With Providence Piers bankrupt, can a scrap yard be far behind?

To the Editor:
After much initial promise and fanfare, our proposed Allens Avenue waterfront development is dead. The property is now in bankruptcy and for sale or eventual foreclosure if a buyer cannot be found in this economy. One interested buyer is a scrap-metal company that can export scrap by water via our deepwater dock. The eventuality of such a use will end the cruise ship visits to the site and provide those millions of motorists entering the so-called Renaissance City from the south another highly visible, ugly and toxic image of Providence.
What happened to the “Narragansett Bayfront” pronouncements of the Cicilline administration and its lavish and expensive Providence 2020 plan?
What happened to Planning Director Thomas E. Deller’s exhortation to us to revise our initial, modest development plan (at great expense) to achieve his expressed dream of residential “density, density, density?”
What happened to the long-promised rezoning from the incredibly restrictive marine industrial use to a much more expansive (for tax base and job creation) general commercial zoning?
The so-called “Knowledge District” may be real or just another “Narragansett Bayfront” whim expressed by politicians and bureaucrats to delude developers and the electorate into thinking that they are doing something to create jobs and to generate economic growth. Assuming the former to be true, has anyone other than us thought of extending the Knowledge District south to Public Street, the main east-west thoroughfare on Providence’s Southside? The southwest corner of such a district at the intersection of Prairie Avenue and Public Street will be anchored by a new medical complex. Moving easterly, Public Street contains the Met School as well as hospital parking lots that will soon give way to medical offices and laboratories.
Given such a southern boundary, our 6.77-acre waterfront site at the easterly end of Public Street would be easily the largest developable location in the district other than the newly available Interstate 195 land. Unlike the latter, our site needs no infrastructure improvements and is development-ready, with rezoning and remediation (the latter of which is now progressing rapidly).
Will the city stand idly by as it loses its most promising place of entry for cruise ships that could bring boatloads of tourists to Providence? Will it allow land bordering on the ever-expanding hospital complex (separated from our site only by Interstate 95) to become a junk yard? Has it totally abandoned its earlier visionary plans because it was intimidated by The Providence Journal and bought off by a handful of well-financed industrial users?
Acquisition of our site by the city is the only way to prevent the continued economic stagnation of the Allens Avenue waterfront. Does a bogus threat to that strip’s mere 72 marine-related industrial jobs (which would be grandfathered in a new zone) deter the city from expanding its tax base and creating the hundreds of jobs which new uses would bring to that forlorn, contaminated and unsightly area?
If our project is lost to a scrap yard such as the illegal one that has sprung up along the water at the foot of Thurbers Avenue, the city will have lost for generations any chance to make this prime waterfront area the vibrant, productive, publicly accessed showplace depicted in the Providence 2020 plan. We relied to our detriment on the sincerity of that vision when we expended millions of dollars to prepare our land and dock. It appears that we were blindsided; 2020 was merely a mirage.
Does the city have the will and the time to salvage our strategic portion of the Allens Avenue waterfront? Can it afford to ignore this economic opportunity? Will its leaders act responsibly and assertively before it is too late for the city to do so? It already is too late for us.
Patrick T. Conley
Providence Piers owner