In Business, Creating Sustainable Enterprises & Communities

Urban Alchemy Brings New Life To Pawtucket

In Business, May/June, 2004, Vol. 26, No. 3, p. 10

Artistic entrepreneurs in this Rhode Island city are helping to revitalize underused buildings and old mills - making it easier to attract other small businesses.

Joan Retsinas

PAWTUCKET, RHODE ISLAND has morphed into an artists' haven. Local and national media - like The Providence Journal, Boston Globe and National Geographic - all cite the city's transformation from a landscape of deteriorating mills to airy artists' lofts.
Statistics document this urban alchemy. Since 1997, Pawtucket has lured more than 400 artists. Glass sculptor Howard Ben Tre, whose works are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, the Hirschhorn in Washington, D.C. and the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, has a studio here. So does painter Gretchen Dow Simpson, who has drawn scores of New Yorker covers. Five years ago, Stone Soup Coffeehouse, famous throughout New England for folk music, moved from a Providence church to Pawtucket's Slater Mill. Last year, Stone Soup moved into an abandoned downtown bank (that the bank sold to the Pawtucket Boys' and Girls' Club for $1, and that the Club transformed into an after-school arts center). The city sold the deteriorating Armory to a group that is remodeling it for a performing arts center. (A professional repertory theater opened last fall in an annex of the Armory.) This summer, All Children's Theater, comprised of children-actors, will open downtown.
The physical changes to the city are startling. Some mills - like that owned by restaurant designer Morris Nathanson - were rehabbed into large, workable studios/offices/residences. A developer transformed another mill into loft-residential-units, some with breathtaking views of the Blackstone River (the river that fueled the industrial revolution) and within site of Slater Mill, considered the birthplace of that revolution. A developer has bought a long-abandoned mill, intending to construct six low-to-moderate income condominiums and 19 market-rent ones. Developers are buying not just mills, but bank buildings, motorcycle shops, even the Elks Building. Four years ago, the city transformed a long-vacant downtown department store into an elegant visitors' center, with a gallery that features the work of Pawtucket artists. Not surprisingly, the city's planning and redevelopment department, with its economic and cultural affairs officer, is stationed there.
Yet even in nonrehabbed mills, artists have crafted workable space. For the past two years, the Pawtucket Arts Collaborative has sponsored bus tours of studios, letting visitors stroll past storage areas, up rickety stairways, down winding halls, to see a furniture-maker, or a glass-blower. In one building, factory workers make rugs on the first floor, while 50 artists rent space on the top floors.
City coffers stand to benefit. Herb Weiss, the economic and cultural affairs officer, notes that one mill-into-lofts project, which used to pay $16,000 in taxes a year, will be paying more than $200,000 a year, even after the incentive abatements, when the project is filled. And the city expects the residential lofts to fill with artists, web designers, empty nesters, couples seeking an urban experience - all without children. (From 1990 to 2000, this city of 73,000 gained only 300 people, but its public school enrollment grew by 24 percent).
THE FORCES BEHIND THE ALCHEMY
Before anybody linked “arts” and “Pawtucket” in the same breath, the city had some logistical advantages over other mill cities. Pawtucket sits north of Providence, just off Route 95, drawing commuters from Boston. In fact, as housing prices in the Boston region have soared, some Boston workers have settled in Rhode Island. And Pawtucket can capture the spillover as graduates of the Providence-based Rhode Island School of Design stay in Rhode Island.
Yet affordable rental space (roughly $4-6/square foot, compared to $8-10/square foot in Providence, $18-20 in Boston)), coupled with a good location, were not enough to propel the transformation.
Weiss credits the political atmosphere of the city. Mayor James E. Doyle has given an enthusiastic “green light” to the arts-outreach. The city bureaucracy, moreover, cooperates in this outreach, with no wrangling over turf. Finally, as Mike Cassidy, director of planning and redevelopment, notes, the city has been honest in its dealings: no special deals, no quasi-legal agreements. When the city is negotiating with an artist, or a developer, the city does not permit them to contribute to special projects, so there is no perception of corruption.
This hands-off policy bears mention. Lincoln Steffens called Rhode Island “a state for sale.” And a century after Steffens, some politicians continued to blur the distinction between contributions and shakedowns. Pawtucket's former mayor (1987-1991) went to federal prison. Providence's former mayor, Buddy Cianci, is now in federal prison. The governor (1985-1990) served a year in state prison. Indictments - whether of a mayor, a legislator, or a judge - evoke a collective “ho hum.” So jaded developers who knock on Cassidy's door are often pleasantly surprised.
Weiss also credits the planning department, which has given him not just a berth, but fairly free rein. From Cassidy's vantage, luring artists is economic development. Artists are small businesses; and his department has been wooing small businesses for years. Although the city has seen an exodus of manufacturing (Hasbro, the large toymaker based in Pawtucket, now makes most toys overseas), manufacturing remains crucial to the city: one-third of the city's employment base is in manufacturing. A few large companies remain, and Pawtucket has worked to attract smaller, nonarts companies, like a wholesale bakery, a manufacturer of portfolio cases for photographs, and a sign company (it makes signs for all the Dunkin' Donuts in the world).
