To understand the modern magic of downtown Greenville and the glory that is Falls Park, there’s really only one name to remember: Tommy Wyche.
The Greenville attorney was a champion for decades of thoughtful urban planning and conservation and was an early advocate for restoring the Reedy River. His vision for how the river and the land surrounding it could become an adornment and powerful driver of urban renewal inspired countless others. In many ways, it has served as the impetus for projects that have transformed Greenville.
It should come as no surprise that Wyche’s ideas about the river’s importance influenced the president and CEO of the company chosen to develop the Falls Park Conference District, a $500 million mixed-use project connecting to the east side of Falls Park which includes a long-planned downtown conference center. The proposed site runs along Falls Street and East Camperdown Way, and currently holds the Bowater Building, a number of surface level parking lots and several smaller buildings.
For The Furman Co. Inc.’s Steve Navarro, the decade it took for conference center plans to coalesce was not time wasted. It was a necessary period of planning and preparation.
The 3 Ps
Navarro moved to Greenville — his grandfather’s hometown — in the mid-1980s fresh out of college in Southern California. He said he arrived knowing two things: Greenville’s growth was inevitable, and virtually all real estate development was handled by a handful of families and firms with a deep tradition for how things were done.
When Navarro joined The Furman Co., the firm was more than a century old and had played a crucial role in Greenville’s early growth and development as a global hub for textiles.
From the outset, Navarro said he wanted to blend the sense of community and place that characterized the way real estate development was done in Greenville with a new sophistication that could meet the needs of a growing tide of outside investors, as well as the influx of people and companies moving to the area.
Navarro became a partner in the early 1990s and eventually bought the company from the Furman and Garrison families. The company itself grew into the largest commercial brokerage firm in the state.
Part of that success was based on a keen understanding of the value of PPPs — public-private partnerships. Successful projects often involved bringing together the people of a community and their elected leaders with private investment for a purpose that would benefit everyone.
When Navarro sold the brokerage arm to CBRE about 15 years ago, the remaining company was smaller and focused on selective development and asset management.
“Our feeling was … we want to be community developers,” Navarro said. “We want to develop significant projects that make an impact in a community and are sustainable and make a community better.”
The preparation
An important step in the evolution of the landscape that will become the Falls Park Conference District was the development of the United Community headquarters building at 200 E. Camperdown Way. United Community, previously based in Georgia, relocated to downtown Greenville in 2021.
Navarro and The Furman Co. worked with United Community CEO and Chairman Lynn Harton and the design team for the project at McMillan Pazdan Smith. The aim was to create a showpiece that would both serve the needs of the bank and its employees, but also enhance the bluff overlooking Falls Park and the Reedy River.
The resulting seven-story, glass-clad United Center, the construction of which was overseen by Greenville’s own Harper General Contractors, was the first WELL certified building in South Carolina.
Navarro said the headquarters site presented a number of challenges that ultimately would morph into opportunities to unlock the vision for what will become the Falls Park Conference District.
One key consideration in developing the bank headquarters was devising a plan that will allow for future growth. The bank purchased more than two acres of additional property along Falls and Webster streets for surface parking and future expansion at roughly the same time construction began on its new HQ. That land has since become an essential piece of Navarro’s vision for the conference district.
“Having a place for UCB to expand and to know it can continue to grow and invest in this community. was not only of paramount importance to us, but it was a condition that if UCB was going to sell their land for the (conference center) project, we had to have a place for them to continue to grow,” Navarro said.
Another element in the emerging landscape around Falls Park was the 2024 purchase by Greenville-based Auro Hotels of the Bowater Building to develop a high-end hotel. That decision was arrived at independently, but Navarro said he recognized a second key pillar of a potential conference district had clicked into place.
“It would have been nice for our community to have had (a conference center) 10 years ago when they (first) talked about it,” Navarro said. “But (the delay) has benefited the community because it has shaped it into something that is more … forward-thinking that will meet the needs of the community for the next several decades.”
Closing the circle
In looking to the future and figuring out how a conference center would fit in, Navarro remembered Greenville’s past and an encounter with Tommy Wyche not long after Navarro joined The Furman Co. Wyche – a prominent lawyer, philanthropist and conservationist – passed away in 2015.
Navarro sat in on a meeting between Wyche and The Furman Co. shareholders Alester Furman III and Junius Garrison Jr. to discuss Wyche’s vision for what would become the modern Falls Park. Navarro was tasked with convincing a property owner to sell his parcel for the effort. He said the lessons learned then helped him appreciate the value of public-private partnerships to achieve big projects that enhance the community.
“(Tommy) and I spent a lot of time talking about what makes good development, and we spent a lot of time talking about his properties,” Navarro said.
He said Wyche owned many of the properties that form the core of the new conference district. Navarro said he never lost sight of Wyche’s expansive vision of Falls Park as Greenville’s beating heart.
“I can’t say anything that hasn’t already been written about him, but his business acumen, his aptitude for people and community and his sensitivity to the environment” were singular, Navarro said. “He found a way to blend all of those to make things grow better.”
With that in mind and following the city’s request for proposals in 2025 for a downtown conference center, Navarro said he returned to first principles and considered what would attract people to use such a facility.
He said that in his presentation to the city, he asked them to consider what companies and groups who would use the conference center would tell their staff about why they chose Greenville. He said they would talk about the city’s vibrant Main Street, its amazing riverfront park and the picturesque falls at the heart of that park.
“So why would you build a conference center anywhere other than on the falls at the park?” he asked.
Navarro credited Greenville City Manager Shannon Lavrin with understanding the need for a conference center and understanding the aims of the city’s elected leadership for how such a project would bolster the city’s urban core. That understanding drove how the city’s request for proposals was framed, and Navarro said the RFP helped drive the plan he and his team ultimately presented.
The result is a comprehensive development in which all the elements are tied together by proximity to Falls Park. There will be retail, restaurants, hospitality, Class A office space and residential components.
Navarro sees the conference center as “the culmination of all these things that we can provide to the community, in a way that the community will be proud of.”
Falls Park Conference District details
More than six acres of property east of Falls Park in downtown Greenville are planned to be redeveloped into a new mixed-use district, consisting of:
- A conference center
- A hotel
- Class A office space
- Multifamily residential
- An underground parking garage
- An expansion of Falls Park
The project will be completed through a public-private partnership with The Furman Co. serving as the master developer. Other announced partners include the city of Greenville, United Community, Auro Hotels and Hines.
Notable projects by The Furman Co.
The Furman Co. has been involved in a wide variety of notable projects in recent decades. President and CEO Steve Navarro said some of the most rewarding have been adaptive reuse projects such as:
- Poe West in the Village of West Greenville
- Claussen Bakery in Greenville’s West End
- Former Borden ice cream building on West Washington Street near Unity Park
- Keys Court (the former home of Keys Printing) on East McBee Avenue
The company has also developed iconic projects, including:
- United Community headquarters on East Camperdown Way in downtown Greenville
- TD Bank campus on Carolina Point Parkway adjacent to Interstate 385 in Greenville
