spaces, retail, and restaurants and bars. Small startups, accelerators, and venture capital firms have made their homes there.
Plus, Google just confirmed that Raleigh-Durham is next on the list to get Google Fiber, the super-modern Internet service that's said to be 100 times faster than basic broadband.
Tech companies based in Durham have long benefited from being able to recruit talent from the three universities of the Research Triangle: Duke University, North Carolina State University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Major companies like IBM and Cisco have been in Durham for decades. IBM recently opened a brand-new, 72,000-square-foot Cloud Resiliency Center at Research Triangle Park.
Source: Triangle Business Journal
But before Durham was a center of research and innovation, it was home to the largest tobacco company in the world, American Tobacco. Throughout much of the 20th century, the nation's supply of Lucky Strikes and Pall Malls were churned out of a series of factories on a 1-million-square-foot campus in downtown Durham. By 1987, however, the tobacco industry had declined, and the American Tobacco campus was suddenly vacant.
Source: American Tobacco Historic District, Curbed
See the rest of the story at Business Insider