1736 Magazine - Fall 2018

“Tech”-Tonic Shift
Fix downtown Augusta today for tomorrow’s residents
PHOTO BY DAMON CLINE
By Damon Cline
Poor old James Oglethorpe.
Every day his monument in
the center of the Augusta Common
faces the decrepit Kress
building, one of downtown’s least
attractive – and yet most prominently situated
– structures.
At least the statue of James Brown at
the Common’s south end faces away from
the blight. Perhaps that’s why the bronze
of the city’s most famous son is smiling
and its colonial-era founder isn’t?
On most days, there is
little around either effigy
to indicate to anyone –
especially visitors – that
they’re in the heart of a
community teeming with
vitality. Certainly nothing
that would indicate
they are in a place Fortune
magazine said has
potential to become the
“World’s Cybersecurity
Capital.”
What ramshackle
buildings like the former
department store do best
is make Augusta’s urban
core look rotten. The
same goes for the boarded
up, long-vacant and
condemned structures in
other areas of the central
business district.
They whisper in your
ear like an apparition:
This city is tired…depressed...dying…
Appearances aside, the reality of downtown
Augusta is that it’s more alive than
it’s been in a long time.
The voices of the city center’s old
ghosts are slowly being drowned out by
a cacophony of investment – nearly $1
What people
don’t see is that
property is
changing hands
downtown at
one of the
highest rates ever.
Margaret Woodard
billion worth of private and public dollars
flowing into everything from new hotels
and office buildings to streetscape improvements
and a high-tech cybersecurity
innovation center.
“What people don’t see is that property
is changing hands downtown at one
of the highest rates ever,” said Margaret
Woodard, executive director of the Downtown
Development Authority. “I have not
seen this pace in the 12 years that I’ve been
here. There’s a major shift going on that
many people are unaware of.”
The tectonic shift she alludes to is perhaps
best described as a
“tech”-tonic shift.
Just tally up a few of
the developments turning
Augusta’s urban core
into the metro area’s
center of innovation:
Augusta University’s
expansion of research
facilities in the medical
district; the soon-tobe-completed
TaxSlayer
software-development
operation on Broad
Street; the expansion of
Unisys’ state-of-theart
client services center
along the Savannah
River; the renovation of
the Sibley and King textile
mills in Harrisburg
into a high-tech campus
known as Augusta Cyberworks;
and ongoing
construction of the $100
million Georgia Cyber Center on AU’s Riverfront
Campus.
This tide of tech-fueled investments
appears to be the early stages of what AU
President Brooks Keel has repeatedly called
a “cyber tsunami” – an influx that thousands
of highly-skilled electronic warriors
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