Current News

Old Hope site sold; in line for makeover

By David Casey
Pawtucket Times | March 24, 2005

The Los Angeles-based company that purchased the six-building, 600,000 square-foot former Hope Webbing mill complex for $2.5 million Wednesday plans to invest an additional $20-$25 million to transform the late 19th century brick-and-timber behemoth into a veritable Greenwich Village. Ron Wierks, the director of operations for Urban Smart Growth’s fast-growing east coast bureau, said the company intends to restore the buildings back to their original condition and fill them with artists – a familiar strategy in Pawtucket.

USG, which “takes old mills and under-performing assets and re-develops them into viable assets for the community,” according to Wierks, is artist-friendly Mayor James Doyle’s dream-come-true.

For the past seven years, Doyle has courted the state’s arts community, which has been increasingly priced-out of the Providence marketplace. After several successful mill conversions, arts festivals and a truckload of economic outreach, he’s finally managed to fill two city block’s worth of un-taxable tinder at the heart the city’s new 300-acre Arts & Entertainment District with a honeycomb of Bohemian cafes, artist’s lofts, workshops and retailers.

“This is the biggest project to hit the City of Pawtucket in the last 50 years,” Doyle told The Times Wednesday. “Nothing even comes close. To see the amount of money they’re putting into this and the scale and quality of this project …this is going to make people who haven’t noticed Pawtucket before, stand up and pay attention. If someone is building a massive project like this here, maybe people will start wondering why.”

Doyle knows that buzz begets buzz, and for the better part of the last decade, he’s believed that Pawtucket can achieve economic success by repackaging itself as a trendy, urban outpost. The logic is simple: Artists like mills because they’re affordable and spacious; mills in Providence (just 7 miles away) and Boston (about 45 miles away) are too expensive; and Pawtucket, a depressed mill city straddling Interstate 95, could use the buzz consumer markets artists bring with them.

According to Wierks, who is in the process of getting the 600,000-square-foot complex re-zoned from industrial to general commercial (Pawtucket’s Arts and Entertainment District only provides for tax-free art sales), the “Hope Artiste Village” will be a regional commercial-cultural “destination.”

All told, the complex will feature boutiques and artists’ galleries, live-work space, apartments, restaurants and cafes, light-industrial space (woodworking, glass-blowing, etc.), an outdoor live music venue in the courtyard, a black-box theater and an executive business center, where out-of-towners can rent fully-equipped office space by the month.

The breakdown is roughly: 25-30 percent living space, 40 percent retail, 15 percent office space, 10 percent restaurants and cafes, and 10-15 percent light manufacturing, according to Wierks.

Manufacturing units will range from 1,600 to 10,000 square feet, starting at $5 per square foot; live/work units will be around 2,000 square-feet, starting at $5 per square foot; and apartments will range from 700 to 1,400 square-feet, starting at $2 per square foot.

And this is no rush-job, according to Wierks, who helped introduce the run-down East Coast mill market to USG’s core market of run-down Art Deco motels and apartment buildings in Southern California. After all, Rhode Island’s generous historical tax credits are the number one reason this nationwide developer chose to base its east coast bureau in little, old Pawtucket.

“The basic tax credits in the State of Rhode Island are a tremendous incentive to developers like us,” said Wierks. “That’s what we do – we restore buildings to their original condition. We get the city’s support and all of the exposure, and they get the ambience and people they’re looking for.”

As such, floors will be sanded and re-finished, brick and tresses left exposed wherever possible, and windows replaced with stylistically-appropriate facsimiles of their 100-year-old counterparts. And this sort of attention to detail takes time.

The entire project is expected to take five years to complete, with buildings 1-6 reaching completion in order of market priority. The Hope Artiste Village will become the fourth east project for USG, which is currently working on the Eagle Square (the former Eastern Butcher Block) project in Providence (144 condo units), Greystone Mill project in North Providence (136 condo units) and a 114-condo complex in Bloomfield, New Jersey.

Bonus

Workers streaming out of the building at noon, 1903
A 5.7 MB quicktime movie found on the Library of Congress’s American Memory website. In our photo #6 you can see the area that is shown in this movie.

History

A large complex occupying a double city block and built to the edge of the site on all sides. Typical brick mill construction consisting of a long 2- and 3- story symmetrical facade, with two 4- story towers. In back of the main street building are four one story brick factory sheds with raised clerstory roofs. The west end of the site is spanned by a long 6-story brick mill block. Most of the structures were built between 1889 and 1913, and by 1930, it claimed to be the largest mill of its type in the world.

One of the most recent tenants in the rear block (Esten Street) was the Schoolhouse Candy company. In June 2004, the boiler works building located in the rear of the complex burned down.

Anecdotes

Helen Triantopoulos Card  I worked at Hope Webbing from 1968-1970. I worked part time after school from 3-7 for 2 years, and worked full time during summer. I made $1.60 an hour; even though it was so loud, you had to punch in and punch out; 30 minute lunch/dinner breaks; i had a great time. When I visit my mom in pawtucket, i drive way and stop outside and if i close my eyes I can hear the spoolers on the lower level and the machine on the 2nd floor.

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