Frank LaTorre, director of the Downtown Improvement District (DID) in Providence, believes a safe and clean streetscape is critical to a city’s ability to keep and land retail and residential leases. And his paid crew of 17 – with their signature yellow jackets – is certainly doing its part to lure businesses.
Over the last four years the crew had removed nearly 10,000 graffiti tags, 5,433 stickers and handbills and more than a million pounds of trash from the 81 blocks that make up Providence’s downtown. Their work supplements the city’s street-cleaning efforts.
“This is all part of the plan of making the downtown more welcoming, more full of life – just the feeling that we are a community and that we welcome people,” said LaTorre, who recently celebrated DID’s four-year anniversary. “It’s the broken-window theory. If a window stays broken too long, that tends to make the area more unstable. So we keep it clean seven days a week, every single day of the year, except for Christmas.”
There’s been a lot of retail activity downtown in the last four years, but Providence Foundation Program Manager Joelle Kanter last week said downtown vacancy likely rose last year. Her nonprofit is in the process of updating its list of retail leases.
“I would say there’s not a flurry of activity right now,” Kanter said. “But because we know it will be a challenging year, we’re trying to come up with some new strategies. Our goal right now is to keep the momentum going, recognizing that it’s a difficult environment.”
But there has been recent retail activity downtown, with two of the most prominent additions adding to the livability of area, she said. Late last month a gym, Boston Sports Clubs, opened a Dorrance Street location. And a new grocer, Gourmet Heaven, is set to open a 2,500-square-foot storefront market at the corner of Union and Weybosset streets this month.
That grocer, which has two slightly larger stores in New Haven, Conn., has been a long time coming, said Joanna Levitt, the director of retail leasing and marketing with Cornish Associates LP. For the last two years, her firm has been working with the Rhode Island School of Design, which owns the space. Cornish master-leased the space, then courted Gourmet Heaven’s owners for a sublease.
Touring downtown and introducing Gourmet Heaven’s owners to the city became integral to the owner’s eventual choice to open the new location, Levitt added “Being from out of town, there was a period of just introducing them to the city.”
There are benefits for Cornish, which has developed and owns hundreds of residential apartments nearby – Levitt pegged the number of tenants between 400 and 500 people.
“This, for us and our residential tenants, validates them living downtown,” she said. “Now, for the true urban experience, they don’t need a car. They can walk everywhere and this makes that a reality. This [addition of Gourmet Heaven] is the piece that was missing.”
LaTorre thinks the retail growth downtown can in part be credited to DID’s work, which also includes a summer plantings program that started in 2007 and this year will grow to 248 hanging plants.
LaTorre’s ideas might be catching on elsewhere. The Boston Redevelopment Agency (BRA) is now looking to create a similar group to patrol its Downtown Crossing district, the retail center that bridges the financial district and Boston Commons.
The Boston agency, headed by the former Providence Director of Development & Planning John F. Palmieri, brought a group to Providence late last month to learn from DID, including about obtaining funding, LaTorre said. His group, a “business improvement district” under state law, has an annual budget of about $1.2 million that is funded by downtown property owners.
DID is also a founding partner in the Hospitality Resource Partnership, which is working on issues involving Providence’s nightlife.
“That’s all about improving the quality of life,” LaTorre said. •
