Downtown on a roll After years of delay, things are starting to gel in Providence’s old retail core BY IAN DONNIS

FOR SOME CASUAL observers, the old retail core of downtown Providence probably appears much as it has for the last decade: for all the bursts of activity at PPAC, Lupo’s, Trinity Rep, and other attractions, a quiet lull still frequently settles over the streets. And for all of the talk of remaking downtown as a residential neighborhood, not to mention the architectural beauty of the well-preserved 19th and early 20th century buildings lining Westminster and other nearby streets, there’s still a sense of unrealized potential, of a great enterprise still waiting to begin.

In fact, the long-sought reinvention of downtown — which has unfolded at a glacial pace since becoming a topic of serious discussion in the early 1990s — is quickly gathering momentum. The boom of the giant construction crane towering above the Peerless Building, where 97 apartments will double the number of downtown units, to a much-touted critical mass of 200, when renovations are completed next spring, suggests the magnitude of the change. The arrival of nearly 500 Rhode Island School of Design students, slated to move into new housing in the old Hospital Trust bank building in the fall of 2005, will deliver even more vitality.

Although vacant storefronts still fleck downtown, a handful of new shops — ranging from Garrison Confections and Lumiere salon to Symposium Books, a serious bookstore with deep discounts — represent the vanguard of a retail strategy being implemented by developer Arnold "Buff" Chace’s Cornish Associates. Two Federal Hill restaurants, L’Epicureo and Gracie’s Bar and Grille, are heading downtown, the former into Stanley Weiss’s forthcoming boutique hotel on Mathewson Street, and the latter into the vacant Players Corner space on Washington Street, and tentative plans are afoot for more downtown dining destinations. Making the hop on Westminster between tazza caffe and the Providence Black Repertory Company’s stylish Xxodus Café (disclosure: I’m a member of the PBRC’s board) has become a popular Thursday night ritual.

Meanwhile, Travelers Aid, which offers housing and other services to the needy, is scheduled to relocate to the former YMCA building on the other side of I-95 in mid-August, removing a perceived drag on development. Chace, whose firm has charted the residential transformation of downtown, plans to raze the existing Travelers Aid structure on Union Street, replacing it with a 400-plus-space parking garage tucked behind more retail space and 35 to 45 additional residential units. Making a success of the structure, described by Chace as a prototype of the remedy required for a shortage of downtown parking, will necessitate nothing less than turning Weybosset into a two-way street.

It wouldn’t be surprising if this welter of activity stirs still additional development, perhaps even on some of the surfeit of surface parking lots that have attracted the ire of urban planner Andres Duany. Former mayor Joseph R. Paolino Jr., whose family firm, Paolino Properties, along with Chace and Weiss, is among the largest downtown property owners, already says he is "in the middle of a major plan right now that I think will add greatly to the skyline of Providence." He declined to elaborate.

A city report, Providence: Investing in America’s Renaissance City, places downtown development in the context of $2 billion in planned construction in the city from 2002-2009.

This pending revitalization isn’t without its critics, not least because of Rhode Island’s skyrocketing housing prices, and the disparity between the earlier conception of a downtown arts district and the evolution of a neighborhood geared more toward professionals and comfortable retirees. The median rent in Cornish’s Alice Building, for example, hovers near $1450, although eight of 36 units in the Smith Building are affordable and some other Cornish properties feature less costly prices. Chace, citing diversity among age, income, and ethnicity, points to a general price of $1 per square foot, although, he acknowledges, "At the end of the day, we failed in achieving rents that were broadly attractive to the arts community."

Similarly, the likelihood of a downtown business improvement district — in which businesses and institutions will contribute toward the cost of services, like cleanliness and safety, which are part of the city’s responsibility — raises images for some of a strangely antiseptic and regulated Providence. Indeed, after a handful of urban settlers spearheaded efforts in recent years to restrain Providence nightlife, its only reasonable to wonder what all this means for downtown. Even some of those sympathetic to the Safari Lounge (whose supporters bought a full-page ad in the Providence Journal, asking "Whose Renaissance? Planned economy threatens real community," when Weiss tried to oust it in 2000) suspect the handwriting on the wall for the venerable dive bar.

Considering the changing landscape, it’s fortunate that some of the less glitzy downtown arts institutions, particularly AS220, Perishable Theatre, and the Black Rep, own their own buildings. Yet even Chace, who comes from money and seems largely motivated by the New Urbanist concept of reinvigorating an urban center, and who has long touted Washington Street as the logical location for nightclubs (a mission accomplished with the relocation to the Strand of Lupo’s) cites the ridiculousness of a quiet urban neighborhood. "It is the nature of living in the downtown to have more noise than living in the neighborhoods," he notes. "I do think there would be nothing worse than having a boring downtown. That would kind of defeat the purpose."

There will always be those who yearn for some supposed golden era of Providence’s past. But if it’s a choice between maintaining an underutilized downtown and bringing more vitality to the district, it hardly seems like a real comparison.

It’s telling that the Reverend Jonathan R. Almond, pastor of the Mathewson Street United Methodist Church, which has been located downtown for 150 years and caters to the needy with a food bank and weekly community meal, sees downtown’s residential reinvention as a good thing. Although the reverend clearly shares the concern about the general lack of affordable housing in the state, the downtown changes are making the area cleaner, safer, more accessible, more complex, and more appealing, he says. And it’s not as if relocating Travelers Aid across the highway will make the poor disappear, although they may be more dispersed. As Almond notes, indigents will make the walk between Kennedy Plaza and Travelers Aid’s new location, and the growing number of downtown residents will add to the overall level of street life throughout the day.

Almond says he has never feared for his safety during his 11 years as pastor at Mathewson Street, although the broader perception used to be that downtown was unsafe. The changing view over time has made possible a wider variety of uses, he says, ranging from the sound and sight of young children and student teachers at URI’s downtown campus singing songs and holding hands to a church-based collaborative program for people living with AIDS. "Fifteen years ago," Almond says, "that couldn’t have happened."