Eminent domain could help save Arnold Building

NARROW SCOPE: Damaged by a fire in 2009, the George C. Arnold Building on Washington Street in Providence could find new life with the city’s help. / PBN PHOTO/TRACY JENKINS
NARROW SCOPE: Damaged by a fire in 2009, the George C. Arnold Building on Washington Street in Providence could find new life with the city’s help. / PBN PHOTO/TRACY JENKINS

As real estate projects, the HP Pavilion arena in San Jose, Calif., and the George C. Arnold Building on Washington Street in Providence are worlds apart.
The arena, home to the National Hockey League’s San Jose Sharks, sits on 17 acres and regularly hosts 17,000 spectators.
The three-story Arnold Building has been vacant since a fire in 2009 and at 12.5 feet deep, is the narrowest building in downtown Providence.
But new Providence Redevelopment Agency Executive Director Donald G. Gralnek believes his experience working with San Jose to build its arena can help Providence save the Arnold Building, one of Rhode Island’s most unique historic-preservation projects.
As senior vice president and general counsel for the Sharks, Gralnek helped San Jose clear numerous hurdles on the arena project that included the city acquiring the site through eminent domain.
That’s the same legal mechanism Providence Mayor Angel Taveras might use to redevelop the Arnold Building, a key part of the downtown streetscape that, due to its unique footprint, may not be viable as a purely private project.
“It desperately needs to be renovated to make it inhabitable and usable – to put it back on the property-tax rolls and make it an economic generator,” said Gralnek, hired to lead the redevelopment agency in April. “Whether [PRA] undertakes it or whether the private sector looks to do that is the question. It is highly likely that we would look to the private sector to rehabilitate it and make it functional. The effort under way now could have the agency acquire the property then contemplate and analyze how the redevelopment would occur.”
For the agency, acquiring the Arnold Building will require approval of the City Council and then negotiations with the owner, who is listed as ZW Properties LLC in city tax records.
Depending on what those negotiations produce, the agency has the option to buy the building in a conventional sale or seize it through eminent domain and then pay the owner a court-determined fair-market value. (There are also “friendly” eminent-domain takings where the property owner agrees to have the city take the property for an agreed-upon price.) Gralnek recently said he hasn’t spoken with the owner of the Arnold Building about it yet, although others in the city have, but he has been contacted by the lender holding the building’s mortgage.
“I do not believe it is going to be difficult,” Gralnek said about finding someone with authority to negotiate with on the Arnold Building, something that is often an issue with rundown properties.
As for what would happen with the Arnold Building once the city acquired it, Gralnek said the property would likely stay mixed use, with renovated storefronts on the first floor, and different configurations of offices or apartments possible above.
“We have had several folks tell us that all the kinds of uses could potentially work in one or more configurations,” Gralnek said. “It would be premature to speculate on exactly what the configuration would be, but the uses all seem appropriate to me and my instinct is it is achievable.”
A request for proposals from interested developers would be one option for finding a private-sector partner to work with, he said.
Located in a central section of Washington Street, the Arnold Building is seen as a key to keeping recent investment and progress on the street going.
Built in 1923, the Arnold Building has an appraised value of $258,000, according to assessor’s records, with the last recorded sale of the property in 2001 for $384,500.
Since the fire, the building has been boarded up and in the last two years has made the Providence Preservation Society’s 10 Most Endangered Properties List.
Constructed at the tail end of Providence’s turn-of-the-century boom years, the Arnold Building’s narrowness signifies the period before the automobile reshaped city life, when downtown land was at a premium. “It is narrow, but if you are standing on Washington Street you wouldn’t know it,” said Providence Preservation Society Coordinator of Advocacy and Education Paul Wackrow. “It fills in the street quite well.”
The preservation society has written a letter in support of the city acquiring the Arnold Building to redevelop it.
Steven Durkee, an architect with Cornish Associates, responsible for many of the downtown historic-restoration projects in Providence over the past decade, said fixing the Arnold Building shouldn’t be impossibly expensive, but it will take an investor looking for a unique challenge more than an easy profit.
“It is not a great speculative project; it’s going to be someone who really wants to fix it up,” Durkee said.
“It’s certainly a special little place and people like quirky spaces,” he added. “The windows are amazing and I am sure people would live there. We need places to live downtown because there is so much demand.”
Although it’s played a large role in major city projects over the decades, the Providence Redevelopment Agency has been quiet in recent years and hasn’t had an executive director for the past 18 months.
The loss of government programs to spur development has been one reason for the slowdown, but Gralnek said under Taveras’ economic agenda, he hopes to get the agency involved again.
Along with the Arnold Building, Taveras has mentioned using eminent domain to redevelop the long vacant South Street Power Station, also known as the Dynamo House.
Gralnek said he hasn’t started seriously working on a city takeover of the power-station property yet because potential buyers are still actively investigating it.
“That is not on the plate of the agency at moment, but if the private efforts don’t materialize, that could change,” Gralnek said. “That is a very large and complicated undertaking and not likely that the agency would start looking at it unless it was specifically asked to do so.” •

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