Janet Graubart sits in the window of her condo above Murphy’s Deli in downtown Providence. Graubart, who moved downtown with her husband from Sharon, Mass., says the noise is ruining her quality of life. Providence Journal photo / Kris Craig

PROVIDENCE

Janet and Stephen Graubart believed in the dream of the new downtown, and they backed it up with their wallets: they bought a pricey condominium on the second floor of the stately Cosmopolitan Building on Fountain Street.

Ruth Ferrazzano believed in the new downtown as well. Her bar, Murphy’s, had been a downtown staple for more than 75 years, despite its dark, cramped quarters on Union Street. She, too, bought into the Cosmopolitan, building a bright, new high-ceilinged Murphy’s on the first floor.

Love thy new neighbor, it was not.

Since well before Murphy’s opened its doors in June, the two have warred over loud music, food odors, and the noise of patrons smoking and milling about outside the bar. To Janet Graubart, Murphy’s does not fit the vision of downtown life that they were sold.

“We were lured to downtown being told one thing, and we were duped. This is an upscale place, and it should have a certain tonality. Instead, my home is now a source of my stress. You’re lying in bed at night, the headboard’s going boom-boom-boom,” she said.

It’s the downside to the new downtown. The clubs and bars that have long dominated are now coming into conflict with the high-end residences that have sprung up in the last few years. Both feel they have the right to exist, exposing an at-times uneasy relationship between the established businesses and the moneyed newcomers.

The Graubarts are exactly the kind of people the city has been trying to attract: wealthy, settled professionals — many of them empty-nesters — who want to take advantage of the city’s cultural offerings, and are willing to pay a high price to live in the center of it all.

But their arrival also has some wary. If Providence caters too much to the needs of its new downtown residents, it may lose some of the edge that makes it attractive and vibrant to begin with.

“People need to be on the street. You want people on the street. We’re trying to make the city alive. How can you come to a city, and want to make it quiet? It’s not the country,” Ruth Ferrazzano said. “To come in and try to make it different, it’s wrong. It’s fundamentally wrong.”

Many are watching closely to see how the conflict at the Cosmopolitan plays out — because all expect it to happen again as more downtown buildings become luxury condominiums.

“What’s happening now is a culture clash. Because you’re having people come from outside the state, from very gentrified areas, people who don’t know the role of a lot of these places in keeping the city going when there was nothing down here,” said Julie Ferrazzano, Ruth’s daughter and the general manager of Murphy’s. “I think we can definitely co-exist, but you’re coming into a very tight-knit, very blue collar city.”

RUTH FERRAZZANO knows as well as anyone that downtown needed a change. She had worked at Murphy’s in various roles since 1979, before buying the bar in 1996.

“It was a bombed-out Beirut; there was nothing here,” she said.

Murphy’s, founded in 1929, was one of the few signs of life on Union Street for years, and a regular stop for journalists, politicians, and servers at other bars and restaurants. But in 2005, the lease was expiring, and with her rent set to increase, Ferrazzano figured she could take advantage of the new climate downtown and attract more conventioneers with a spot on a more prominent corner. The new Murphy’s opened in June.

She settled on the first floor of the former Palmer Block building, a 1915 office building at the corner of Fountain and Mathewson streets. It was renovated into the Cosmopolitan condos in 2004, with 2-bed, 2-bath units, most with panoramic views, Jacuzzis, and mahogany, limestone and marble throughout.

She fretted about the new site holding the same authenticity for her regulars — but did not expect this level of conflict with her new neighbors. She saw the new residents as a fertile customer base.

The Graubarts bought into the Cosmopolitan at the height of the housing market in the summer of 2005, when Providence’s downtown was just starting to hit as a luxury residential destination. The couple had long lived in Sharon, Mass., and run an interior design business. They paid more than $700,000 for their sumptuous condo.

They knew that a restaurant was likely to occupy the empty space beneath them, but they expected it would be something more upscale, like Bravo Brasserie on Empire Street, Janet Graubart said. And she said that the early plans presented for Murphy’s were nothing like the end result.

“I knew it was a bar, I didn’t know it was a bar that played loud music. She’s running a nightclub,” she said

It was tough getting anyone from the city, the media, or the neighborhood to listen to her, she said. But when a new neighbor, Paul Schapiro, moved into the Cosmopolitan this summer, he joined their fight, agreeing that the amount of noise that comes from Murphy’s is significant.

