Dr. Downtown, David Brussat: Downtown Beaux-Arts Beauty
Monday, April 27, 2015
The Union Trust Bank Building, at Westminster and Dorrance streets in downtown Providence, was designed by Stone, Carpenter & Willson and completed in 1901. It boasts the city’s most elaborate cornice, said by the Rhode Island Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission to be of “heavy bracketed modillion-and-dentil stone” topped, as the commission’s 1981 survey does not mention, by sexy urns sitting on an ornate balustrade.
This glorious financial tower, arguably the most beautiful if not the most rococo commercial building in the state of Rhode Island, has ground-floor windows topped by ovals of stained glass representing the crests of the world’s most famous banking families - including the Medicis.
The entrance to the banking hall on Dorrance, now a fancy restaurant of the same name, features a Puritan and a Noble Savage reclining in marble, carved by Daniel Chester French, sculptor of Lincoln in his temple at Washington. I was once told by Bob Burke, owner of a former restaurant there (The Federal Reserve), that its coffered ceiling sports female breasts hidden amid its ornate decor. I have never located a single one, though Burke is a notorious puller of chains.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTAbove the restaurant, 10 stories of office space are about half occupied. Soon, except for the two floors above the restaurant, they will renovated as 60 luxury apartments.
Vince Geoffroy Goes Deep
Vince Geoffroy last year completed the ProvidenceG project, 56 high-end units among four buildings once owned by Providence Gas (the G, it is said, stands for gas, not Geoffroy), and the former Narragansett Hotel’s garage, oldest in downtown. The project has a rooftop restaurant (with a view of the Union Trust’s cornice) and three other places to eat or to imbibe, including a recently opened seafood restaurant, Garde de la mer, in the teeny-weeny Teste Block.
Geoffroy had purchased the smaller Lapham Building farther up Westminster (it’s the building that el’s around Tilden-Thurber), but then sold it to downtown developer Arnold “Buff” Chace and has now purchased the Union Trust. If he sees downtown Providence residential taking off in the wake of the lingering local recession, he is not the only one.
Chace himself, whose rehab of six old buildings on or near Westminster sparked downtown’s revival, plans to put 50 units in the Lapham and 44 units in the Kinsley. He says he contemplates at least 100 more units in at least one new building he contemplates erecting on a parking lot across Fountain Street from the Journal Building, which he is apparently close to buying.
But Wait, There’s More!
Two other, smaller apartment projects have risen to my very pleased attention in the last several weeks. They are the planned renovation of 32 Custom House St., next to the aforementioned Pot au Feu. Officially entitled the Real Estate Title Insurance Building, it is being rehabbed for 10 units by a Brooklyn developer, HM Ventures 7.
Then there is the Merchants Bank Building, a wee Italianate brownstone - Providence’s “Little Flatiron Building” (near its “Big Flatiron Building,” aka the Turk’s Head). It was the city’s tallest building for two decades after its construction in 1857. Ten new windows are being punched into its east-facing facade, which for years has mooned College Hill with its blankness. I once urged sending an architectural mural to its rescue. That may no longer be needed; it might still be nice.
Finally - so far as I know - there is the project to rehab the narrow George C. Arnold Building, which suffered a major fire in 2009. Entrepreneurs Dave Stem and Lori Quinn agreed to redevelop three units in the building plus retail on the ground floor, with help from the Providence Revolving Fund after the city took it by eminent domain.
Saving the Arnold is like saving the Little Dutch Boy. The Arnold has its finger in the dike. It is a tiny building whose existence constitutes a slender (12 and 1/2 feet) wall of architecture that prevents two large parking lots from overwhelming that section of Washington Street.
What are they thinking?
Word creeps out (and creeps me out) that a new building project will soon be announced in the long quiescent Capital Center, a good portion of which remains undeveloped. A second phase of the astonishingly ugly Capital Cove, extending along the Moshassuck River from that building farther toward Smith Street, will be built, allegedly with a similar cheesy architecture.
That is bad news. Capital Center’s prospects have been seriously dimmed by the modernist towers erected during the regrettable Cicilline mayoral administration. The first phase is so ugly that its condos had no takers. It was leased as a dormitory to Johnson & Wales, which bought it a couple of years ago. Let’s not throw yet more good money after bad architecture.
J&W, by the way, seems to have abandoned its long effort to beautify Providence after the completion in the ’90s of its elegant Gaebe Commons along Weybosset Street. Its newly begun building on the I-195 corridor will be a dog, fully in sync with the horrendous models from the 195 Commission’s Developer’s Tool Kit. As if to ratify the official nature of future ugliness, the new streets of the redevelopment district are now lined with highway cobra lamps. Ugh!
Where do the new 195 commissioners stand on this?
David Brussat was an editorial writer and architecture critic at the Providence Journal for 30 years, and now writes an independent blog, architecturehereandthere.com. He lives in Providence.
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