Years of promises and waiting for new economic opportunities have made some residents and business owners jaundiced about a Pawtucket turnaround.
If the so-called Ballpark at Slater Mill comes to fruition, the Pawtucket Red Sox, a Triple-A minor league baseball team, would provide an immediate anchor to an old city in desperate need of economic stabilization.
But if not the PawSox, what? How well is Pawtucket, with its 71,427 residents, positioned to shake off decades of decline?
Its tirelessly optimistic mayor, Donald R. Grebien, cited trends on a recent walk around the downtown that indicate change is coming. One of the most promising has already taken form.
The Isle Brewers Guild, now producing 100 barrels a day at a cooperative brewery, bypassed Providence for its Pawtucket plant, and has created a center of activity in what was not long ago a forlorn area near downtown.
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GROWTH SIGN: Pawtucket Mayor Donald R. Grebien, left, meets with Isle Brewers Guild co-founder Jeremy Duffy during a walking tour of the city’s downtown. Grebien cites IBG as an example of increased economic activity in the area. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO[/caption]
In addition to the manufacturing operation, the guild has a 4,000-square-foot tap room, serving whatever is being brewed. It draws 600 people on weekends, said founding partner Jeremy Duffy.
“We’re an anchor in this neighborhood,” he said. “And it’s a start of what’s happening.”
All around the guild site, a former nuts and bolts factory, former mills have been turned into modern apartments or newly renovated business space.
Harvest Kitchen, an operation of the nonprofit Farm Fresh RI, has a store with fresh produce and grab-n-go foods at 2 Bayley St.
The new owner of the Slater Cotton Mill apartments recently bought another vacant building near the original holding, at 75 South Union St., and has obtained city approval for 40 additional units, according to city planning officials.
Near the site of the future Pawtucket train station, due to open in 2019, interest in property acquisition is accelerating.
The owners of the 125 Lofts at the former Union Wadding mill at 125 Goff Ave. have purchased acreage adjacent to the proposed train stop, according to a letter from owner Rebecca Spencer, written to support the city’s application for federal funds.
She explained the investment of $2 million in the property: “The partners in Lofts 125 allocated around $2 [million] in acquisition funds in the immediate vicinity in anticipation of the approval of the train station, which will make surrounding areas a perfect development opportunity for residential, commercial and retail use.”
Duffy said his company purchased the former mill in Pawtucket after seeing the value of its location, including its proximity to the highway and to Providence, and the size of the building for the brewery.
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ALL ONBOARD? The planned location of the new Pawtucket-Central Falls Commuter Rail Station is near the small structure on the left side of the tracks and runs across the tracks on both sides. / PBN FILE PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO[/caption]
He sees reason to view the area as changing. Both the proposed new downtown home for the Pawtucket Red Sox and the train station will be important for the downtown, Duffy said. Both are within a short, walking distance to the guild.
“Those pillars start building the whole infrastructure. They will all interconnect,” he said.
The trouble, say downtown business owners, is the time frame required.
Promised development has taken too long already, they say, and many are looking at the two-year wait for the train station, and the even-longer horizon for a new PawSox stadium, assuming it gains approval, as too long.
‘IT LOOKS ABANDONED’
Main Street appears inactive even during weekday hours, with few shoppers or passersby on the sidewalks.
Alongside the smattering of retail stores and restaurants, the main corridor has several closed shops. The city-owned, downtown parking garage, dilapidated and festooned with graffiti, is shielded from view of the street by a row of vacant retail shops. In one of the windows, a closing notification sign dates to January 2011.
The city has had plans for years to renovate the garage, to make it more appealing to visitors, according to Grebien. Although a request for proposal was issued this year, the initial bids came back at amounts greater than budgeted.
Directly across the street, Robert Plouffe, who owns Plouffe’s Cup n’ Saucer diner, said any renovation to the garage that opens it up to the street will be welcomed by businesses. “Now, they’re going to be able to see their cars,” he said.
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HEARD IT BEFORE: Nicholas Carbone, owner of Pawtucket Pawn Brokers, is skeptical plans to use a new downtown ballpark to boost economic development will come to fruition. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO[/caption]
A few stores down, Pawtucket Pawn Brokers is one of the oldest small businesses on Main Street. Nicholas Carbone, whose father established the company in 1990, said his business survives as a destination. The clients know where the shop is and are coming to him specifically.
The one-way streets and lack of parking are hard for the businesses on Main Street, he said.
The free parking garage, he said, is all but unknown to most visitors.
