PROVIDENCE
-- Not much has changed lately on the outside of the Masonic Temple, but on
the inside, well, the inside is gone.
In fact, the gaping space that remains inside has grown bigger as the construction crew has not only demolished everything inside the outer walls, but has dug down, making more space for the luxury hotel that Sage Hospitality Resources plans to build inside the shell of the old temple.
Around the empty chasm, the old walls form an incongruous, towering gallery for the work of the graffiti writers who decorated the building while it was boarded up, before the restoration began.
Outside, the temple continues to look as though it is being rebuilt from the inside out. Its most striking feature is the external steel skeleton holding up the old building's facade while the interior was being demolished and a new steel structure goes up inside.
Sage Senior Vice President Michael C. Coolidge said the next major development that will be visible to passersby won't be until November, with the erection of a tower crane, similar to the yellow one being used to construct the GTECH building just down the hill. That and the arrival of truckloads of steel beams will signal construction of the new framework inside.
But for now and the near future, Coolidge said, most of the work is going on below ground level.
UNDER THE TEMPLE, excavation and construction will leave the hotel subbasement extending three floors below the ground level at the front of the temple, on the Avenue of the Arts.
Other heavy construction invisible from outside is creating a separate, concrete building-within-a-building under the adjacent Veterans' Memorial Auditorium. There, Sage and Hensel Phelps Construction Co., its contractor, are building what will become the hotel's ballroom, accoustically separate from the concert hall above, where the Rhode Island Philharmonic and numerous other groups will continue to perform.
The temple, which faces the State House across Francis Street, became increasingly decrepit after the Masons abandoned it, unfinished, in 1929. Ownership fell to the state, which couldn't find a use or buyer for it. In 2002 Sage, a Denver-based hotel developer, emerged with a restoration plan based on state and federal tax credits for historic preservation.
Coolidge said the demolition of the interior involved breaking up and removing about 15,000 cubic yards of steel and concrete, much of it from the slabs of old steel and concrete floors and the framework that held the building up. That translates into about 500 30-yard Dumpsters full of debris.
"It's just a massively constructed building," he said. If it wasn't, he said, the facade might not have survived, since the building spent perhaps 25 years unheated and another 25 years exposed to the elements after the roof failed, letting water run through it.
FROM INSIDE, the edges of the old floors are visible, spaced up the walls. Between the floors, like an art gallery for patrons with wings, are rows of graffiti painted by the artists who sneaked into the then boarded-up building.
One of the more striking depicts a green demon's head, on the inside of the east wall about two-thirds of the way up. Coolidge said that before the demolition, when there was a floor up there and you could walk through the room where the demon was, "The eyes would follow you around. It was really eerie."
The limestone outer facing on the first two floors needs a lot of work on the north side, the front of the building. Bad weather, Coolidge said, "kind of shoots down the I-95 corridor" nearby, beating up that side of the building. As a result, most of the limestone on that side will be replaced. Sage has found stone at a quarry in Indiana "that'll come pretty close," he said.
The remaining original stone will be washed. The stone at the northeast corner of the building, closest to the State House, was test-washed at about the second-story level, giving an indication of what the stone will look like.
WITHOUT MORE THAN $30 million in local, state and federal tax breaks supporting historic rehabilitation, Coolidge said, "the project would not have been viable to redevelop." The simpler approach -- knocking down the temple and building new -- "probably would never have happened," either, he said, because of the small and odd-shaped site, the cost of demolition and other factors.
Coolidge said the estimated project cost has grown from $77 million to about $80 million.
The developers have posted pictures and information on the project on the Web at http://www.renaissanceprovidencehotel.com