Is Foster ready for village center?

WHAT’S IN STORE? Foster could be getting a 35,000-square-foot retail complex, which could include a restaurant, a grocery store, coffee shop and library. Pictured above are Town Librarian Kristen Chin, left, and developer Ann Valentine. / PBN FILE PHOTO/TRACY JENKINS
WHAT’S IN STORE? Foster could be getting a 35,000-square-foot retail complex, which could include a restaurant, a grocery store, coffee shop and library. Pictured above are Town Librarian Kristen Chin, left, and developer Ann Valentine. / PBN FILE PHOTO/TRACY JENKINS

Why does former data-processing company owner Mike Valentine want to build a 35,000-square-foot retail complex with a new public library in rural Foster?
“Because there’s nothing there,” said Valentine about the town on the border with Connecticut he’s lived in for 20 years. “The whole concept is to create a place where people here can go without driving from one parking lot to another in another town.”
On the site of a burned-down restaurant on busy Route 6, Valentine is planning the start of the village center Foster never had.
His project, called Simmons Crossing, would add a restaurant, grocery, mini-post-office, automated teller machine, coffee house and other shops to the northwest corner of the Route 6 and Route 94 intersection.
Already nearby are a church and a fire station, which Valentine sees forming the heart of a local gathering place, possibly with an outdoor farmers market.
“Now the only choice for food in town is a Sunoco station and it is difficult to make a whole menu out of that,” Valentine said. “We think it is important for the town to have a sense of community.”
In character, Valentine is pitching Simmons Crossing as fundamentally local, community-focused and homespun, in contrast to the typical suburban retail-strip plaza.
The home page of the project’s website mentions listening to wildlife each night, supporting local cottage industries and “being a pie judge at Old Home Days.”
Valentine has been pursuing Simmons Crossing since he and his wife, Ann, purchased the 5-acre site where the Backdraft Café was located before it was razed after a fire.
The town recently rezoned Route 6 from a traditional commercial “strip” zoning to business mixed use, allowing a developer to utilize an entire lot and encouraging a village-center design, said Town Planner Ann-Marie Ignasher.
Along with the need for a gathering place and retail option, the town has also been looking for a new library, so Valentine decided to make that a part of the complex. Currently, the nonprofit Libraries of Foster are housed in two small, former schoolhouse buildings, one about three miles and another six miles from the Simmons Crossing site.
While both libraries exhibit country charm, neither are handicapped accessible nor large enough for the multimedia, program-driven, digital library of the 21st century.
The libraries have been operating on a waiver from accessibility codes for years and exist under the constant threat of losing state funding.
“They have donated a pad to build the library,” said Kristen Chin, director of the Libraries of Foster about Simmons Crossing. “This is incredibly important because we have two libraries in small school houses and you can’t do the things you need to do with regard to technology. Libraries are very different now, not just a repository for books.”
If the library and town can raise half the cost to build a new library, the R.I. Office of Library and Information Services will pick up the other half.
Chin said preliminary plans call for a new building with about 9,000 square feet of space to consolidate the two old libraries.
Although architectural plans have yet to be drawn for the library, Chin said early cost estimates are in the $3 million range.
To highlight the village and community concept for Simmons Crossing, Valentine wants to employ some of the principles of urban design to enhance walkability and get away from the drive-through and box-store model.
Last summer he hired Union Studio architects of Providence, a firm known for community-centered and environmentally focused projects similar to Sandywoods Farm in Tiverton.
Union Studio founding partner Donald Powers said the unique design challenge of Simmons Crossing is the tension between attracting enough traffic to the development to make it commercially viable while keeping it human scale and walkable. “There are two opposing strategies at work: one is retail wants maximum visibility to Route 6 so people see what they are going to pull into and see parking,” Powers said. “But that runs counter to being pedestrian-friendly, where an enclosure makes people want to walk around. And the library would like outdoor spaces activated, so from that perspective you want it inward.”
To get around this problem, Union Studio’s preliminary site plan puts the smaller library at the corner of the intersection with the larger, 11,500 square-foot market building to its north and a two-story, 17,000-square-foot retail building to the west, forming a triangle with a “town green” in the center.
Since the commercial buildings are larger – the market is described as barn-inspired – they are visible above and around the library, which provides shelter from the street.
Further west on the property, on the other side of the main Route 6 driveway, is a “Town Commons” with a pavilion for events.
To build Simmons Crossing, Valentine is going to need dimensional variances from the town, which caps commercial projects at 10,000 square feet, Powers said.
Powers expects to submit a formal application and begin hearings on those variances within a month.
Once the project has cleared those land-use hurdles, Powers said attention will turn to the critical job of signing the right mix of tenants to make it work commercially and attract financing.
Although Simmons Crossing will be Foster’s village, Powers said it needs a unique mix of boutique offerings to attract people from throughout northwestern Rhode Island.
“Route 6 is a major corridor to Connecticut and back and it is possible to tap into all those people going east-west who have few other resources for entertainment,” Powers said. “It has to be differentiated. It can’t just be another convenience stop.” •

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