If the PawSox ballpark is built downtown, it couldn’t do any harm, he said. But he’s skeptical of the talk of revitalization. Since he assumed ownership six or seven years ago, he’s heard about plans for new things.
“I’m a little biased. We’ve been hearing a lot of, ‘This is going to happen. This is going to happen,’ ” Carbone said. “And [then] no action.”
Down the street, a new business has opened up in a tiny corner space of one of Pawtucket’s many art deco buildings.
Bake My Day, a bakery and café, moved downtown from a space now occupied by the brewers guild. Owner Stacey Riendeau, who lives in Pawtucket, eventually dreams of landing on Hope Street in Providence. But in her current location, she saw a future.
“I thought this place had potential,” she said.
On a recent afternoon, she was preparing a base mixture for a cake. A bowl of eggs and several sticks of butter were in colorful mixing bowls.
She’s attracted a loyal lunchtime following among downtown workers at her location. In the space of a few minutes, a Pawtucket police officer and a physician stepped into the café for their pickup orders.
But downtown Pawtucket is not an easy place to establish passerby traffic. Some of it is aesthetic. The vacant shops, the graffiti, the appearance of having seen better days, all afflict the downtown.
“It doesn’t look attractive,” Riendeau said. “It’s the little things that make a difference, whether it’s the coat of paint or the little basket of flowers.”
One of her efforts in recent months has involved other small businesses downtown. She’s trying to organize them, so they might have a stronger voice in expressing what they need to city leaders.
The downtown needs more people, more residents, more activity. “That lived-in look,” she said. “Right now, it looks abandoned.”
One employer has been investing in downtown Pawtucket. Collette has invested more than $15 million in its world headquarters and currently has 393 employees in the city.
The company “has committed several million dollars for continued development and expansion, as well as many aesthetic improvements and upgrades to campus and the riverfront over the next two years,” said Bob Colucci, executive vice president and chief financial officer of Collette.
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BUILDING BLOCK: Jeremy Duffy, co-founder of Isle Brewers Guild, says the co-op has become an anchor in its neighborhood near the downtown. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO[/caption]
AWAITING ANCHORS
As in many American cities, downtown Pawtucket is isolated, divided from the surrounding residential neighborhoods of the city by Interstate 95. A decision to make the commercial center accessible only through one-way roads has served to bewilder visitors and business patrons.
For more than 10 years, city officials have had plans to eliminate this traffic pattern, creating a more visitor-friendly approach. But nothing has changed. Grebien and other planning officials say one of the issues is parking – how to make the traffic two-way without eliminating the street parking that small businesses need.
Jan Brodie, executive director of the Pawtucket Foundation, said the traffic pattern has been a concern for years, but fixing it is not going to attract visitors. “What’s really needed are key anchors,” she said, which for Pawtucket is the ballpark proposal downtown, and the train station, at the other end. “There is true faith that with these anchors that the ancillary development and the increase in tax revenue will follow. It’s setting the stage and we need that.”
Brodie, who has been with the foundation for two years, previously led the Interstate 195 Redevelopment District Commission. That district, she noted, took 30 years to create and prepare for development.
Pawtucket now has an opportunity, with the train station and the ballpark, to generate the economic activity that will help turn around the city, she said.
Since the announcement of a federal Transportation Investment Generating Economic Activity grant, which authorized the train station stop, and now more recently the talk of the PawSox moving to downtown, more development interest has peaked in the area.
“We have some infill development that people are starting to ask about,” she said. “I just got a call before yours. Someone wants a tour of the train station area.”
Some long-hoped-for changes have already taken place, designed to increase the attractiveness of the city to development. They include the adoption in 2015 of a citywide, standardized policy on tax stabilization agreements, allowing a five-year phase-in on taxes for projects that invest at least $250,000, and a 10-year phase-in of property tax on projects of at least $5 million, with City Council approval. Zoning requirements also have been loosened, to remove parking requirements for downtown buildings.
Like other cities, including Providence, downtown Pawtucket is occupied by buildings housing large numbers of nonprofits and government-owned facilities, including a residential complex for those with low incomes and a YMCA. They provide needed employment, but as nonprofits, no property tax and thus limited revenue for the city.
And then there’s Apex. A former destination department store, the building with the pyramid roofline has long since become a deteriorating symbol of the city. The traveler’s eye on I-95 goes to the largely vacated Apex site, not the elegant church spires or the art deco tower of City Hall.
