Architecture and Design - Best and Worst of 2023

BEST

Marijuana Mecca

Will Morgan wrote last January:

Now that cannabis sales are legal in Rhode Island, a “newly licensed compassion center” speaks for the marijuana industry. If the Mother Earth Wellness store in Pawtucket is any indication, Mary Jane has gone mainstream, even upscale. It is remarkable how a well-designed image–a new logo, a handsome building, or thoughtful interior layout–can change our perception of a previously illegal product and the once unwholesome reputation of its merchants.

The handsome entrance masks what was once the Narragansett Machine Shop, a factory that made lathes, tennis rackets, and fabricated parts for street railway cars. About twenty years ago, Mother Earth developers Eddy Keegan and Joe Pakuris purchased the 1889 machine shop for their Kitchen Countertop Top Center of New England, a business that shares the former mill with the new cannabis dispensary. The upper story of the Pawtucket mill is used for Mother Earth’s in-house laboratory and kitchen.

BEST

Old Miriam Hospital Transformed to Elegant Living on Parade Street

Morgan celebrates design done right:

Just down the street from the Cranston Street Armory on Providence’s West Side, an elegant apartment development is about to welcome its first residents. What was originally four 1878 row houses, and then the original Miriam Hospital, has been transformed into one of the city’s most desirable rental properties. At a time when the East Side and Downtown are seeing the construction of more Ubiquiboxes–or Stumpies, as planners call them, the revitalization of the old Miriam is an example of how to do residential architecture right.

The developer of the Parade Street block is a team led by Mark Van Knoppen. Van Noppen is best known as the founder of the Armory Revival Company, and has been restoring houses and mills on the West Side since 1986. The neighborhood developers have restored 500 houses and apartments, as well as 387,000 square feet of commercial space, including the Rising Sun Mills, Pearl Street Lofts, and The Plant.  The architect of the Miriam makeover is another West Side resident, Jack Ryan; the contractor is Stand Corp.

BEST

PPAC Square: Paris in Providence

Morgan brings focus to the transformation of the downtown area:

Until seeing the small lamppost banner at the corner of Weybosset and Mathewson Streets, I did not know that there was a place downtown called PPAC Square. The name is uninspired, but the square has the strong urban design elements that make this commercial heart of Providence the place to hang out. While downtown may be struggling–not enough people or housing or parking, this open square reminds us of why the hope for city life is still on the street and not in some mega-structure. We humans thrive best when we freely encounter one another and interact, dine, shop, or conduct business out on the sidewalk or in a congenial space such as a restaurant.

Cities evolve, of course, and four-year-old Ellie’s Café is in the Liggett’s Drug Store that occupied the space for decades. The spirit and the bustle of the earlier store survives, even though the soda fountain is gone. The white subway tile walls reflect lots of sunlight through the plate glass windows, and the whole is reminiscent of a classic New York eatery. (My wife says I like Ellie’s so much because it feels like Greenwich Village or the Upper West Side.) The owner’s intent may have been Parisian, which also works for me, as I believe that a vibrant café society is an indicator the healthy neighborhood.

BEST

PPS Reinvented Classic

Morgan writes of the new life for the historic structure:

The Providence Preservation Society has a new home, or rather an old home that has been made new. While only a domestically-scaled 3500-square-foot building, the transformative renovation to the Old Brick School on Meeting Street is a noteworthy example of sustainable conservation.

The Providence Preservation Society moved into the School House nearly sixty-five years ago, which has served as the heart of one of the nation’s premier preservation organizations. This modest brick structure served as the command post for PPS founder Antoinette Downing, along with those following in her footsteps, in the fight to preserve neighborhoods such as College Hill. This significant project, done right is thoroughly appropriate to the mission of the Society.    

The renovation’s relevance to PPS’s work is attested to by the elevator tower bringing light into the School House, and seamlessly connecting past and present. Standing in the glazed elevator foyer, one gets a glimpse of College Hill, the former state house, and early houses beyond. There are always those ready to whine at any changes which seem unsympathetic to the past. Yet, the Historic District Commission strongly advocated for a contemporary solution to the addition, and Jonathan Bell responded with a handsomely discrete composition. Warren Jagger, the photographer and PPS President during the Old Brick School House renovation, said it best: “I am so proud to see us recognize contemporary design.”

