By the 1940s, sixty percent of Winston-Salem worked either for R.J. Reynolds or for the Hanes textile mills. Reynolds imported so much Turkish tobacco and French cigarette paper for Camel cigarettes that the federal government designated the city an official port of entry - 200 miles inland from the ocean. The Reynolds Building went up downtown in 1929, a 314-foot Art Deco skyscraper designed by William F. Lamb of Shreve, Lamb and Harmon. It was the tallest building in the American South. Lamb's firm liked the design so much that they used it as the prototype for the Empire State Building two years later. The R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company is still based in Winston-Salem, though its workforce has fallen from a peak of nearly 30,000 to under 3,000. Hanes - which started in 1900 as P.H. Hanes Knitting Company making men's underwear - became Hanesbrands and is still headquartered here, as is Lowes Foods, Quality Oil, and the makers of Texas Pete hot sauce.

Steve Earle wrote a song called Mary Ellen and Rick about a Winston-Salem couple - Earle has lived a lot of places, and Winston-Salem sticks with people. Other artists have left their marks too. R.E.M. recorded Chronic Town here in 1981 at Mitch Easter's Drive-In Studio in his parents' garage; Easter, the frontman of Let's Active and close collaborator of The dB's, kept the studio running until 1994 and helped define an entire era of North Carolina indie rock. Suzanne Vega, Pylon, Game Theory and The Connells all recorded there too. The Ramones, R.E.M., Guns N' Roses and Blue Oyster Cult all played at Baity's Backstreet Music Garden, a venue founded in 1982 on Baity Street that burned down in 1993. Krispy Kreme opened its first shop on South Main Street in 1937. The first arts council in the United States was founded here in 1949. In 2014 the city officially adopted the nickname City of Arts and Innovation.

Walk south from downtown and the present runs out. The brick streets and dormered houses of Old Salem look the way Salem looked in the 1770s because seventy percent of the buildings are original. The cobbled square is still Salem Square. The Single Brothers House still stands. God's Acre, the Moravian cemetery, has hosted the Easter sunrise service every year since 1772 - thousands gather before dawn, some traveling from overseas, to hear brass bands play the chorales and watch the sun come up over a graveyard where the dead are arranged not by family but by choir. Bethabara Historic District, where the first Moravians arrived in November 1753, sits within the city limits on 195 acres of preserved fields, mill, and stockade site. The Moravian star - that intricate twenty-six-point ornament - is Winston-Salem's official Christmas decoration. A thirty-one-foot Moravian star, one of the largest in the world, sits atop the north tower of Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center every Advent.

The east end of downtown used to be Reynolds tobacco-processing plants. Now it is the Wake Forest Innovation Quarter, anchored by 1.9 million square feet of biotech labs, university offices, and apartments built in old factory shells. Ninety companies. 3,600 workers. 1,800 students. The Wake Forest School of Medicine runs it. Wake Forest itself moved here from Wake County in 1956 on a check from the Babcock family - Mary Reynolds Babcock was R.J. Reynolds's daughter, and she gave the school 330 acres of the Reynolda estate. Winston-Salem State University, an HBCU founded in 1892 by Simon Green Atkins as Slater Industrial Academy, sits on the east side. The University of North Carolina School of the Arts, the first public arts conservatory in the United States, sits south of downtown. Six colleges, 250,000 people, a tobacco fortune that quietly pivoted into biotech and university endowments. The fifth-largest city in North Carolina, still hyphenated, still Camel City, still City of Arts and Innovation - all of it true at once.