Winston-Salem's hottest new trend: Watching a skyscraper's lights turn off
Someone noticed that their city's most phallic building went dark every night at midnight. So they started posting videos. Now? People are coming into town to watch the lights go out.
When Hannah Dixon and her friend J.C. Carawan were wrapping up this year’s spring semester at UNC Asheville, they made some plans for a summer meetup. Carawan grew up in Winston-Salem and wanted to show her around his hometown. They went to Old Salem. They got beers and pizza at Cugino Forno. Hannah met J.C.’s family and his wiener dog, Albert. That wasn’t all. “One of the most important things we wanted to do was see the Winston Wiener’s lights go off around midnight,” Hannah says. J.C. had seen a video of top of the skyscraper going dark on Instagram, and wanted to see it for himself.
So on May 17th, Hannah and J.C. got a good view of the skyscraper at 100 North Main Street, also known as the Wells Fargo Center, which they knew as the Winston Wiener. As the time approached 12:00 a.m., they started shooting a video. They were chit-chatting when, abruptly, the light banks started turning off, one by one. A second later, the entire top of the building was dark.
Hannah was in mid-sentence when she saw it, stopped herself, and blurted out: “Goodnight Winston Wiener!”
“Yes!” J.C. yelled. “YES!”
The Wells Fargo Center is Winston-Salem’s tallest building. It opened 30 years ago as the new bank headquarters for Wachovia. It was designed by renowned architect César Pelli. It’s the only skyscraper in the world that’s topped by a granite dome. Pelli himself said it was meant to resemble a flower about to bloom.
That’s, uh, not what anyone thinks it resembles. “When I was a kid, we called it the ‘R2D2 building,’” J.C. says, “but then I got to middle school and realized it looked like a giant penis.”
If this all sounds familiar, dear Rabbit Hole reader, it’s because I wrote a long story about this tower’s origins last summer. Short version: I was unable to tell if the architects knew what it was going to resemble before they actually built it.
So, What is Winston-Salem's Tallest Building SUPPOSED to Look Like?
All skyscrapers are phallic. And then you have Winston-Salem’s tallest skyscraper.
However! I didn’t give much thought to the lighting. The only information I could find about it was an (apparently) old writeup on a skyscraper fan site:
296 fluorescent fixtures light the dome at night. It is also outlined in eight and a half inch wide, acrylic fiber-optic cables, with sixty watt bulbs at each end, along the sides. The setbacks on the ninth, twenty-first, twenty-sixth and twenty-eighth floors are lighted using sixty-four one-thousand watt incandescent spotlights. The lights require fifteen minutes to reach full brightness at the intended shade.
I’d noticed—mostly on the way home from late night beer league hockey games—that the lights at the tip of the building had gone dark. Notably, though, the blinking red strobe at the top always stayed on.
I had no idea why the lights went out. Or when. The only thing I could find was a story from 2012, in which the local Audubon Society encouraged the managers of Winston-Salem’s tallest buildings to turn off their lights earlier in the evening. Those lights interfered with migrating birds, which often fly at night. After some local Audubon folks began to count the number of dead birds at the base of local office buildings, seven began to turn their lights off at 11 p.m. during migration months. The Wells Fargo Center no long burned its lights until morning.
At some point, the building changed its turn-off time to midnight, and at least a few people noticed. In October 2021, someone created an Instagram account to document this phenomena. Their first video Is shaky and blurry, but you can see the top of the Wells Fargo Center lit up in the distance. Voices count down from three. Right on cue, at 12:00:00 a.m., the lights shut off. There’s cheering and laughing. They’d timed it perfectly.
For the next three and a half months, the account posted a new video every single day. Every one was taken at midnight. You can hear a man’s voice wishing the building good night as the lights go out. One video is narrated in a Cockney accent. One was taken at the Moravian cemetery. There’s even one that’s synced up perfectly to the New Year’s Eve countdown.
And then, on Feb. 10, 2022, the posting stopped. The small but loyal audience noticed and pleaded for the account to come back. Finally, that November, a new video dropped. “The wait is over,” it stated. “The Wiener shall return.”
It did! For about a month. Then it went dark until September of last year, posted a few more times, then returned again this April with several new videos. One, which seems to be taken outside of a house, shows a small crowd of people eagerly counting down to midnight. And again, precisely at midnight, the lights go out.
That video was viewed 1.6 million times. The next one was seen 2.5 million times. Among the comments:
This is art
how do i join this movement
White people
I’m from Winston and never knew this was a thing
About that last one: It wasn’t A Thing! The account seemed to be the work of a few people, and each video would get a few hundred views. Then, somehow, one of them went viral last month, and now people like J.C. and Hannah are submitting their own goodnight videos. “I knew I had to witness the lights turn off once, since I have never seen them turn off in my 21 years of life,” J.C. says. “Seeing a group of people love the Winston Wiener made me feel pride for my hometown.”
Hannah was a little bit awestruck. Earlier in the day, she’d gone to Major Tomms Oddities & Curiosities and saw Winston Wiener stickers and statues for sale. “I really had no idea how much of an impact the phallic architecture of the building had on the people of Winston,” she says.
I don’t want to get too deep here. After all, this is, at its core, the @goodnight_winston_wiener account that does one thing and one thing only. It’s not out here trying to sell you something. It’s not a stealth marketing campaign. It’s not even something that most people in Winston-Salem are probably aware of (J.C. seems to think that it’s mostly local kids and Wake Forest students who engage with it). This seems to be simply a long, running joke created by someone who noticed something one night, went huh!, and then turned it into a niche piece of local culture. It makes me long for the more innocent, Hampster Dance era of the Internet. We still have a few vestiges of it left today—the Did Duke Win? site, an account that posts a video of Daniel Craig saying “Ladies and gentlemen, the weekend” every Friday, and a bot that does nothing but display pictures of possums every hour. And now we have this.
I don’t know much more than that. I sent a direct message to whoever’s behind the account, asking how it got started. I only got this response: “we saw a problem and created a solution.”
In the meantime, the posts continue. There are sweeping drone videos of the lights turning off. A new post showed the tower going dark a whole two minutes late (WHAT?!). The videos are getting slightly less family-friendly and slightly more creative. It’s a ridiculous ritual, but still, it’s a ritual, and rituals can lead you to some some unexpected places. “I hope that the Winston Wiener will be enough to maybe even draw some tourism to Winston-Salem,” Hannah says, “cause it sure as heck did for me.”
The “official” response from the account makes this even better.
Great stuff 💪