The state, moreover, has allowed Pawtucket (along with Providence, Westerly, and Woonsocket) to create artist-friendly zones: artists working within Pawtucket's 307-acre “Arts and Entertainment District” need not pay sales tax from sales of their work. And a new law will give some artist-residents a waiver from state income taxes.
Although Weiss does not credit himself with a role in the transformation, everybody else does. The media have labeled him a “dynamo,” an “indefatiguable booster,” a “sparkplug.” In April, the Pawtucket Foundation gave this Dallas native the “Person of the Year” award. If an artist calls on the weekend to ask about loft space, Weiss will drive him around (a task made easier by the computerized inventory of vacant space that the city planning department has compiled). He gives interviews, designs brochures, stages tours. When Stone Soup needed help transporting its equipment to Pawtucket, Weiss made calls: the city provided a truck, driver, and helper. For an artist holiday sale in the armory, the city did marketing, erected signage, and arranged for heat.
To create a three-day arts festival in 2003, Weiss raised more than $70,000 from 140 local businesses. The Pawtucket Teachers' union, noted in history books for staging some of the earliest, bitterest strikes, contributed $15,000 towards a public concert by the Rhode Island Philharmonic. He has ratcheted up the level of customer service: “If another city rolls out a red carpet, that's great, but we'll make sure our carpet is plusher.”
BEYOND THE ALCHEMY
At this point, the city has gathered enough artists to spark a grapevine. Five years ago, Weiss reached out to artists; today they call him.
In The Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida posits that entrepreneurs seek out cities full of creative people. Pawtucket is becoming such a place, at least for arts-minded people. And presumably the more artists the city attracts, the more attractive it will be to arts-minded people. The city even plugs tourism, building on its status as birthplace of the industrial revolution: an Elder Hostel meets here every summer; a tour boat cruises along the Blackstone River; a regional tourism council has linked the Slater Mill to Woonsocket's Museum of Work and Culture, so tourists can “do” the Blackstone Valley. Indeed, Weiss hopes to spur restaurants with city-backed low-interest loans. He envisions theaters, galleries and coffeehouses in the downtown's storefront churches and vacant buildings.
Officials from other cities have visited Pawtucket to learn the not-so-secret key to the alchemy. But even as cities remake themselves, they should recognize that an arts district, even a large one, is not an antipoverty program. Weiss explains that the city reached out to artists to fill underused buildings: the more tenants the city could lure, the higher the potential tax base. The “arts” per se is not a high-profit industry: many Rhode Island galleries, as well as artists, are barely solvent, operating on passion. More crucially, most artists are solo entrepreneur-creators. So the arts will not translate into many jobs.
The artists, though, have made Pawtucket more attractive - which has made it easier to attract small manufacturers, housing developers, new businesses. As these newer residents come to Pawtucket, its tax base expands. This outreach is meeting its goal. Empty space is filling up.
Yet Pawtucket today - like a century ago - is home to low-income people (57 percent of schoolchildren are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches), some new to this country (14 percent are Hispanics, up from 7 percent in 1990), some with few skills (the high school graduation rate is 63 percent - the lowest of any city in the state). This is the kind of labor force that manned the early 20th century mills. The families crowded into tenement apartments may be the ultimate test of Pawtucket's urban alchemy. Will those families be gentrified out of the city? Will the city spend more on services for them? Or will Pawtucket bifurcate into two distinct constituencies?

NEW GALLERY ON THE FOURTH FLOOR

TUCKED AWAY on the fourth floor of a rehabbed mill building is Studio Goddard Partridge. Five years ago,
Lisa Goddard and Regina Partridge set up shop here. Their unit has 1,100 square feet, 14-foot ceilings, a bank of southwest windows, and wall space for paintings - from Regina's vantage, “a classic studio; from Lisa's vantage, a “serene and safe space.”
At the center of the room is a Takachi etching press, with a 30 inch by 60 inch press bed. The women, who began as painters, now focus on printmaking. They make monotypes - featuring landscapes - here, using nontoxic materials. They give workshops on printmaking, letting artists try their hand on the press. And they rent press time on the machine: last year eight artists contracted to use the Takachi.
This working studio functions as a gallery, open occasionally to the public, so that people can view Lisa and Regina's prints, as well as the prints of other artists who have used the press.
Studio Goddard Partridge's fourth floor neighbors include a photographer, a puppeteer, an industrial designer, and a silversmith. For more information, Studio Goddard Partridge can be contacted at 164 Exchange St., #405, Pawtucket, RI 02860, phone (401) 724-4991.