“I’m an urban creature, I love downtowns, I loved downtown Washington, I loved downtown Chicago. It’s lovely down here, most of the time. I just don’t want it in my living room 24/7,” Schapiro said.

Schapiro doesn’t blame Ferrazzano; instead, he puts the blame on the city, for not recognizing that you don’t mix luxury apartments with a thriving bar. As more residents move downtown, he said, the city needs to more carefully plan, block-by-block, what uses can cohabitate.

“It’s obvious that you don’t plan a nightclub — and that’s kind of what Murphy’s is becoming — underneath a residential building,” he said. “This is about a city that wants people to move back into the urban center, and it’s just not approaching it the right way.”

The Murphy’s conflict comes at a pivotal time for the Providence downtown. In the next few weeks, the Procaccianti Group will open 103 high-end condominium units on the upper floors of its new 32-story tower which is part of the Westin Providence hotel expansion, now the third-tallest building in the Providence skyline. The units start at $425,000 and go as high as $2.6 million, and they have been consistently marketed to empty-nesters like the Graubarts and to young couples with money.

Next summer, Waterplace apartments will open in capital center, bringing nearly 200 more units online. The hope is that those condos will be far enough away from the street action that these problems will be avoided.

“That couldn’t happen at a Waterplace or a Westin. It’s only with some of those decades-old places that you see this. As more of these older buildings get rezoned and reused we’ll run into this kind of problem,” said Arnell Milhouse, president of the Downtown Merchants Association.

As the first president of the Downtown Neighborhood Alliance, Maria Ruggieri is a well-known presence downtown, so much so that she has served as a mediator on this issue. She wasn’t able to broker a compromise, but said she thinks that the two sides can work this out.

“They have to,” Ruggieri said. “Because what is at stake is the future of checks and balances to the downtown that apply to everyone.”

Similar conflicts have already occurred elsewhere downtown, including strife between residents of the Conrad Building and Finnegan’s Wake on Empire Street, and the Alice Building and Tazza CafÉ on Westminster Street.

Ruggieri said that the key to allaying future disputes is more involvement from City Hall, with professionals evaluating potential problem situations before they arise. Perhaps even a small, special department or a written structure for anticipating disputes is needed, she said.

Rita Murphy, a top aide to Mayor David N. Cicilline who deals with neighborhood issues, said that City Hall has taken a greater interest in this matter than in any other of its type — and that they tried hard to address the concerns of both sides well before Murphy’s opened. This is largely an isolated incident, she said.

“I think that the process is working fine,” Murphy said.

IN THE FIVE MONTHS since Murphy’s first opened, headway has been made on some issues, often with the condo documents as the battleground. Recently, Ferrazzano agreed to install additional soundproofing in Murphy’s ceiling to deal with low-frequency noise traveling up through the floors, and she said it may be possible address the food odors.

Michael Egan, president of the Cosmopolitan condo association and a member of the city’s zoning board, said that some of the concerns are legitimate, and that Murphy’s is working to fix the problems.

“There are growing pains, like with anything else. Any new place that’s a mixed-use building is going to have stuff like this,” said Egan, adding that other Cosmopolitan residents are not having any problems with Murphy’s.

Ferrazzano said that she wants to appease the Graubarts’ concerns, but fears that no change will ever be enough.

“Basically, it was a class issue. Murphy’s wasn’t good enough for her. She virtually said my place was dirty. She’s never going to be happy that I’m here,” she said.

Graubart said that she’d leave, but she fears the financial loss.

“If I could move, I would, but I can’t, because now my place is worth nothing,” she said. “I’d hate for this to happen to someone else, and it is going to happen again.”

Ferrazzano wants to believe that this can be worked out, and that there is room for everyone in the new downtown. She believes that on some days. Others, she thinks the only way that luxury condos will work is if they’re 17 stories up, like the Westin.

“This is a city. You’re going to get the guy out there at 2 a.m. when the clubs let out, playing the horn, asking for money. It’s a city,” she said. “My advice is to go up. Go up. Go high up, or go home.”

dbarbari@projo.com