The waterfront spot has been a ship yard, a train repair yard and a construction debris dump. But by summer’s end, it will be a sparkling-new student housing complex known as Harborside Village, with a quadrangle and a recreational hall.
Shaking off the debris and contamination of the site’s prior uses, Johnson & Wales University is deep in the midst of a brownfields reclamation effort that will redevelop a large swath of land at the Providence-Cranston line, near Fields Point, to add facilities for its student body and the community.
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With the announcement last month of a $196,000 Wildlife Habitat Incentives Program grant from the Natural Resources Conservation Service, Johnson & Wales has now received nearly $600,000 in grants, to add to its own multimillion-dollar investment.
The school first entered the harborside area in the early 1970s, as a tenant. But the neighborhood was damaged goods. Used during World War II for constructing Liberty Ships, by Providence Shipyard, and then for successive industrial uses, the site had become a toxic eyesore.
In the mid-1980s, seeing the area’s natural beauty, and the potential for nearly 100 contiguous acres, Johnson & Wales began acquiring property there, according to Christopher O. Placco, vice president of facilities management for the university. It relied on its own money, he said, and the private help of some of its trustees.
The purchases began “slowly,” Placco said, accelerating only in recent years. The acquisitions were completed in 2000.
“It’s hard to see it right now, when you go through the abandoned railroad tracks and a lot of the operations that happen at the [Port of Providence],” Placco said. “But really, this is beautiful waterfront property.”
The first step in the brownfields reclamations is slated to be completed at the end of the summer, when Johnson & Wales will open its new Harborside Village. The project, which cost more than $25 million, includes 12 apartment buildings with a total of 576 beds, a quadrangle, and a recreational hall. It was made possible by first capping the contaminated land. The units will be available to upperclassmen, providing walking access to the classrooms already onsite, as well as access by bus to the school’s downtown facilities.
The project is Johnson & Wales’ first new construction on this site, south of the Port of Providence, on the banks of the Providence River. Previously, the school had mainly grown by retrofitting existing buildings, Placco said.
The school is not looking to grow its student base, he said, but it is looking to add amenities to the waterfront campus, which hosts the College of Culinary Arts, the Master of Business Administration program and the School of Education.
“We see this really as kind of the kickoff for the major restoration and adaptive reuse of this property,” Placco said.
Although plans are still preliminary for the next phase of redevelopment, Placco said the university will most likely include athletic facilities on the campus. Preliminary sketches of the redeveloped brownfields areas show baseball and softball fields, as well as a track-and-field area.
Also slated for the project is the restoration of 1,500 feet of shoreline wildlife habitat, funded in part by the $196,000 Habitat Incentives grant. The university is treating the area as public open space that will include a public walkway along the coast, said Susan Mayo, director of brownfields projects for the university.
She said the school was spurred to create the walkway by Save the Bay, which is leasing six acres at the site from Johnson & Wales, at $1 per year for the next 60 years. As part of its new headquarters facility, constructed on the property, Save the Bay allows public access to the waterfront.
“Their development has been so successful, and brought so much public attention to this part of the city, that it became a natural for us to continue development like that,” Placco said.
Also included in Johnson & Wales’ plans for project are extensive amounts of “passive and active green space,” Placco said.
In addition, he said, the university is looking to make the Harborside Campus an asset for the surrounding community. Aside from the extension of the coastal walkway, it will work to permit local youth sports teams access to its athletic facilities, once they are built.
Mayo said Johnson & Wales also has been working with community groups, including the Washington Park Citizens Association. Recently, the school took residents on a bus tour of the facility to show them what was happening at the campus.
The people, many of whom hadn’t seen the campus in years, seemed pleased with the university’s progress, Mayo said.
“Most of the people that I have met have lived here all of their lives, and they had parents or spouses that worked at the shipyard,” Mayo said. “They were very excited about [the project]. They’re happy to see the wasteland, if you will, gone, and new buildings and fields sprouting up.”
