The Dud on the River – Architecture Critic Morgan

The Dud on the River – Architecture Critic Morgan

 

Just when apartment house design seems to have turned a positive corner, as evidenced by some of the proposed schemes for 195’s Parcel 5, Providence Architecture and Building Company has come up with another astoundingly hideous and destructive vision for the East Side of Providence.

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There are so many reasons that 27 East River Street is untenable: it is the wrong size (326 apartments on a two-acre lot), the wrong scale for the site (seven stories), and it would forever destroy open riverfront that clearly needs to belong to the Blackstone park system. The plans for this blunt object of a project looks as though they were downloaded from the internet–it is a structure totally without any architectural merit. 27 East River Street is the largest, least appropriate, and most embarrassingly unsophisticated housing scheme ever foisted on the East Side. This low point of ubiquibox scourge represents a total failure of the city to understand the true nature of our patrimony and how to intelligently plan for the future.

 

 

Blame the shibboleth of Providence’s “housing crisis” for the possible approval of this turkey. The catchphrase has become almost meaningless–like blaming immigrants for all our ills, or playing the race card because no one will call you on it. While there may be a putative housing crisis in the city, it will not be solved by so-called luxury apartment buildings like 27 East River Street. The housing-crisis dog whistle, in this case, is merely a smokescreen to obscure the fact of a greedy and insensitive developer’s plan to pimp a bit of waterfront green space for his own profit. No one can seriously claim that this 244,000 gross-square-foot piece of junk will contribute to the commonwealth. East River Street is another salvo in the assault on the scale and desirability of the entire East Side.

Project architect Kevin Diamond has merely wrapped the building dimensions in the most banal skin imaginable. The City Plan Commission should be an advocate for sensible planning and act as a guardian against such ill-conceived and destructive schemes. Yet, at the recent most CPC hearing, Diamond went unchallenged when he declared that his work will result in a ”transformational property” on “an amazing, vibrant, activated site.” With further unsupported hyperbole, the architect boasted that his behemoth would “reconnect the neighborhood with the water,” and “activate the coastal greenway.” Aside from the kayak dock, one wonders how a clunky seven-story block of flats would accomplish this. Does anyone other than the construction-at-any-cost-to-history-and-livability crowd believe this is the only barricade against hordes of the homeless? (In the drawings submitted to the CPC, there are no floor plans of apartments–would they be larger than the near-windowless flats in the same developer’s proposed Wickenden Street townscape blaster? Will this mix of condos and rental units be luxury living, or simply more student ghetto? No “affordable” spaces are planned.)

The developer behind the project is Dustin Dezube. 

 

 

Admittedly, the material submitted to the CPC supported requests for variances in height and the number of parking spaces, but as the chairman of the commission stated, this is “not a fully fleshed-out development plan,” and that the requests for fifteen more feet of height and 163 less parking spaces “were jumping the gun” (there’s been no traffic study, for example). Robert Azar, deputy director of the city’s planning department, noted that the building occupies the entire lot, “from lot line to lot line,” but also called the Commission’s decision to greenlight the parking and height request as “fairly reasonable.”

 

 

The developers claim that the variances are needed, as they “want flexibility,” not to mention that “height is an early-stage domino.” Yet, respondents at the October 15th CPC meeting bemoaned the lack of communication and discussion with the community. City Councilor Helen Anthony, for example, expressed “alarm at the lack of community engagement.” Nina Tannenwald of the Wayland Square Neighborhood Association was concerned about “a very large building squeezed into a very small lot” and that there was “no reference to Richmond Square.” Tannenwald hoped for “more deliberation” for the project, especially in light of what she called “steamrolling.”

 

 

 

There may indeed be an acute housing crisis in Rhode Island, but have, for example, the 195 clunkers, the Brook Street Canyon, and the dissolution of the Nicholson Estate on Blackstone Boulevard really addressed housing in a meaningful way? Architectural firms, such as Union Studio and various neighborhood housing coalitions, are erecting successful and often appealing housing across the state (such as Ivy Place in East Providence). Yet in Providence itself, we roll over and play dead before developers who have the aesthetic chops of gerbils and no philanthropic desire to contribute anything worthwhile to the community.

Carelessly thought-out projects like 27 East River Street are not the answer. Providence must come up with more inventive, more common sense, and better-designed approaches to developing our city.