Plans for former Tefft-building site unveiled

On a slim, vacant lot along Weybosset Street, Stanley Weiss, the developer who refurbished the Hotel Providence, is planning to build a one-story, retail building that would eventually be joined by a larger planned office building on the balance of the lot.
The Providence site, a 45-foot-wide parcel, is where the Thomas A. Tefft Building was before the building was destroyed by a fire and demolished in 2006.
While the Tefft building had been a “heavy” brick building that was built before the Civil War, when downtown was largely residential, the to-be-built building will have a more modern feel, with full-length windows and aluminum cornices, said Jay J. Litman, principal of Warren’s Litman Architecture.
“Here we are, in the 21st century, and we’re not going to build a building like” the Tefft building, Litman said. “Downtown is commercial, so we’ll build a much more human-scale commercial façade with lots of glass. Then we’ll step back about 20 feet and, in the future, there will be a four-to-six story building that fills that block along Eddy Street.”
Putting a taller building behind the one-story structure will allow for fewer shadows on the corner of Weybosset and Eddy streets. “And, maybe, in the future there will be a roof deck on the top of the front building,” Litman said. “When you’re done, that’ll be 18 feet off the ground, which will be kind of neat.”
“We’re anticipating putting up another building there, but, because of where the market is now, we’re doing it in phases,” he added.
For now, Weiss added, the plan for this year is to create a retail strip at the Weybosset Street site, west of Dorrance Street. “It will be just a one-story, retail space, which the city would like to see so we don’t have retail gaps,” Weiss said in a recent interview.
Weiss also plans to restore his building next door at 159 Weybosset St., which now houses retailer American Apparel.
The façade of that building is galvanized, hammered iron. “That’s rare in an old commercial building,” Litman said. It’s also the only Egyptian Revival architecture building in the city’s downtown. “The building’s an oddity – that’s what gives downtown its flavor, all these quirky little buildings that create a tapestry.” Much of that building has been unoccupied for years and the restoration includes adding a new elevator, stairwells and bringing it up to fire code. The exterior brick wall that had been damaged by the demolition of the Tefft building will be fixed and windows will be added. Weiss said he hopes the renovations will draw tenants to the space – each of the three vacant floors is about 5,000 square feet. Weiss will, for now, put parking for the offices on the lot behind the new building. He said he expects the space will rent for about $15 per square foot.
After the fire at the Tefft building, Weiss bought the building and knocked it down. “We just felt that the cheapest thing to do after the fire was knock it down,” said Litman, who also worked with Weiss on the Hotel Providence.
The new building will have 14-foot ceilings, mirroring the first floor of the American Apparel building’s “high-bay first floor windows.” But the building will not attempt to re-create the style of the building next door at 159 Weybosset St., Litman said.
“We specifically tried to create a more modern feel to it, European, like something you’d see on a canal in Amsterdam,” he said. “The proportions look correct, even though it’s a long, flat, pancake-type building.”
At about 2,000 square feet, a coffee shop or gallery might work in the new building, but there aren’t any set tenants yet, Litman said.
Providence Revolving Fund Executive Director Clark Schoettle said Weiss’ project, along with the recent addition of Gourmet Heaven, a grocer, “will be good, because we want to try to re-create the commercial activity on that section of Weybosset.” •