Providence Police and Fire Department Headquarters, before demolition in 2007

Journal archives

IN FOUR YEARS, downtown Providence has seen the demolition of four old buildings, three of them attractive. This left four vacant lots, on which four buildings, three of them unattractive, were to have been built but have not. Elsewhere downtown, five unattractive buildings have risen or are rising. Only one attractive building has gone up in this period.

By attractive I mean old historical buildings or new ones designed along traditional lines. The city’s largely intact architectural fabric has a cohesive, even harmonic historical character that most U.S. cities lack. By unattractive, I mean buildings of modernist or hybrid (mixing old and new) styles that detract from that character whether they are well designed or not.

The attractive buildings lost were: the Providence National Bank building (1929), razed in 2006 to make way for an unattractive proposed condo tower; the Police and Fire Department Headquarters (1940), razed in 2007 to make way for an unattractive proposed office tower; and a commercial building (1920) on Washington Street, razed in 2007 to make way for an unat-tractive proposed Sierra Suites hotel. W.T. Grants (1949), originally an unattractive brick modernist variety store, lately home to Travelers Aid, was razed in 2005 to make way for an attractive proposal for apartments flanking a parking garage with ground-floor retail.

All four proposed buildings remain unbuilt.

The one attractive new building that has been built is the Westin hotel/condo wing. It is joined by three unattractive new buildings that undermine the beauty of Waterplace Park. Another two unattractive ones are not yet finished: the Blue Cross/Blue Shield headquarters and the Capitol Cove condos.

If you take downtown’s level of beauty at a point in time half a decade ago, this amounts to a net subtraction of seven units — one attractive building added but three attractive historical buildings razed and five unattractive new buildings built or under way.

This is a rough calculation, and some will dispute my characterization. It is indisputably unobjective. The question isn’t whether the buildings are well or poorly designed but whether they add to or subtract from the dominant traditional character of downtown. Even an attractive modernist building (conceding, as I do, its possibility, however unlikely it might be) will tend to weaken rather than strengthen Providence’s unusually extensive fabric of traditional buildings. Saving old buildings maintains the fabric. Razing old buildings weakens it. Building new traditional buildings strengthens the fabric. Building new modernist buildings weakens it. That’s how the math works.

The public tends overwhelmingly to prefer traditional buildings to modernist buildings. The British cultural philosopher Roger Scruton refers to the public as “the great disenfranchised majority of building users.” Against them are those who tend to prefer cutting-edge modernist architecture. Many of the latter are professionally involved in the development process as city planners, architects, developers, academics, leaders in the political, corporate and institutional sectors, and even preservationists.

The elites have power and authority but the public has influence through its vote and its potential pressure on elected officials. If the elites and the public would just work together, the development process in Providence would operate more smoothly. Therefore, elites should embrace development projects more in line with public taste, since the latter is more instinctual and resistant to change, and the former requires merely shifting back toward a long historic trend.

For all his flaws, Mayor Cianci understood this dynamic much better than Mayor Cicilline does. Cianci threw his weight behind traditional architecture in the 1990s. A number of popular traditional buildings were built. Under Cicilline, only one traditional building has been built — the Westin wing, which was approved swiftly in spite of considerable political baggage.

Cicilline seeks more stylistic diversity for the city, but downtown alone has at least 25 modernist buildings today, none of which are popular, not even the five built in his tenure. Enough already! Moreover, public coolness toward the several stalled modernist proposals might have as much to do with their delay as the economic downturn. If the mayor would shamelessly cater to public taste, the widespread resistance to his Providence 2020 plan would largely dissipate, and a host of stalled downtown projects might revive. Until then, the public will justly accuse him of promoting indiscriminate development and seeking tax revenue at the expense of what makes Providence great.

After all, attractive buildings don’t pay less in taxes! A mere shift in stylistic preference, at no cost to himself or the city, could transform Cicilline from a goat into a hero, and make Providence a better place.

As part of the city’s neighborhood planning process, the Department of Planning and Development will, on Oct. 27-30, host a meeting about downtown’s future. If the mayor really wants to promote the city’s prospects, he has an easy decision to make.

Correction: The Downcity Partnership, cited in my Sept. 18 “Ask Dr. Downtown” column as partnering in a downtown grocery, merged in 2005 with the Revolving Fund of the Providence Preservation Society, which ought to have been mentioned instead.

David Brussat is a member of The Journal’s editorial board ( dbrussat@projo.com).