Stepping into the darkened South Street Station power plant in Providence’s Jewelry District is like stumbling upon a lost temple of the Industrial Age.
The vast, empty rooms are lined with massive concrete pillars that rise to 60-foot-tall ceilings laced with catwalks and girders. The brick walls are punctured with large holes for pipes that carried steam from coal-fired boilers to turbines that spun out electricity for a growing city through the 20th century.
Collaboration drives significant energy and non-energy benefits with Rhode Island Energy
With four major hospital campuses, multiple offsite facilities (ambulatory care, MRI buildings, offices) and buildings…
Learn More
Below today’s silence, memory conjures up the long-gone rumble of Herculean machinery.
The silence in the old electrical power plant, which was built from 1912 to 1925 and shuttered in the early 1990s, is about to end.
This June, construction teams will begin the work of transforming the building into “Dynamo House,” future home of the Heritage Harbor Museum and a multi-use complex of retail stores, fitness club, restaurant, offices, and hotel rooms. Completion is expected in June 2009.
But the skin and bones and character of the old power plant will remain visible throughout the new complex, due to careful planning by the R.I. Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission and the Baltimore-based developer Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse, which specializes in adaptive reuse of historical urban structures.
For Struever Bros., there’s a financial incentive to preserve the building’s architectural elements, because historic preservation tax credits are essential to finance the project. But the old power plant is also recognized as a historic gem.
“Being able to keep and reuse the South Street station is valuable in its own right because the building is beautiful,” said Ted Sanderson, executive director of the state commission. “It is part of the cultural landscape that spreads throughout the entire city and makes Providence unique.”
The Classical Revival building, with its arched windows, fancy brickwork and cornices, was an ornate beauty in its early days, and it was designed with detail and brio for a reason.
“It was built in a time when electrical service was not taken for granted,” said Seth Handy, development director of the project for Struever Bros. “The building is a monument to the electrical industry; it is a marketing strategy. It says, ‘electricity is here to stay.’ ”
Efforts to restore and reuse the building have been under way for more than a decade. A consortium of museums and historical and cultural groups formed a nonprofit in 1996 to develop the Heritage Harbor Museum, and in 1999, Narragansett Electric (now part of National Grid) gave them the decommissioned plant.
The plan was to use the entire 325,000-square-foot building for the museum, but the consortium wasn’t able to raise the full amount of money it needed.
In July 2005, Struever Bros. was brought on board as co-developer, and last year, new plans were unveiled for a $140 million project in which the museum will occupy 55,000 square feet, and Struever Bros. will lease out the remaining 270,000 square feet.
Maintaining the interior space and original structures raises complex design problems. There are three sections: the turbine hall, the 400-pound house and the 200-pound house (the latter two sections named for the pounds per square inch of steam their machines produced). The open spaces, once occupied by huge turbines and boilers, are large and irregular in size.
“The building was built for big machines,” said Handy. “The floor levels don’t correspond to any kind of logic for human use.”
One goal of the project is to keep tall vertical spaces open as much as possible. On the other hand, floors must be built in some of the vertical spaces to create essential revenue-producing office and retail space.
This gets sticky when the designers need to consider the appearance of the building’s tall, arched windows. Historical preservation officials want the windows, which are 25 feet tall, to remain uniformly lighted to maintain their shape and beauty when viewed from the outside at night. But floors that intersect the windows could create a junky, disrupted appearance of partly lighted and partly dark windows at night.
Handy said the solution will be to build any floors that intersect the windows as mezzanine floors that are pulled away from the windows. A person standing at the edge of the mezzanine floor would look over a railing at the full window, opposite, and the floor below.
This is just one of many instances where designers have to adapt old structures to new uses. Another example choosing to situate the museum’s traveling exhibits from the Smithsonian Institution – with which Heritage Harbor is affiliated – against a “dark” wall with no windows, because low-light areas are always better for museum objects.
The museum, a dream for a faithful group of planners since the 1980s, will occupy two levels in the 200-pound house and the turbine hall, with its entrance – a spacious and lushly planted plaza – off the 360 Eddy St. side of the power plant.
Heritage Harbor is designed to tell the story of the state from several angles: the natural history of Narragansett Bay; the story of Rhode Island’s role as the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution in America; the histories of different ethnic groups, and more.
Dynamo House’s crowning historic detail will be the replacement on the roof of six of the original steel smokestacks and their supporting latticework. Plans call for the stacks to look solid and functional in the daytime and to radiate a changing mixture of colored lights at night.
Sanderson noted that, along with the project’s inherent value, it also will be a boost to the redevelopment of the city’s waterfront, especially when the dust clears from the project to move Interstate 195. There is already plenty of pedestrian activity on the downtown end of the Providence River, and Dynamo House will attract people farther south.
“Besides being beautiful, this project brings land back online for civic development,” Sanderson said.