Rear of the PPS with city skyline: PHOTO: Warren Jagger

BEST

The Revival of Downtown East Providence, One Cafe at a Time

Morgan celebrates the smart development of cities through thoughtful economic growth:

Let’s talk about the inevitability of East Providence. Young entrepreneurs with a bookstore and a restaurant on Ives Street, refer to their home across the Seekonk River as Brooklyn. While not quite the hipster vibe of such sentiment, East Providence has a lot of assets that, when sensitively developed, will contribute to a promising future.

East Providence has some strong advantages, beginning with its topography. Running for several miles along the shore of Narragansett Bay, some of which is being envisioned as a working harbor, there is also development along the Seekonk. Completion of the new Red Bridge will make passage between the two Providences easier. From Rumford to Riverside, there are a series of viable neighborhoods composed of single-family houses, many with water and skyline views.

WORST

195 Commission Crime

Morgan has consistently warned about the lack of vision for the high-value 195 land:

Yet the context of the 195 Commission is arguably the most important urban makeover since the uncovering of the Providence River. The relocation of the intrusive interstate that cut through Fox Point and the Jewelry District was a bold and courageous act that identified a city willing to stand up to highway planning chaos and take chances. The most glorious development opportunity imaginable for a unified urban mosaic was revealed beneath all that steel and concrete: two river banks, open parks, College Hill, the Jewelry District, and downtown, all at the head of Narragansett Bay.

Instead of a grand unifying vision for this city-changing gift, however, the 195 land was divvied up into little chunks, with little relationship to each other or to the city around them (i.e., context). The usual response to the failure of design excellence is development economics: there’s not enough money, extra-city developers shy away from Providence, good architecture is too expensive, and so on. Nevertheless, with the possible exception of 225 Dyer Street, the result is an undistinguished set of anywhere-and-everywhere apartments, hotels, and commercial blocks. It is ironic to see what is unfolding in one of the most architecturally rich cities in America. People do not come to Providence to marvel at Trader Joe’s or the dreary apartment blocks that surround it.

This haphazard rush to mediocrity is illustrated by the four divergent schemes considered for Parcel 1A. It is difficult to understand how any smart urban planner or architect could not see the folly of developing this sliver of land between South Water Street and the river. High rises along this narrow strip will create a traffic canyon of the street, and block views to the river. One of the schemes, by the developer of 269 Wickenden Street, is almost laughable in its amateurishness. The phrase “placemaking” was thrown around in the meeting, yet ill-formed projects like this should more truthfully be called place razing.

WORST

A Historic Gem Is Targeted for Demolition by the Church

It is hard to feel bad for Pawtucket when it simply can't get out of its own way. Morgan wrote in July:

Two immigrants to Pawtucket, John Read from Maine and Joseph Ott from Germany, were part of the cadre of successful businessmen and mill owners that made Pawtucket a national industrial powerhouse in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. The hardware merchant and the silk manufacturer were among the wealthy and powerful whose grand mansions gave the Quality Hill neighborhood its name. Now the magnificent house that Read built in 1842, and that Ott enlarged in 1915, is about to be demolished–a representative of the city’s grandeur and influence reduced to dust, a symbol of a general failure to protect Pawtucket’s patrimony.

As is often the case, buildings often outlive their usefulness, they become too expensive to maintain, or as is often the case, maintenance is deferred to the point where the owners claim safety issues–the building is too dangerous to occupy and is beyond repair. Furthermore, painting such a house would cost around  $10,000. Given the quarter-century time span, one might reasonably conclude that the parish decided that they were just going to let the Read-Ott house rot. Assumption now has a permit to eradicate this particular Pawtucket historical fingerprint, and unless there is a miracle, the Read-Ott house will soon disappear forever.

Demolition was recently stalled by Pawtucket’s Historic District Commission. The HDC requires that anyone seeking to demolish an historic structure “must make a good faith effort to demonstrate that all alternatives to demolition have been evaluated.” Rehabilitation, sale to a sympathetic party, or moving the structure, are options. Demolition permit applications also “require information about how the site will be treated once the building is removed.”  Assumption was not forthcoming with such assurances, nor did they share any master plans. They did, however, turn down a quarter-million-dollar offer on the house, while advice from such organizations as Preserve Rhode Island were only lukewarmly received.

