PAWTUCKET -- Dissent was provoked by four proposals for redeveloping 28 acres along the city's industrial waterfront, even though the proposals are case studies and the land is privately owned.
The dissent, which came from open-space advocates, was directed at a series of schematic designs developed by Peter Flinker and Harry Dodson, landscape architects hired by the state Department of Environmental Management to show how polluted urban properties can be redeveloped in ways that are environmentally sound.
The controversy started as soon as Flinker unveiled sketches showing a combination of open space and office buildings on the so-called Tidewater property, site of a former coal gasification plant along the Pawtucket River.
People who attended a 2:30 p.m. meeting yesterday organized by the city Planning Department, and a 7 p.m. public hearing at the Blackstone Valley Visitors Center, said the Tidewater property should be left largely undeveloped, although the land, parts of which are still used by New England Gas. Co. and Narragansett Electric, is so polluted it will cost several million dollars to clean it up.
"You know, we've got a downtown that's as dead as a doornail," said Janice McHale, a member of the city's Riverfront Development Commission. "Now we're going to take business from downtown" and move it to a new office development on the Tidewater property, using one of the city's last remaining tracts of land.
"I bring children down there all the time," said Cheryle McBurney, who teaches at the nearby Francis J. Varieur Elementary School, citing the natural state of the land along the Pawtucket River .
"If you put a building right up on the waterfront, they're going to lose that," McBurney declared.
All but one of the four proposed reuses of the Tidewater site would preserve a big chunk of open space on the property. One design would place 10 commercial buildings along a new access road that would run along the top of the property, turning the land between the road and river into a waterfront park.
Another design would substitute a footpath for the access road and provide the same parkland. The third plan would minimize the amount of open space, using most of the available land on the Tidewater property to build an office park. The fourth design would arrange the office buildings along either side of a town common, or patch of green space, that would run from Taft Street down to the riverbank.
Dodson said they would have liked to turn all of the Tidewater property into a big waterfront park, but the cleanup will be expensive, and the property owners, New England Gas and Narragansett Electric, have to have some way to recoup the cost.
Flinker defended the office buildings. "From an urban design standpoint, it's sometimes nice to punctuate [open space] with some kind of structure," he said.
"The trouble some cities have isn't enough open space," he told participants in the 2:30 p.m. meeting. The trouble is too much open space and not enough people to fill it. Parks separated from populated areas tend to become isolated, empty and unused, he said.
Plans to redevelop the Tidewater site have been kicked around since 1993, when the federal Environmental Protection Agency removed the property from its list of Superfund sites, and the Department of Environmental Management assumed responsibility for supervising the cleanup.
But the plans have gone nowhere as Valley Gas and Blackstone Valley Electric, the original owners of the Tidewater property, have been acquired by bigger companies with headquarters outside Rhode Island. Participants in last night's public hearing were anxious to find out when, if ever, the site might be redeveloped.
Dodson and Flinker were unable to offer a timetable. The proposals they developed for the Tidewater site are theoretical, intended to be included in a manual DEM plans to publish on urban design.
