he could come
home again.
“Who said you can’t go home again,” remarked designer Morris Nathanson, as he handed a mug of steaming coffee to a visitor and proudly presented a tour of his tour de force design firm.
The concept’s certainly worked for Nathanson, who was born in Pawtucket and went to high school directly across Exchange Street from his illustrious company that today has an international client list and a resume of upscale projects all over the world.
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His life has traced the proverbial circle, from leaving Rhode Island for the service at 17, attending college in New York and Miami, and then beginning his life as a designer.
“I never thought I’d go back,” Nathanson said, although he did raise his first family in the tiny Northern Rhode Island rural community of Harmony and has also worked for the City of Providence as a consultant and Trinity Repertory Co. as a scenic designer.
Youngsters – folks of any age, actually – have been known to approach the courtly and bespectacled Nathanson, size up his dapper suit and silk bow tie, and guess, “you’re somebody famous, aren’t you?”
Maybe they’re thinking Albert Einstein, perhaps Mark Twain. But Nathanson’s public role as board member of the Pawtucket Foundation derives from his association with Blackstone Studios, an enclave of art studios in the heart of Pawtucket’s old mill district. He’s already achieved the type of economic revitalization and commitment to culture that the foundation has in mind.
“I couldn’t think of a better area for artists to work in,” Nathanson said of his artist colony, which is not an artsy craftsy thing, but “real professionals doing work,”
And that’s part of the mission of the Pawtucket Foundation, he said, to inspire people “to think of Pawtucket as a convenient place, a comfortable place, to live and work.”
About 10 years ago Morris decided to restore the 19th-century paper factory across from Tolman High School, which had been vacant for many years. “When I bought this building it was totally derelict,” he said. “My wife at that time thought I was crazy.”
He not only moved in his own firm, which specializes in hotel, restaurant and hospitality design, but inspired another dozen or so artists to join him to create an eclectic mix of lofts, a novel concept in Pawtucket at the time.
Today the studio not only features painters, muralists and printmakers but silversmiths, jewelry designers and a glass artist and landscape architect.
The building also provides a thriving testimony to Pawtucket’s past, its exposed brick and wooden beams, its large windows just an initial peek into the historic treasures the old industrial city has to offer new business.
It’s still a factory, Nathanson said, a factory of artists and artisans, not working for me “but with me.”
Besides allowing Morris Nathanson Designs to approach a project more coherently, to be “much larger than we really are,” the artist community at Blackstone Studios is also quite convenient – the better to share and coordinate ideas, and experience the satisfaction of “that working collaboration [when] you’re building something together.”
The use of local artists in international projects has become a key Nathanson attribute – “It’s become part of the way we work” – beginning several years ago with several projects at Euro-Disney in Paris.
Just recently the company, which typically has about 20 projects going in various stages of completion, completed two restaurant projects at the new Aladdin mega resort in Las Vegas.
They designed the hotel’s upscale Italian eatery BiCE and its highly fashionable The Blue Note restaurant. For BiCE Nathanson hired printmaker Regina Partridge to do 40 abstract mono prints, Thomas Studios to paint a 60-foot mural, and computer construction designer Avantgarde Design – all from his building.
He also hired ceramic artist Coral Bourgeois, whose studio is in an old Rumford factory, to create a huge, tile wall. “The artists in Rhode Island are as good as artists anywhere in the country,” Nathanson said, resolutely.
How does this affect the Pawtucket Foundation? The artist is very much like the student, both “pioneers in urban settlements,” who like students will venture into areas not the most attractive or ostensibly the safest, to be the first to encourage others to follow, Nathanson said.
“The real estate is here,” the old factory buildings, just waiting to be given new life in a setting close to Route 95 and Green Airport and just minutes away from the commuter rail to Boston. There are many facts of Pawtucket life “people don’t realize,” said Nathanson, who with his wife has put everything they own into the studios because “we believe in this so much. We see this as an investment for the future.”
And how is this just burgeoning renaissance in Pawtucket similar to what’s gone
on for its southern neighbor, recently named by “Money Magazine” as one of the
best places in the country to live? “We root for Providence, because we know if
things work for Providence we share in its good fortune,” said Nathanson. “I see
Pawtucket and Providence as being very, very close. I think our destiny is with
Providence because we have the same river,” he continued, and like individual
drops in a thundering current the two cannot be separated, since “it all flows
to the [same] ocean.”