Sadly, this is a typical story. Likely too late now, alas, but one can imagine the house being repurposed for housing or some other income-producing solution for the church–a hospice, a Greek language school, apartments for parishioners? There would still be plenty of open space around the church for future expansion, such as a parish house, without letting the Read-Ott house disappear. One can empathize with the costs of supporting a congregation and maintaining its real estate in a city that is a ghost of its once hugely prosperous self. Nevertheless, this a loss that should not have happened.

WORST

Goodbye Fox Point

Morgan, an advocate of the mixed-use, scale, and historic nature of the Fox Point neighborhood warned in April:

If you live in an attractive neighborhood, there’s always the dread that its desirability contains the seeds of its demise. For example, there’s a pattern of development that is destroying the East Side of Providence. In Fox Point, Wayland Square, College Hill, and spreading up Hope Street. Blocks of older, sometimes historic houses are being demolished and replaced by over-scaled apartment buildings of absolutely no architectural or urbanistic distinction. The justification for such junk development usually run like this: The older structures are run down and there’s a housing crisis.

The too-frequent solution is to erect a giant box that may make money for the developer, but one which offers no visual, aesthetic, or long-range cultural benefits to the neighborhood. An appalling case in point is the Fox Point Mixed-Use Redevelopment scheme to replace two 38-year-old commercial buildings at the corner of Brook and Wickenden Streets with an aggressively boring and totally out-of-scale behemoth.

The proposal for this important corner in Fox Point is, in fact, so egregious and so without merit that no self-respecting citizen–mayor, planning official, neighborhood group, or local resident–should ever allow this turkey to get off the drawing boards. Even before getting to issues of scale, design, and compatibility, there ought to be howls of protest over the continued practice of stealth planning, not to mention a lack of communication and transparency.

WORST

Train Station Blah

Morgan wrote in his column, "Pawtucket/Central Falls T Station Lacks Design–Architecture Critic Morgan:" 

In 1952 Dwight Eisenhower’s presidential campaign train stopped in at the Pawtucket/Central Falls railroad station in this once important urban nexus. Within a decade, the station closed, and by 1981 rail service to the dying towns was discontinued altogether. So, the opening of a new Pawtucket/Central Falls MBTA commuter station is very welcome news. Add that this stop on the T’s Providence line is a RIPTA hub, and we have the makings of a real economic shot in the arm for this part of the Blackstone Valley–one with more likely concrete results than a phantom soccer stadium.

In short, the new T stop does everything that it ought to do in terms of function. Yet, for that much public money, shouldn’t we expect something that offers a nod to history or perhaps something to lift the spirits? Does civic architecture have a responsibility to beautify?

This station looks like so many of the others along the MBTA. Perhaps it could have announced something of the Blackstone Valley’s seminal role in the development of American industry.

WORST

More Storage, Less Livable City

Morgan ridicules the endless development of storage buildings throughout the urban core:

Providence had a weight problem, or rather a size problem. Not that bigger isn’t better in some instances, but it seems that whenever a new project is proposed for the city it is over-scaled, physically too much building–whether a skyscraper in the Innovation District, the student ghetto planned for Wickenden Street, or the “stumpy” apartment blocks being thrown up everywhere. Now, we are asked to absorb a 73-feet tall, 1,399-unit, 132,000 square-feet storage facility on Branch Avenue across from the North Burial Ground.

That Trunk Space LLC’s scheme was recommended by the City Plan Commission should raise red flags everywhere. This behemoth is planned for one of the busiest intersections in Providence. Its height will overwhelm its slowly resuscitating commercial area, and it will bring nothing attractive to the North Main Street neighborhood. Nor will it contribute the kind of non-transitory human activity that the area so desperately needs. Does the planning commission consider only how such a Gordo intrusion will benefit the developers?  Is there ever a discussion of how such a monster will impact its surroundings, the city, or the entire commonweal? How could such putative professionals, tasked with guiding Providence growth, shamefacedly approve a landscape plan that will put only eight trees on a 35,000 square-foot lot?