Despite New Stadium, Pawtucket Is Facing Demolitions and Decay

Despite New Stadium, Pawtucket Is Facing Demolitions and Decay

 

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City Hall in Pawtucket is literally falling apart. It is not, however, the only iconic building in the city in peril.

 

The fabulous Art Deco structure designed by John O’Malley and made possible in part with WPA funds during the Great Depression now needs upwards of $80 to $100 million to restore the building, according to the city. 

 

The functions of City Hall are being moved out of the historic structure. Tunstall America's headquarters on Freight Street is the new location for the city's government.

 

Pawtucket Mayor Don Grebien, in an interview with GoLocal on Saturday, said, “Then we're over the next three to four months. There'll be a permanent council chamber built. They have some police ticketing some city clerk [functions will move to the new location], you know, in phase one, that's getting done. That's going to be three to four months." Grebien has served as Pawtucket's mayor since he was first elected in 2010.

 

He said the city is reviewing the options for the future of City Hall. According to Grebien, he expects that it will take another year.

 

 

City Hall is not the only major iconic structure in Pawtucket in decay. 

 

Demo of the Grandest Home

 

 

 

 

This past year, Pawtucket lost one of its grandest structures — the Reed-Ott mansion — which was demolished and is now a vacant lot.

Prior to the demo, GoLocal wrote about the history of the historic home.

“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.”

 

 

McCoy’s Demo

Move across the city, and McCoy Stadium is being demolished. Nearly everyone aged ten and older in Rhode Island spent multiple summer nights at McCoy eating ice cream out of a mini-baseball helmet with their family and friends.

That location will be the site of a new high school.

The loss of the Pawtucket Red Sox drove state and city leaders to panic. Rhode Island Commerce issued an RFP; in 2019, then-Governor Gina Raimondo and Fortuitous Partners announced a sweeping $400 million project in Pawtucket that included apartments, a soccer stadium, retail, and other developments. 

But now, more than five years later, the minor league stadium is set to open on May 3 after years of delays, controversy and budget-busting cost overruns.

Pawtucket’s own financial advisor resigned due to questions about the economic viability of the deal.

Rhode Island taxpayers, who were not supposed to pay for anything but the infrastructure, are now, due to a deal by Governor Dan McKee, on the hook for $ 140-plus million in bond payments.

Despite the massive investment by Rhode Islanders, the stadium is 100% owned by a private investment group from out of state led by Brett Johnson.

 

 

 

 

Memorial Hospital - Broken Windows and Graffiti Covered

Just down the road is the empty edifice of the once-vibrant Memorial Hospital.

The campus once employed nearly 2,000 healthcare professionals, but after years of mismanagement and financial losses, Care New England petitioned the state of Rhode Island, and then-Governor Raimondo and Attorney General Peter Kilmartin approved the closure of the facility.

The impact was profound. The loss of Memorial Hospital created a domino effect, causing chaos in the emergency rooms at The Miriam Hospital and Rhode Island Hospital due to the closing in Pawtucket.

RI Hospital’s emergency room has one of the longest waiting times of any hospital in the country.

The redevelopment of the Memorial Hospital was announced by Grebien and Lockwood Development Partners’ president Charles Everhardt in 2021 with great fanfare.

“The City of Pawtucket has long supported the redevelopment of the underutilized former Memorial Hospital site to a project that benefits and meets the community’s needs,” said Grebien at the time, who introduced Lockwood to Care New England. “We thank Charles and his team for their transformational vision to bring a veterans’ facility and the ancillary economic development that it will create to our community.” 

According to Grebien’s office in 2021, “Lockwood and Veteran Services USA (VSUSA) are designing a revitalization plan with the view to transform the vacant Memorial Hospital into a safe, clean, and enjoyable place to live for Rhode Island’s aging veteran community.

But three years later, Grebien has harsh words for Everhardt, who never developed the project. And is now touting a new developer.

“The hospital itself, which is the Memorial LLC, is now a Memorial Development LLC, because what the original LLC did was they went out and borrowed about $10 million roughly against the property that they paid $250,000 for, and that was another hot deal,” said Grebien.

 

 

Apex Roof Panels Removed Due to Safety Issues

Now, another iconic structure is literally crumbling.

Grebien said the white panels of the Apex pyramid adjacent to I-95 needed to be removed after one of the panels blew off.

“PRA [Pawtucket Redevelopment Agency] has control of the APEX property, and we bought it, what, three, four years ago and we went out for an RFP, or an RFQ, maybe six months ago, it was due in September, and we had five bidders come in on the property,” said Grebien.

“We didn't do anything with the bidders because, at the same time, it was the Hasbro stuff. Hasbro popped up, so we said, okay, timeout, let's focus on Hasbro to try to attract them to APEX. So those five proposals are kind of still on the shelf, collecting dust. We've talked to everybody; we haven't ignored them, but we felt that trying to keep Hasbro here was a priority,” Grebien added.

There is little indication that Hasbro is interested in staying in Rhode Island, let alone Pawtucket.

In Pawtucket, some of its most important buildings and city history are being demolished.