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DOWNTOWN DRAW: City leaders say a new home for the Pawtucket Red Sox could help spur development throughout the downtown. / COURTESY PAWTUCKET RED SOX[/caption]
The owner of Apex also owns several adjoining sites, all of which could be redeveloped as a single parcel into the new, downtown home for the Pawtucket Red Sox, who now play at aging McCoy Stadium. The proposal for a new ballpark would include funding from the city, the state and the private owners of the baseball team.
If it moves ahead, the project would involve a rerouting of roads on Main Street, and removal of several office buildings adjoining the site, all owned by the Apex development, according to Grebien. Parking would be included in the proposal, but not so much that the site would be self-contained.
The city is determined to avoid the “casino effect,” which would isolate the development and its planned ancillary development away from the downtown, said Jeanne Boyle, newly hired as Pawtucket’s commerce director and the former longtime planning director for East Providence.
“We don’t want the casino effect,” she said. “A lot of the parking is going to be at the site. But a lot of it is going to be located downtown. You want people to visit the downtown, patronize the local businesses and activate some of the spaces that are not being used right now.”
The $83 million proposal is now before the General Assembly, which will need to approve bonding requests for the new ballpark to be built. The proposal includes $10 million for land acquisition for the site, although the final number has yet to be determined.
Grebien, elected mayor six years ago, has largely taken over the local leadership role for the pro-stadium effort. He describes it as critical for the city.
“It’s my job as mayor,” he said. “It’s a Pawtucket project. If you just look at the numbers, it’s a great proposal. It’s the political aspects of it that nobody wants to touch,” he said, alluding to voter antipathy toward public-private partnerships in the wake of the 38 Studios bankruptcy in 2012.
What if it falls through? The city has momentum, he insisted, after years of plans.
ARTS GROWTH
The transit-oriented development around the new train station will include space for a new bus hub, which will pull most of the bus traffic out of the immediate downtown, while leaving a bus stop across from the Blackstone Valley Tourism Council’s visitors center.
Grebien understands that some residents and business owners are skeptical. It’s taken years, and he said he shares the frustration. He cited the example of an arts installation for a bridge spanning I-95. Meant to celebrate Pawtucket’s position as a destination for artists and designers, the approval process has been delayed for years.
“We all get frustrated. I come from private industry,” Grebien said. “You’ve got to be kidding me, why does it take so long?”
The city has tried to attract and retain artists as part of its economy, as well as identity, according to Herbert Weiss, the economic and cultural affairs officer for Pawtucket.
That effort started with the creation of the 307-acre Pawtucket Arts and Entertainment District in 1999 that included economic incentives for artists to live and work in the downtown and surrounding areas.
Some of the incentives included sales and state income tax waivers for artists who live and work in their homes, flexible zoning to allow such live-work units and loan programs, he said.
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BIG PLANS: Pawtucket Mayor Donald R. Grebien and Jeanne Boyle, city commerce director, conduct a walking tour of the downtown area. They are in front of the former Wilkinson Mill building. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO[/caption]
Three once-dilapidated mills have been renovated and populated with working artists in the years since, as well as several mills in the larger city.
Riverfront Lofts was the first, Weiss said, attracting artists to its renovated live-work apartments in the 1990s.
The mills were once the working identity of Pawtucket, and the city made an effort to use them in courting artists, he said. “We have [more than] 65 mills in our city. This was a policy that could bring artists into the mills. We had a philosophical shift, where we made a determination when we created the arts district to look at every artist as a business. Artists are businesses.”
In Hope Artiste Village, a mill in central Pawtucket, 150 small businesses are now active, he noted.
According to a city tally, Pawtucket now has more than 486 artist studios, employing about 800 to 1,000 people.
In recent years, the city has made more than $30,000 available annually to artists in program and operating grants. Pawtucket is now considering an ordinance that would direct a percentage of all public construction projects awarded by the city to support arts installations.
The public and private investment in the city has convinced Grebien things are changing.
“We’re seeing this activity. There is a general consensus that people understand it’s moving,” he said. “It’s not moving fast enough, and that’s the cynicism.”
While he and other supporters believe Pawtucket has a unique identity in Rhode Island, and assets that could be better showcased, trying to attract attention from the state has been difficult.
The shadow of Providence, with its own needs, looms large.
“The state … has to invest in its capital city, but you have urban districts [such as] Pawtucket that are never going to be as big as Providence, but we deserve our opportunities,” Grebien said. “That’s what we’re fighting for. And you’re starting to see those investments.”
