Butcher Block creating collaborative energy

SURVEYING THE LANDSCAPE: Joe Novak, founder of Novac Garden Design & Construction, has found a home for his business in the Butcher Block Mill and has benefited from the location’s ability to foster collaboration. / PBN PHOTO/FRANK MULLIN
SURVEYING THE LANDSCAPE: Joe Novak, founder of Novac Garden Design & Construction, has found a home for his business in the Butcher Block Mill and has benefited from the location’s ability to foster collaboration. / PBN PHOTO/FRANK MULLIN

Before he started his own business and moved into Butcher Block Mill in Providence, Joe Novak, founder of Novac Garden Design & Construction, endured a double dose of Rhode Island career tumult.
The Pennsylvania native had moved to the Ocean State from California to work on the creation of the Roger Williams Botanical Garden, a project that was eventually scaled back, costing him his job.
Then he was hired as a construction manager for a large landscape firm, but that company collapsed during the recession and he was laid off.
Now Novak is happy to be working for himself and, although he says he is most comfortable working with plants, has already benefited from the environment of creative entrepreneurs at Butcher Block.
Soon after moving into the renovated mill, Novak began collaborating with Joel Gietler, the owner of IntegraStone, a building-material manufacturer down the hall whose products work well in landscape designs.
“Most spaces are single garages of warehouses, not a community of people,” Novac said of Butcher Block. “In a mill building with other creative professionals, there is an energy that helps you be more creative.”
The collaboration between Novak and Gietler is central to the mission of Butcher Block Mill and other projects run by the Partnership for Creative Space.
Since the nonprofit was founded nearly a decade ago, partnership Director Erik Bright has seen the market for commercial spaces turned inside out by the economy and housing collapse.
Through it all, the spaces run by the partnership have remained in demand with the newest, Butcher Block, 90 percent full, with only two of 20 units vacant.
In addition to Novak Garden and Integrastone, Bright points to Rhode Island School of Design professor David Dilks’ design and fabrication business, which has brought 3-D printing into the complex, as examples of the innovation potential there. Even though mills aren’t being gobbled up by developers now the way they were five years ago, the partnership is still pressing the value of a network of inexpensive, creative industrial spaces.
This year Bright is working with state lawmakers on establishing a “Made in Rhode Island” program to identify products manufactured in the state and to build a brand identity for it.
If approved, the program would establish an official Made in Rhode Island seal that manufacturers could attach to products where 100 percent of assembly took place in the state and all materials used came from within the country.
Once the program is established, Bright hopes to add sales tax or tangible property tax incentives for Made in Rhode Island qualifying businesses.
“If we can’t begin with our local products, it seems unlikely that we will ever reduce the restrictive environment on businesses creating jobs in our state,” Bright wrote about the Made in Rhode Island idea. “We need to encourage small businesses to start in our state and to contribute to our job growth.”
The partnership’s last foray into the legislative arena involved a successful lobbying effort to pass a city ordinance making developers seeking subsidies for mill renovations help evicted tenants relocate.
When Bright formed the Partnership for Creative Industrial Space in 2004, Providence’s underutilized mills were still a big draw for artists and recent college graduates looking for an inexpensive base to launch a creative enterprise.
But as property values soared during the housing-bubble years, developers discovered those spaces and converted them into apartments, condominiums, shops and offices in projects such as the Foundry, Rising Sun Mills and Eagle Square. The state historic-tax-credit program was also in full swing, making mill conversions particularly attractive to developers.
With the market for inexpensive studio and production space becoming tighter, the partnership was created to lock up mill buildings in long-term master leases for sublet to creative businesses at lower rents than they would find on their own. The first project was at Conley’s Wharf on Allens Avenue, where the partnership leased 31,000 square feet in the former coal-gasification plant renovated using historic-tax credits.
In 2006, the partnership was hired by the now-defunct developers of the American Locomotive Works project on Valley Street to find homes for the artists and craftsmen displaced by the redevelopment of that mill.
Since then the partnership has focused on buildings in Providence’s Valley neighborhood, where Bright converted the Monohasset Mill building on Kinsley Avenue into live-work studios.
The next project was the former Nicholson File Co. building on Acorn Street, which the partnership leased from Licht Properties and converted it into live-work spaces. Nicholson File is fully leased with 15 tenants.
Like Conley’s Wharf before the partnership ended its involvement there last year, at Nicholson File the organization’s master lease is approximately $4 per square foot and the subleases to tenants are $5 to $6 per square foot, Bright said.
At Butcher Block, Bright teamed with Rachel Rafaelian, who bought the 30,000 square-foot, former golf ball and furniture factory in 2010, so the partnership could convert it into small industrial units.
Now four years after the real estate market collapsed and the state historic-tax-credit plan was put on ice, Bright believes demand for inexpensive industrial space, at least in Providence, is still acute.
Bright said there is no shortage of demand for space in Butcher Block or Nicholson File, but he is careful to choose only tenants who will add to the collective energy of the place.
“The primary goal is to keep them in Providence; the secondary level is to help them grow.” •

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