Eight tenants have signed leases for residential apartments in one of eight mill buildings now in various stages of rehabilitation at East Providence’s Rumford Center, representatives for PK Rumford developers said last week.
The 8.3-acre, mixed-use development is set to have 80 total apartments, retail and commercial space totaling about 270,000 square feet. It’s on the northeast corner of the intersection of Greenwood and Newman avenues in Rumford.
For the confirmed leases, all in for Building No. 3, tenants will begin moving in on Oct. 1, said Jennifer L. Vinnitti, president of JLV Consulting.
And the first of the retail tenants – about 4,500 square feet of the available 6,000 square feet has been taken – will take their places along Greenwood Avenue by Nov. 1. Although she couldn’t yet release the names – pending final contracts – Vinnitti said that one tenant will be a local bakery with a café and another will be a gym.
During a tour of the complex last week, Development Manager John McMahon pointed out a brick-paved section just behind the retail center – a row of stores will fill two buildings – where there will soon be tables and umbrellas. “It’s going to have outdoor seating available to residential and commercial tenants,” he said. “It’s going to be beautiful, to say the least.”
The retail building has wide bay doors along the road, where trains once pulled up to load baking powder. Although it’s now 8.3-acres, the site was once part of a 300-acre campus that operated as Rumford Chemical Works, makers of Rumford Baking Powder. At the turn of the century, Rumford was called the “kitchen capital of the world,” according to material promoting the project. And much of the pitch to prospective tenants is that the development will again be a key part of the Rumford neighborhood – a place that was in need of a main street-type retail strip, Vinnitti said.
“I think it made sense to have the retail space where it is,” McMahon added. “With proximity to Greenwood Ave. and Newman Ave., not only can commercial and residential tenants have access to it but [so can] the public. There really isn’t anything like this in Rumford.”
The $40 million development is a joint collaboration between East Providence’s Peregrine Group and Lincoln’s Kirkbrae Development.
Kirkbrae President Greg Richard said the majority of the project will wrap up by Dec. 31, with the renovation of the smaller, interior buildings waiting until next year.
Richard said the project has been trimmed because of changes to the R.I. Historic Preservation Investment Tax Credit program. Those credits, for approved projects, dropped from about 27 percent to 22 percent of qualified construction costs. The project cost remained at $40 million because two historic buildings that would have been restored were knocked down, he said.
The developers are also hoping to draw tenants to the site from Providence. So far, they’ve drawn a few young professionals and a few empty nesters, Vinnitti said. “Seeing where the project is and where it’s going to be in a month and a half, I think people are going to start coming in,” she said. “Once people start seeing retail come in, people will start living here.”
Along with high-end features – granite countertops, steel fixtures and small video screens to see who’s ringing your doorbell – the diversity of the units already has become a selling point, McMahon said. The locations of load-bearing timbers in the lofts had impacts on their individual layouts. “And that’s the interesting part of mill construction,” he added. “It wasn’t ground-up construction, so they didn’t have the luxury of designing from scratch.”
The few that have raised bedrooms – open rooms that are about four feet off the ground with half walls – have already been taken, he said.
Along with the retail space and about 200,000 square feet of residential, there’s about 60,000 square feet of commercial office space is being built. Of that, about 10,000 square feet have been leased, McMahon said. The pricing for that space will fit into the lower end of the Providence market, McMahon said. They’ll rent for between $17.50 and $20 per square foot, he said.
But there is still plenty of work going forward on the project, for which New England Construction is serving as general contractor. The final two buildings, which will be built from scratch, have yet to break ground on the northwestern corner of the site, Vinnitti said. Those buildings are set now to share brick facades with the mill buildings, but they might also be combined with other materials.
Last week, jackhammers were still breaking up concrete outside and the retail shops still had floors that were partially dirt. Many of the buildings still need windows – historically accurate replicates have been installed in several, so far – which Vinnitti said are set to go in this month.
But standing in one of the just-leased, 1,445-square-foot third-floor lofts – with 14-foot ceilings and the original wood floors – McMahon last week could see past the current construction to a completed Rumford Center.
“Obviously it’s a construction zone right now, but once the landscaping is complete – you are just going to have a great view,” he said. •
