Empty Providence buildings fill up again
Two-year-old state rehab code spurs loft conversions in Rhode Island’s former shopping district.
Phil Langdon
Providence, Rhode Island, is blessed with ornate, well-crafted buildings and a downtown that could be a paradise for pedestrians. Now the city of 174,000 is experiencing a welcome burst of office-to-residential conversions, most of them carried out by Cornish Associates, the firm that developed the Mashpee Commons town center on Cape Cod.
The hope is that the rising number of middle-class residents will encourage new businesses to open in Providence’s center and will improve the atmosphere of a downtown that can still empty out at 5 p.m. Last year Cornish finished installing 38 loft apartments in the upper floors of the Alice Building, one of the company’s first downtown residential projects. Now Cornish, headed by locally-based developer Arnold “Buff” Chace, is working ambitiously on a series of nearby buildings — roughly two full blocks — which will bring its stock of high-quality downtown apartments to about 200.
Biggest of these undertakings is the former Peerless department store, which faces the Alice Building across Westminster Street, once a premier shopping destination for Rhode Islanders. The Peerless consists of seven buildings that were constructed over a long period for retail and office uses and were eventually joined together. The 210,000-square-foot building will be converted to 97 apartments plus ground-floor retail space. To make the building habitable and attractive, construction crews will create a 60-by-60-foot atrium in its center.
Rehabilitation code introduced
The obstacles to such conversions have been daunting. Planning for work on the Alice Building started in 1996, was put on hold,
Rendering courtesy of Steve Durkee
City ordinances stipulated that when an office and retail building was shifted over to housing and retail, the building had to be brought into compliance with current codes — a very expensive proposition. The codes required much more renovation than was needed to make the buildings safe living places, Durkee says. He went through the laborious process of requesting about 70 variances for the Alice. Sixty of the variances were granted — but not quickly. Because of the slow progress on such projects, he says, “people started looking at why these jobs were so hard to do.”
After a painstaking code reform process at the state level, Rhode Island in the spring of 2002 adopted a rehabilitation building and fire code for existing buildings, aimed at rationalizing and simplifying the system. The rehab code allows existing buildings to be converted to different uses without complying with all the standards that a brand-new building would have to meet. Safety in the converted buildings is assured in part through installation of sprinkler systems and additional fire exits. The state code encourages rehabilitation by allowing incremental improvements and incremental changes.