Someone walks along the quad of the main Johnson & Wales campus, off Weybosset Street in downtown Providence.

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The Providence Journal / Kris Craig

PROVIDENCE

Johnson & Wales is tired of feeling scattered.

As the university expands nationwide, with satellite campuses in Miami, Charlotte, and Denver, its main campus in Providence remains fractured, with buildings spread throughout downtown.

In the relocation of a section of Route 195, the university sees a one-time chance to greatly expand and consolidate its flagship campus as part of a larger plan to bolster its academic profile and attract and retain better students.

Johnson & Wales envisions a semi-contiguous university corridor along Pine Street, stretching from downtown into the Jewelry District, using some of the land that will become available when the old sections of 195 are dismantled in 2012.

“We want to sell off outlier buildings, and create a well-defined urban campus,” said Chris Placco, Johnson & Wales’ vice president for facilities development.

Over the next 10 years, Johnson & Wales plans a $126-million expansion, using both land it now owns and some of the highway land. The university would construct at least eight buildings — from dorms to a college of business structure to parking garages to a hotel — with small parks and green space throughout. Five new buildings on the western edge, by Route 95, would ring a new quadrangle, creating a campus book-ended by this quad and the existing Gaebe Commons — Johnson & Wales’ signature space on Weybosset Street — on the east.

But Mayor David N. Cicilline wants taxable office development, high-wage jobs and some housing in his city’s once-in-a-generation development opportunity, and it’s not clear how much room there is for tax-exempt Johnson & Wales in that picture for reuse of the highway corridor.

JOHNSON & WALES has grown dramatically since the days when it was largely a little-known, storefront college. Founded in 1914, it got by on reusing small, converted downtown buildings for classroom and dormitory space. Until the 1970s, it had the dubious distinction of never having constructed one of its own buildings.

The school undertook significant expansions in the 1980s, and by 1996 it had made its mark on Providence with the opening of its consolidated downtown campus on Weybosset Street, at the site of the old Outlet department store. In the last decade, it has also expanded its Harborside campus at Fields Point in Providence, and further expansion is planned. Full-time enrollment in Providence grew from 6,000 to just under 10,000 at the downtown and Fields Point campuses. The school has carved out niches in culinary and hospitality education, and has a large business program.

Meanwhile, the university has expanded nationally, with 6,000 students at satellite campuses in Florida, North Carolina and Colorado, and it has an endowment exceeding $235 million.

Despite its growth, the college’s academic profile and student retention rates are still low. It is the second-largest university in Rhode Island, behind the University of Rhode Island, but most college guides rank it as the least competitive to enter of all the state’s four-year colleges — and it doesn’t even appear in several of the most popular college guides.

Barron’s Profiles of American Colleges 2007 ranked it as “less competitive,” while Roger Williams University, Rhode Island College, Salve Regina University and the University of Rhode Island were listed as “competitive.” Brown University, by contrast, was ranked as “most competitive.”

Johnson & Wales wants to become more competitive; its strategic plan, FOCUS 2011, recommended allowing admission to fewer applicants, starting last year.

Still, Johnson & Wales lets in most students who apply: it admitted 81 percent in 2006, and 69 percent last year.

But, according to the university, many of these students don’t stay. Last year, only 69 percent of freshmen returned for their sophomore year, a figure far below that of most four-year colleges, including its in-state benchmarks: URI retained 81 percent of its freshmen; Roger Williams, 77 percent; and RIC, 74 percent. Brown retained 96 percent of its freshmen.

The reconstruction of the downtown campus is part of a larger push to attract better students, become more selective and keep students from dropping out. Students have consistently told the university that they want a more residential, traditional college experience and identity — living on campus, walking to their classes, feeling like they are on a contained academic space, Placco said.

At the same time, Johnson & Wales recognizes that converted old buildings don’t always cut it as modern classrooms and science labs; attracting and retaining academically higher-quality students and faculty will mean replacing these outdated facilities with new, high-tech labs and classroom spaces.

“Right now, Johnson & Wales owns a number of small facilities, historic facilities throughout the city. They’ve served us well … but quite frankly, they don’t serve our students that well. What we need to do is be much more student- centric, put the appropriate functions in the appropriate places. We’re taking our outlying facilities and we’re really kind of creating a core campus here, on the western edge of the city,” Placco said.

The shifting of Route 195 will open up 36 acres in the center of Providence for development. Eight acres will be used to create two parks that will hug the Providence River near the Point Street Bridge. Eight more acres will be used to re-create the old street pattern in the Jewelry District and Fox Point before Route 195 was built. That leaves 19.2 acres for development.

Johnson & Wales would need 4.5 acres by the current Route 95-195 intersection for its new campus plan. Despite its plans for physical growth, Johnson & Wales does not plan to expand its student population in the city.

