Proposed Hilton Tower, Amazing Views of Route 95 - Architecture Critic Will Morgan

Proposed Hilton Tower, Amazing Views of Route 95 - Architecture Critic Will Morgan

 

Déjà view all over again. The 30-story TPG Tower proposed for Atwells Avenue takes us back to the failed city planning of the 1950s and ‘60s, back to the age of urban renewal, and to the destruction of historical cityscapes. This non-descript tower would offer its tenants an unparalleled view of one of Providence’s great urban design failures, the carving of the city in half by Interstate 95. (As Congressman Charles Farnsley, one of the sponsors of the Historic Preservation Act of 1966, succinctly put it, “Americans are the only people who bomb their own cities.”)

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Who but an architecturally insensitive developer with a limited sense of history and understanding of what makes successful cities would even suggest that Providence needed another everywhere-and-anywhere tower? Despite all the whining about the need for housing, the TPG scheme would add only 216 apartments for the well-to-do while adding nothing to the commonwealth. Instead of connecting with downtown life, this tower would offer more hermetically-sealed living units, atop six floors accommodating parking for 248 polluting and congestion-causing cars. And given other options for downtown living, who would choose to call home this particular spot of urban wasteland?

 

Tall buildings make sense only in a city with scant available land, while Providence has an intact, walkable downtown. They remove people from the daily commerce of the city (“I’ll drive my Lexus into the TPG Tower, take the elevator to my apartment dozens of floors above the city, and thereby avoid interaction with my fellow citizens, especially the homeless and the less-fortunate; I cannot open my windows for fresh air, but if I get one of the south-facing apartments, I might be able to see the Bay.”) In the last few years, the resurgence of activity in the core of downtown, not to mention the liveliness of Hope, Wickenden, Thayer, and Broad Streets, should amply demonstrate the case for greater density on the ground, the employment of infill, and the abandonment of poorly-designed development. Despite the unrelieved mediocrity of the buildings erected in the 195 District, most all of them are around five stories, making for a more relatable urbanscape.

 

   

 

A lot of city leaders and developers still bemoan the failure of the Fane Tower. They rue the lack of construction jobs and dreamed-of views of the river and bay, of 195 traffic jams and the scrap yard. But the officially named Hope Point Tower was an absolute turkey from the beginning. Unless you are as constricted and as crowded as Manhattan or Hong Kong, vertical development makes no sense in 2020s Rhode Island. The Fane Tower was a piece of urban flotsam by a developer who hadn’t a clue about inspired design. Many observers know by now that the final design idea for Fane was lifted from a building by a Chicago firm that graced the cover of an architectural magazine. That said, even this critic could have cheered a Fane tower that was imaginative, innovative, handsome, and a notable work of architecture. (Friedrich St. Florian sketched a stunningly handsome tower for the site.)

 

Yet, boldness and imagination seem to bypass our developers, union leaders, politicians, and university presidents. The quality of life in Providence is being chipped away, little by little; Neighborhoods are being assaulted by out-of-scale projects; review boards and commissions charged with protecting the city’s patrimony are being decimated of talent or are not doing the jobs with which they were charged. Where are the leaders willing to take on the challenges of encouraging new construction of which the city would be proud? Alas, we will lose much of this wonderful city’s character if we are unable to move beyond the self-defeating philosophy that meaningful development is that which only benefits the developers.

 

 

We have done some things absolutely right, such as uncovering the Providence River. But mistakes (some surprising for such an intellectually and artistically endowed city) continue to remind us of how we ought to aim a little higher. Whenever I greet visitors to Providence who come by train, I am both embarrassed by the grimness of the platform–who would want to disembark here?–and wonder why we accepted such a depressing gateway to our town. Fifty years ago, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, arguing for the preservation of New York’s Grand Central Terminal, said: If we don’t care about our past we can’t have very much hope for our future. We’ve all heard that it’s too late, or that it has to happen, that it’s inevitable. But I don’t think that’s true.”