Exchange Place in 1926, then also known as the Mall, and now as Kennedy Plaza

Journal archives

THE 17TH FLOOR of the Biltmore Hotel, both the ballroom and where L’Apogée used to be, offers a great bird’s-eye view of Kennedy Plaza, including the bus depot, Burnside Park, the skating rink and City Hall Park, the official name of the hilly parklet between the rink and the Biltmore.

For all the ribbing it takes, Kennedy Plaza is one of the nation’s best civic squares. Of course, it is not really a square. And since the city seems to be on a “branding” jag, maybe they should change its name to Kennedy Trapezoid. Imagine the buzz.

Originally called Exchange Place, Kennedy Plaza is half pleasure ground and half bus station. The latter half was renovated in 2002, with elegant new period-style lampposts, bollards, bus kiosks and a new bus station (renovating the old 1914 comfort station, where the Café Plaza restaurant used to be). Its design reflects that of the traditional skating rink built in 1998. The city did the plaza a big favor by rejecting modern architecture for the skating rink and the bus station. In Burnside Park, Bajnotti Fountain and the equine statue of Gen. Ambrose Burnside were renovated in 2003. The old and new classicism help to knit together the plaza’s business and pleasure zones, picking up on the traditional architecture of most of the buildings of the plaza’s boundary.

Nine of the 18 buildings that form that boundary are very good indeed: City Hall, the Industrial Trust National Bank, the old Hospital Trust Building, the Federal Courthouse (celebrating its 100th birthday) and the five buildings of the Union Station complex. Six more range from good enough to quite good. Because the worst three are such a minority, they are sufferable — the Howard Building (where the Paragon cafeteria used to be), the Hospital Trust Tower and the building where the Ming Garden restaurant used to be. (Are these Rhode Islandisms or Mark Patinkinisms?) The architectural score is 15 to 3. For a civic plaza in a U.S. city, that’s good indeed.

Only the lot northeast of Kennedy Plaza fails to anchor its corner. In 2006, a 20-story tower in a traditional style was proposed for that site but was attacked by the design reviewers of the Capital Center Commission, and hasn’t been seen since.

How might Kennedy Plaza aspire to be a better civic square? That question drew about 100 people to a meeting last Wednesday in the ballroom of the Biltmore. It was hosted by the city and a coalition of nearby property owners and civic groups led by the Providence Foundation. New York-based Project for Public Space helped them brainstorm the issues facing Kennedy Plaza. Daniel Barbarisi’s Feb. 28 story, “City told to think and dream big in reinventing plaza,” summarized the presentation. A possible model for the plaza, PPS president Fred Kent said, might be Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens, a pleasure ground built in 1843 that you pay to enter. He said that for the plaza to succeed, “we need to have a lot of amenities and a lot of reasons to be in this space.”

Undoubtedly. But a bus station next to a skating rink flanked by two parks and surrounded by civic, residential and commercial buildings add up to a lot more than many American or even European civic squares offer. We mustn’t sniff at what we have. It is not too crowded. It could, of course, be better maintained. Yet perhaps it can still be improved.

With the 2002 renovations, Providence missed an opportunity to expand Burnside Park into the entire plaza. Try again? No. It would be foolish to discard $9.5 million in federal largess so soon, all the more given how nice the bus station looks. Maybe instead the fleet of big ugly fuming buses can be replaced by double the number of quaint little clean trolley wannabes. That would make things nicer. (Naturally, the state proposes to eliminate the trolleys.) Fiscal reality will push a real trolley system into the future.

To bring more life to the plaza, Kent suggested more concerts, and better retail in shop fronts along its perimeter. But programming is by its nature costly and spotty. Moreover, the steroidal summer concerts at the rink drive away more civilized people than they attract. More of that can only make things worse. As for better retail, most of the nearby buildings are civic or corporate in nature and lack shop fronts, and the owners of the rest have been trying to find better commercial tenants for years.

One solution was offered many years ago by restaurant designer Morris Nathanson, of Pawtucket, in a discussion of Waterplace Park long before it was cluttered with off-putting modern architecture. In the Greek taverna system, an established restaurant or hotel sponsors tables at a nice spot some distance off. A young fellow phones in food and drink orders that waiters transport to the tables. The waiters get tips, the young fellow gets a commission, the restaurant gets free publicity and the public gets more outdoor cafés. Tavernas could attract a civilized clientele to the plaza, transforming it into the grand civic square that we had once hoped Waterplace might be.

Good ideas, and cheap! That, not Copenhagen, is what Kennedy Plaza needs to fulfill its destiny.

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