In the marketing of the Route 195 land, Cicilline wants to create a mixed-use neighborhood. Higher education will be part of that mix, he acknowledged — but the priority is commercial space, and job creation.

“I understand why they have an interest in some of this land. Lots of people have an interest in some of this land, which is great,” Cicilline said.

Cicilline seemed lukewarm about the prospect of Johnson & Wales getting one-quarter of the developable land.

“It’s certainly reasonable to expect that there will be some institutional presence…. But my goal is to be sure that the primary use of that land is for job creation, growing the tax base and building a vibrant new neighborhood in the city … an 18-hour neighborhood. The institutional uses are part of that, but only part of that,” he said.

In the city’s long-term plan, known as Providence 2020, land along Route 95, near the current intersection with Route 195, was identified as the best location for office towers. Johnson & Wales wants to build its new quad there, with relatively low-slung buildings.

“I think the vision that I set forth in Providence 2020 continues to be my vision for that area, and I think there’s good reason to encourage the development of higher buildings close to the highway,” Cicilline said.

Many suitors are lining up for their crack at the surplus Route 195 land, but most are doing so privately, and cityofficials will not divulge who they have spoken with.

But Johnson & Wales, as is the case with the city’s other colleges and the hospitals, is required by city ordinance to submit every five years a master plan for projected growth and has presented its plans for the highway land as part of that process.

Decisions on who will buy the highway land will be made jointly by the city, the state Department of Transportation and the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation.

Earlier this month, this group began seeking a consultant to develop a specific plan for the 19.2 acres. The request for proposals by consultants says that goals for development include: attracting companies with high-wage jobs, increasing corporate, sales and real estate taxes to the state, assuring that Providence is competitive in knowledge-based industries and adding top-tier office space.

Nowhere in that planning concept are there goals for the growth of local universities, but EDC Director Saul Kaplan said that does not exclude a large Johnson & Wales campus on some of the Route 195 land. They can be a player, he said. But, echoing Cicilline, he said they are not the priority.

“There’s an overall vision that is emerging,” Kaplan said. “…we are all very aligned around a mixed-use vision with significant office space,” he said. “I do think that [Johnson & Wales] can fit into the vision that we’ve all been working on.”

Johnson & Wales officials would not say what would happen to their downtown campus goals if they could not buy the 4.5 acres they seek. It is unclear when Johnson & Wales will know what it can buy, and subsequently what it can build.

But some parts of the university’s larger plan don’t require purchases of highway land, and these expansions should happen no matter how the land sale shakes out.

•Renovations are well along on the former Rolo Manufacturing building on Pine Street, overlooking the Route 195 ramp to Route 95 North. Johnson & Wales is converting the building into a services center, where students can pay bills and register for classes.

“It becomes the focus of our downcity campus,” Placco said.

•The university is expected to begin construction in the next two years on a 500-bed dormitory, rising perhaps seven stories, on a Johnson & Wales-owned parking lot at Pine and Claverick streets.

•At Pine and Chestnut streets, Johnson & Wales hopes to build a 90,000-square-foot student center on land now used for parking. It would have space for shops, a bookstore, dining, student clubs and more. Work on that structure would not start for at least three years. “To make it economically viable, we need to put an awful lot of functions in there. It can’t expand out, so we’ve got to go up. We’re thinking four, five, maybe six stories,” Placco said.

•The Xavier auditorium nearby, on Broad Street, is also to be renovated, and new student dining facilities are planned for the John Hazen White Center on Chestnut Street and for Johnson Hall.

•A small green space, to be known as the Xavier quadrangle, is also planned for the corner of Pine and Claverick streets in the near future.

Beyond that, nearly all new downtown campus projects hinge largely on the acquisition of the highway land by Friendship Street.

The centerpiece would be the western quadrangle, which would contain five buildings, including the Rolo Student Services Center. Friendship Street would run down the middle.

“It’s not a quiet, contemplative space, but it’s a big public space that we’re looking to create there,” Placco said.

In the southwest corner, a 45,000-square-foot hospitality college is planned. Across Friendship Street would be a 150-room conference hotel, allowing hospitality college students to train in a real-world environment, much as they do now at Johnson & Wales-associated hotels in Seekonk and Warwick.

In the northeast corner, at Claverick and Friendship streets, nascent plans envision a 50,000-square-foot college of business. Next door would be a large parking structure, likely wrapped by retail and other uses to mask the parking.

Finally, another parking garage is possible, at Pine and Richmond streets, though that plan is more than 10 years out.

All these plans are preliminary, but Johnson & Wales has stuck fairly closely to its long-term plans in the past, Placco said. It’s a good bet that, if the highway purchases are possible, some version of this plan would become reality over the next decade. Until the plans for the highway are clear, predicting the future is difficult.

“Often here, we’re dealing with pieces of land that don’t exist yet. So it’s very hard to read the tea leaves,” Placco said.

dbarbari@projo.com