Pawtucket makes its move (continued)

IN 1789, JOHN SLATER, an Englishman with industry connections and technical know-how, broke the British ban on exporting technology to the colonies by sneaking through customs while disguised as a farmer. Thanks to Moses Brown, Slater ended up in Rhode Island, and in 1793, the duo built a cotton-processing mill on the banks of the Blackstone River, at the site where the falls stop the tidewater coming in from the ocean.

Development spread rapidly along the Blackstone. By 1844, there were 94 cotton factories lining the 50 miles of riverfront between Pawtucket and Worcester. According to one account, it became "the best harnessed river in the US." Textiles, described by Rick Greenwood of the Rhode Island Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission as "a whole ecosystem," were at the center of the industry. There were mills that made thread and others that fashioned spools to wind it on. There were mills that dyed, bleached, and finished, and mills that braided, knitted, and stitched. All this industry meant that the city was somewhat of a business incubator, and a center of technological development. "You could find people who could do things," says Greenwood. "It was a magnet for mechanically minded people, because there were jobs there."

Unlike Providence, which also had banking and mercantile interests, Greenwood says Pawtucket "gave itself over almost entirely to industry." The mills remain right in the downtown, spreading outward from the city center. A photo taken of downtown Pawtucket in 1904 shows an area densely developed right up to the riverfront, with factories, churches, and multi-story houses. The steeple of Pawtucket’s First Baptist Church is visible towering over the city, along with the smokestacks of several mill buildings.

If you go to downtown Pawtucket today, things look very different. The economic and physical landscape changed most dramatically in the last 50 years of the 20th century, a time when, as Greenwood puts it, "dense urban industrial centers were not favored," and industry took a beating. Two national trends implemented in response to the real and imagined problems of American cities had the most severe impact on the local landscape. The first was the construction of Interstate 95, which came through Rhode Island in the early ’60s and was completed in Pawtucket in June 1963. The second was the federally funded policy of urban renewal, which encouraged cities to bulldoze entire 19th century neighborhoods in favor of a "modernized vision" of the American city.

The results are most visible in the area near exit 28, where the Apex building now stands. Instead of an urban industrial landscape densely packed with factories, houses, and smokestacks, there are asphalt parking lots and the Apex shopping center with I-95 running through it all. As it did in countless East Coast cities, the interstate cut Pawtucket in half. (Lobbying from influential city residents convinced the city to alter the highway’s path to protect some of the social clubs and 19th century houses that can still be seen teetering over the edge of highway.) The result was the now infamous Pawtucket "S-curve," which some people call the most dangerous stretch of 95.

After urban renewal, the city unsuccessfully tried to inject economic activity back into the downtown, which suffered when manufacturing jobs moved elsewhere and retailers followed the highway into the suburbs. These efforts included a $1 million plan in 1976 to turn Main Street into a pedestrian mall, and reopening Main Street to traffic in 1982, in hopes that new bus lines would bring shoppers back into the downtown. But by then, it was already too late. Downtown was as good as a ghost town.

THINGS BEGAN TO turn around with a scattering of individual redevelopment projects.

One of the first was Morris and Phyllis Nathanson’s. In 1985, the couple purchased a 20,000-square-foot-mill, formerly the Rhode Island Cardboard Company, just across from the Armory on Exchange Street, creating Blackstone Studios, 12 live-work studios and condos. Although the Nathansons were basically the only game in town at the time, they pushed the Pawtucket City Council to allow live-work zoning for mill buildings. The measure passed, and other projects followed suite.

If how to fix Pawtucket was a question, the answer that slowly emerged from the city was "the arts." In 1998, Mayor James Doyle set up a commission to plan for the city’s future. Out of that grew Pawtucket’s arts & entertainment district, a 307-acre tax free zone downtown. (Pawtucket’s is one of six such districts in the state, and was second behind Providence in establishing one.) The city also brought in Northeastern University researcher Ann Galligan as an arts consultant.

When Galligan talks about using art to revitalize cities, it sounds both visionary and the most common sense thing in the world. She is currently writing a proposal on how Pawtucket can best continue its arts and revitalization efforts, and having worked in both Providence and Pawtucket, Galligan can assess each city’s assets and aspirations. "Providence’s main goal was to bring people back into downtown," she says. "Spruce up PPAC [the Providence Performing Arts Center], spruce up Trinity, get people downtown in the skating rink, get people downtown to the mall, get the restaurants up and running." Pawtucket, Galligan says, had very different goals, stemming from a different set of problems. Pawtucket lacked theaters and restaurants and other arts institutions, so there was nothing to be spruced up to get going again. What Pawtucket needed, Galligan says, "was to have people come in and fill all those empty buildings. And commerce was not going to do that any more."

The arts — described by Galligan as the second biggest industry in New England — were quickly identified as a solution. According to data from New England Council, a business trade group, there are more than 245,000 creative sector jobs in the region — more than in software and medical technology combined, and just slightly fewer than in the financial sector. Rhode Island in particular has more than its share of artists, and has one of fastest growing populations of artists in the region. This is due in part to the design community and the presence of RISD, recently ranked by U.S. News & World Report as the best graduate design school in the country.

Considering its proximity to Providence and its abundance of the kind of old industrial buildings favored by artists, Pawtucket seemed well positioned to take advantage of this trend. In that sense, Galligan says, "We’re like in Texas. We’re sitting on gold, on oil." Not harnessing this potential, she says, is like "telling the Beverly Hillbillies to sit on that gold, and go plant alfalfa."

Pawtucket also benefited from a squeeze on artists in Providence and dramatic increases in statewide housing prices, which made the city a home-buying destination for people from Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and elsewhere. And like Avis, Pawtucket’s approach of trying harder won fresh converts. As Jason Thompson, the founder of the bookbindery Rag & Bone told the development watchdog site www.artinruins.com, "The City of Providence wouldn’t return our phone calls [when he was looking for new space after the I-195 relocation forced a move in 2002]. We couldn’t get a meeting with anyone from the Providence Economic Development offices. After a point, however, we stopped looking at Providence." Pawtucket "courted our business by providing information on available spaces. In the end, we wouldn’t have found the space we have without [Herb Weiss]. He was also an advocate for our company when it came time to ask Pawtucket to assist financially with our relocation."

Tony Estrella, artistic director of the Gamm Theatre, echoes this story. In Providence, he says, "we were just one of many." In Pawtucket, the group is "much higher up the ladder. Here we can carve out an identity, which was harder to do in Providence." The Gamm is "completely transformed" in its new home, Estrella says, describing how the number of subscribers has gone from 94 to 1000 in the course of 18 months.

The way in which activity breeds more activity is seen in a string of more recently announced projects. The American Insulated Wire Building now houses former Red Sox pitcher Ken Ryan’s KR Baseball Academy, and parts of the complex are being targeted for live-work space. Elsewhere, Los Angeles-based Artiste Lofts LLC/Urban Smart Growth plans to redevelop Hope Webbing, a 550,000-square foot mill on Main Street, into "an artistic mixed use facility," with different types of live, work, live-work, and retail space, and possibly a performance space.