05/02/2002

THE FEDERAL BUILDING and Courthouse, as the big pile of gray architecture at the east end of Kennedy Plaza is now officially known, has been on my radar for at least three years. So has City Hall, at left in this view of the plaza, shot on Tuesday from my loft in the Smith Building. In 1998, I celebrated City Hall's restoration in this space. Now that the restoration of the courthouse is complete, it is time, again, to celebrate.

The coincidental intersection, in the news, of the courthouse with City Hall had this reporter standing in line, waiting to go through the metal detector, hoping to be able to sit in Judge Ernest Torres's courtroom rather than the virtual courtroom to which I had already been twice consigned.

A prayer to the woman pictured below -- whose bust interrupts a broken architrave in the entryway to the gloriously restored lobby -- landed me in the leftmost seat of the front row of the Torres courtroom's spectator section, well within waft of Mayor Cianci's famously pungent intergalactic cologne.

But other than to admit that it's fun to tell people that I live behind the Plunder Dome, I have nothing to report about the proceedings at the far end of Kennedy Plaza. I can testify, however, that the mayor's day of reckoning will come in a building that looks fully as voluptuous as it did when it opened for official business on Nov. 14, 1908.

At night, the building is lit front and rear with boldness and subtlety by street and facade lights. (It is time for City Hall to improve its own facade lighting; that is, if it wants to recapture its status as an equal plaza bookend.) The black railings around the rear entry to the courthouse far outstrip my meager expectations of long standing. The reconstruction of its extensive rooftop balustrade rescues one of the city's great balusterphiliac feasts.

The restoration, overseen by the U.S. General Services Administration and Court System, was led by Herbert Andrade, of the Providence firm of Edward Rowse Architects, and Feingold Alexander, of Boston. Gilbane Construction kept tabs on A.F. Lusi, the main contractor. Inside and out, their work has burnished that of Clarke and Howe, the architects whose Beaux Arts design won a competition hosted by the U.S. Treasury in 1903.

Its neoclassicism was described in the Rhode Island Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission's 1981 survey of downtown buildings. The entry, by William McKenzie Woodward, is a veritable glossary of grandeur: The courthouse is a "4-story, limestone-sheathed building with hip roof; rusticated first story; 3-bay central projecting pavilions on east and west facades and 10-bay north and south elevations with colossal Corinthian pilasters; full entablature with modillion cornice and balustrade parapet above; monumental marble sculptures representing America and Providence (carved by John Massey Rhind) flank the entrance on the west."

In a March 18 story last year ("Judicial reprieve"), Journal staff writer Karen Lee Ziner reported that, believe it or not, federal officials considered demolishing the courthouse in the 1980s. No glossary would be needed to describe its likely replacement. In fact, the brick-and-glass federal building that actually arose on Westminster Street in 1983 can be described in three or four words, only one of which is really necessary: Blah.

That is the city's latest federal building. Its first was the U.S. Custom House (1857), a domed granite Italianate on Weybosset Street. Its judicial and postal functions were shifted to the new building, on what was then called Exchange Place, in 1908. The post office moved next door in 1939 when a federal annex (now called the Pastore Building) replaced the old Central Fire Station (1903). The annex was the main post office until the nation's first fully automated postal facility was built on Corliss Street, in 1960.

Meanwhile, the courthouse was growing old, and, as Ziner reported, its future was uncertain: By the 1980s, "[a] decision loomed: Restore this nearly century-old beaux-arts building, with its expansive lobby and vaulted limestone ceiling, curving staircases, Italian marble fireplaces, and mahogany-and oak-paneled courtrooms and law library? Or start all over and build a new federal courthouse?"

Mercifully, justice was done. Chief Clerk David DiMarzio told Ziner that because "the building was a gem, not only for the court itself, but for the people," Rhode Island's federal judges opted for restoration.

Indeed, not only the courthouse but almost everything nearby has been either renovated or restored, or soon will be. The Pastore Building next door was recently renovated; the Providence River was relocated and uncovered in 1990-96; the new Kennedy Plaza, with its four Victorian bus pavilions, has just reopened; and Burnside Park has new green grass, new black railings, and a Bajnotti Fountain that may soon spout water from its 236 nozzles. It truly is springtime in Kennedy Plaza.

David Brussat is a member of The Journal's editorial board. His e-mail is: dbrussat@projo.com.