The former Shooters property is considered integral to a successful reinvention of India Point Park.

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The Providence Journal / Andrew Dickerman

PROVIDENCE — With the June planning charette to decide the fate of the city’s waterfront shaping up to be a decisive moment for the future of the Providence shoreline, interested groups are already staking out their visions for what sections of the waterfront should look like.

Yesterday, nearly 100 people packed a conference room at the Radisson Hotel, overlooking India Point Park, to imagine the park of the not-so-distant future, with a marina where the closed Shooters nightclub is now, restaurants, fishing piers, farmers’ markets, public spaces and bike paths throughout. Even a Ferris wheel is possible, at least in the minds of those gathered yesterday.

“We really wanted to engage people who were concerned about the waterfront in Providence, thinking about it and discussing it before the waterfront charette took place,” said Arria Bilodeau, cochair of one of the two sponsoring groups, Head of the Bay Gateway. Friends of India Point Park also sponsored the event.

India Point Park is in the midst of a total reinvention. It has been chewed up by backhoes involved in the Route 195 project for the last few years, but once the highway relocation is complete, park advocates say, the foundation for a larger and better-used park will exist — if it isn’t gobbled up by developers interested in high-rise residential development.

The key to those hopes is the roughly 2-acre site of the former Shooters nightclub; the land was purchased by the state Department of Transportation for the highway relocation project, and now the state must sell the property that remains to help pay for that massive undertaking.

Local advocates want conditions placed on the sale to ensure that the buyer intends a use that is compatible with the desires of area residents for publicly accessible waterfront space, but the state has not agreed to any restrictions.

Instead of sitting back and hoping that things work out their way, park advocates are trying to push the debate forward, and craft their own plans for the park. To coordinate their efforts, the park groups brought in Ethan Kent of the Project for Public Spaces, a New York-based planning organization that recently oversaw a similar exercise for remaking Kennedy Plaza downtown.

Kent said that this stretch of waterfront has the potential to be a regional draw.

“This is a fishing expedition to figure out the reasons that are going to draw you here and bring the rest of the city here.”

But to become that, it must capture what is special about Providence, and give visitors clearly defined reasons to venture there.

“The best waterfronts in the world actually bring together the cultures of the city to express its personality,” he said.

Kent broke the participants into groups to tackle specific areas of the park, but he first laid out a few ground rules: the best uses are public uses; a good waterfront has at least 10 different destinations to draw visitors; parking should be off-site; residential uses should be kept away from the waterfront’s ground-level; any vertical development in a waterfront area should be kept between four and eight stories high.

Five groups were created, and their members assigned to specific locations, from the far western area under the new Route 195 bridge, to the Shooters site, to the park’s eastern corner near the Brown University boathouse and the Washington Bridge.

It was quickly clear that the Shooters site was seen as the key to reinventing the larger park. Participants yesterday said that they hoped to see a marina built at the site, flanked by restaurants offering outdoor dining and publicly accessible space available for use that would draw residents from around the region.

WaterFire creator Barnaby Evans, who oversaw the group assigned to the Shooters site, said that the dilapidated property is the lynchpin of the efforts to improve the waterfront.

“We clearly saw it as a resource that is ours to grab now, and will not be there again,” Evans said. “Short term, clearly it needs to be cleaned up, both inside and out, as it’s a symbolic statement of reclaiming the space.”

City Councilman Seth Yurdin, who represents the India Point area, said that a marina is a very real possibility for the Shooters area. The land is already zoned to allow for marina use, and that’s a big draw in attracting a developer. An event like yesterday’s summit may also help to spur interest, now that it’s clear that similar projects would have community backing.

“There are not specific developers that I’ve spoken to with particular proposals, but obviously part of this exercise is to get people interested, and aware that the city wants those kinds of things to happen,” Yurdin said.

Participants pictured the center of the park as the future site of outdoor movies and concerts, and perhaps even as the terminus for a water taxi service running from downtown to the park.

The eastern end of the park, where the Radisson sits near the Brown boathouse and several Brown-owned warehouses, was seen as ripe for future development, perhaps some capitalizing on its location on major bike routes.

The land under the new highway bridge — what team leader John Schenck dubbed a “dark, gloomy passageway” — also needs to be kept vibrant, or else it could deter use of the larger park.

“It needs light and activities all the time,” Schenck said, offering basketball courts, permanent sound and light installations, and historic exhibits as possibilities for keeping that space from turning into a shadowy no-man’s land.

With the summit complete, the sponsors will retain Kent’s team to produce a short report on the day’s discussions, which Providence Deputy Planning Director Linda Painter said the city would link to from its Web site when it is complete. They are also trying to raise money for further studies of the Shooters site.

The date of the waterfront charette has been pushed back several times since it was initially scheduled for February, but that has only given interested groups more time to prepare for it.

The other major stretch of the city’s waterfront, the industrial section along Allens Avenue, is the site of major conflict as developers push for rezoning to allow residential uses, and the waterfront businesses push back, fearful of losing their livelihood if condos stack up next to salt piles and shipyards.

Organized as the Working Waterfront Alliance, those businesses have also been working to show the value of their presence in the city, including bringing advocates for a new type of cargo transportation strategy — short sea shipping — to Providence last month to evaluate the potential for growth there.

dbarbari@projo.com