Downtown Design Review Committee Review

The Downtown Design Review Committee (DDRC) meets monthly to approve all renovation and construction in Providence’s D-1 zoning district. The Downtown Design Review Committee Review (DDRCR) relays the meeting’s highlights and introduces the public to the movers and shakers of Providence real estate development.

The March 13 meeting of the DDRC was the first since October to feature sunlight, which lifted spirits in Joseph A. Doorley, Jr.  Municipal Building tremendously. To a lesser extent, so did an application to fill the parking lot next to Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel with a mixed-use residential complex.

The development, referred to as 78 Fountain St. throughout the meeting, looks like a neat but arbitrary arrangement of neutral-colored boxes, an increasingly typical aesthetic for mixed-use and transit-oriented residential complexes.  The development will house 145 market-rate residential units — market rate in this instance being a euphemism for luxury.

The newly created 78 Fountain JV Owner LLC will develop the project, though this corporation is owned in large part by Cornish Associates, which in turn is owned in large part by its founder and managing partner Arnold Chace, Jr.

78 Fountain St. will occupy a full downtown block, bound by Fountain, Clemence, Washington and Mathewson Streets.  A tiny two-story building — vacant since the closure of Coffee King — occupies the northeast corner of the site, while the rest is a parking lot.

The site is overshadowed by the Providence Journal building across the street, which Arnold “Buff” Chace, Jr. also owns and is in the process of renovating. General Electric is slated to move 100 jobs with an average salary of $100,000 into the ProJo building in the near future.

A New Age Mill Town

Light Google research on the Chace family yields some fun trivia. Ancestor Oliver Chace started his career as a carpenter in America’s first textile mill and ended it as the owner of a textile empire. Oliver Chace’s descendants expanded the family’s business, fleshing out factory towns in Swansea, Fall River and Valley Falls, before purchasing two major New England electricity plants.

In 1929, the family consolidated two of its holding companies to form Berkshire Hathaway, which served as the family businesses until Warren Buffett acquired a majority share in 1964.

Beatrice Buffum Chace, Arnold “Buff” Chace, Jr.’s aunt, was the principal financier behind Antoinette Downing’s work on Benefit St, buying 12 or so of the street’s houses and catalyzing the most substantial preservation event in the city’s history.

After a few years dallying with Buddhism and documentary filmmaking in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Arnold “Buff” Chace, Jr. built a “New Urbanist” mall on family land on Cape Cod.

The scion of a long line of industrialists and real estate developers, Arnold “Buff” Chace, Jr. took naturally to the trade and is quickly establishing himself as a magnate of Providence’s post-industrial “innovation economy.”

Rhode Island’s textile economy may be decimated, but it doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to picture Chace’s Fountain St. scheme as a new age mill village.  Chace is wisely capitalizing on the recent white-collar trend of living next to where you work — a dramatic reversal of the mid-century white flight narrative — with 78 Fountain St. essentially positioned to provide worker’s housing for the GE and Providence Journal offices Chace leases across the street. Village amenities include a fitness center, restaurants, a “sky lounge” and a potential market on Washington St.

78 Fountain St. also shares a border with Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel, which Chace once tried to evict from his Peerless Building on Westminster St. The dispute was a public fair, and in the end Chace had to pay Rich Lupo an undisclosed sum of money to get him to move. Ironically, Chace is now building six floors of luxury residential units next door to the popular music venue.

Public Subsidies

In nearby Boston, the proliferation of luxury housing recently brought average rents down for the first fiscal quarter since the financial crisis. Optimistic logic suggests that Buff Jr.’s complex will leave more affordable homes in actual Providence neighborhoods for the rest of us, at least until the Chace family’s next mass historic preservation campaign.

The only sad part is that 78 Fountain St. will receive a substantial sum of public subsidies. In January, the Rhode Island Commerce Corporation approved a $500,000 sales-tax exemption in construction materials for the project and $6,115,119 in property-tax credits, which will be issued over five years.

Chace received the money through the Rebuild Rhode Island Tax Credit program, which requires that its recipients lack sufficient funding or are at risk of locating in another state. It’s hard to believe that 78 Fountain St. meets either of these requirements — Chace is a lifelong Providence resident with a deep roster of downtown properties and his Uncle Malcolm was a literal billionaire. Nevertheless, massive tax exemptions have become a standard bargaining chip in the Rhode Island construction game and it would be unfair to demonize Chace and his associates for following suit.

Fountain of Youth

Chace is flipping Fountain St. property at a good time. He is joined by the Procaccianti Group, who are currently demolishing the John E. Fogarty Building at 100 Fountain St. Formerly the state’s welfare office, the Fogarty Building is somewhat symbolically making way for a 13-story all-suites hotel.

Designed in the infamous “Brutalist” style and installed during a merciless urban renewal campaign, a crowd of preservationists nevertheless held a funeral for the Fogarty Building on St. Patrick’s Day. The Fogarty Building had been out of use for 10 years. Jeffrey Allcock said it best in a recent post on the architectural history website ArtInRuins: “It was a good place to smoke a j and even take a piss if you had to.”

“Conceptual Approval”

Meanwhile at the Joseph A. Doorley, Jr. Municipal Building, the 78 Fountain JV Owner LLC eagerly awaits the DDRC’s decision on the corporation’s two requests: a Downtown District Demolition Waiver (Zoning Ordinance Section 1907.2) and a waiver from Zoning Ordinance Section 606.E.1 Building Facades/Ground Floor Transparency.

The latter request is a no-brainer. Chace wants to skirt a requirement for commercially suitable window design on their eastern elevation, which fronts on a glorified alleyway known to the DDRC as Clemence St.

To grant the former request, the DDRC must rule that the benefits of constructing 78 Fountain St outweigh the benefits of preserving Coffee King — technically a “contributing structure” to the surrounding historic district. This is a softball, and the developers even pander to the DDRC by saying that they considered constructing the complex in an L-shape around Coffee King.

I know few people who will be sad to see Coffee King go — its one claim to fame is that, excluding parking attendant huts, it may be the smallest building downtown. The site’s other defining feature, a surface parking lot, is basically the only thing preservationists don’t get sentimental about. Any structures of historical significance on the site have long been demolished.

During the jazz age, the block was home to the Arcadia Roof Garden Ball Room, which eventually gave way to a boxing club before its demolition in the mid-20th century. The first floor of the building remained intact as a commercial space through the 1980s before it too was razed — all of this well before Arnold “Buff” Chace, Jr. purchased the property.

Back at the meeting, a motion to approve Chace’s requests is filed and a celebratory mood grips the air. Deputy Director of City Planning & Development Bob Azar, who sits in at every meeting to remind the DDRC how the Zoning Ordinance works, announces that “this is exactly the kind of building we want to see on a site like this.”

The motion is seconded and chairman John Rupp takes a hasty tally of the committee’s unanimous “ayes” before granting official “conceptual approval.”

The Providence Public Library’s proposal to mount a flashing LED sign on their ugliest facade is tabled until the next meeting, April 15, and the DDRC is adjourned.