Arcade ready to again be innovator

LIVING HISTORY: Evan Granoff, owner of The Arcade Providence, tours the nearly 200-year-old structure. Current renovations will create a mix of residential and commercial space in the building. / PBN PHOTO/BRIAN MCDONALD
LIVING HISTORY: Evan Granoff, owner of The Arcade Providence, tours the nearly 200-year-old structure. Current renovations will create a mix of residential and commercial space in the building. / PBN PHOTO/BRIAN MCDONALD

Can what’s old really become new again?
Evan Granoff, owner of The Arcade Providence, thinks so and aims to prove himself, as well as those behind him in the effort, right when the building’s transformation – from a vacant reminder of its former glory as a city centerpiece to an innovator in downtown housing – is completed later this year.
The Arcade, once the nation’s oldest operating indoor shopping mall and, since it was built in 1828 one of the city’s most architecturally renowned buildings, will soon reopen as a micro-loft apartment and retail building.
“It’s a market that hasn’t really been addressed and works in that building very well,” said Granoff, of Granoff Associates LLC. “It was meant to [have] very small units. Keeping it that way is just very natural.”
The Arcade has been empty since June 2008, when Granoff announced it would undergo an $8 million, yearlong renovation to position the building for a better economic future.
(That plan was backed by a 22 percent Historic Preservation Income Tax credit.)
It was around that time that Granoff hired Michael Abbott of Northeast Collaborative Architects LLC, with offices in Newport and Providence, as well as Middletown, Conn., to facilitate the redesign.
Abbott has worked on such well-known projects as the Slater Mill historic renovation in North Smithfield and the Providence Performing Arts Center restoration.
The mixed-used plan was announced last January and immediately heralded by city and state officials and civic leaders as the right move at the right time for downtown.
“It took a while to plan it all out, go through everything, and figure out what we were going to do,” Abbott said. “It’s been rehabbed many times. Micro-lofts was a new idea. Residential up above kicked it over the goal line and got it off the ground.”
When it opens – which Granoff hopes will happen by year’s end – the building will house 48 apartment units on its second and third floors and approximately 14 businesses, including three or four restaurants, on its first floor.
By sticking with small spaces, Abbott said, the building will be in truer form to its original 1828 design than ever.
“It’s allowing us basically to put the building back to what it was when it was built,” he said. “They were individual rooms that were tiny. We’re actually creating more of the streetscape [feel] that was inside.” Demolition was 98 percent complete, Granoff said, by the end of June. July was slated to see new windows being put in, to be followed by a roof replacement. Refinishing individual units will follow, ensuring the interior has been made watertight.
The plan also seems to have done wonders to dissipate a cloud of ill will that surrounded The Arcade’s closing four years ago.
At the time of the closing there were 13 tenants at The Arcade. Johnson’s Bakery, which accounted for 25 percent of its revenue, had just announced it was vacating.
Other tenants complained publicly that Granoff Associates had mismanaged the mall since it took over in 2006 and fought against eviction that came with their 30-day notice leases.
Granoff said repeatedly that the building hadn’t made money in years, a sentiment echoed by previous owner Johnson & Wales University, which said it never made money in its 10-year run there.
“The goal is to make this building economically viable,” Granoff said. “That’s something it hasn’t been in a long time. To preserve buildings they have to be [making money].”
If “micro-loft” seems like a foreign word that’s because, largely, it is.
The economized apartment floor-plan – about 300 square feet – is designed for functional living on a small-scale budget. Typical features include minimalist kitchens and furniture that tucks away when not in use, including tables that fold into walls and stove-less cooking.
The Arcade’s lofts, which will start at $550 per month, require a one-year lease and include utilities, will be the first of their kind in Providence, one of only a handful of cities in the United States to embrace the apartment model.
Micro-loft living is not new to areas such as Los Angeles and New York. Several other such developments exist in both locations as well as other cities around the world, including in Vancouver, British Columbia and Paris.
There is a waiting list for the units that Granoff said is filled with young people and some in the part-time resident category who may work in the city but live out of state and are looking for a Monday through Friday home. Jim DeRentis, an agent in the Providence office of Residential Properties, said the lofts could serve a population that works downtown but is often priced out of living in the city and round out Providence’s residential demographic.
They’ll also be living in a historically significant structure. The Arcade has long been one of the city’s most protected buildings, listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1971.
The Providence Preservation Society placed it on its most-endangered list in 2009; where it has remained. In that designation, PPS most noted The Arcade’s interior. At the time, there was concern about the possibility that Granoff could bring a single tenant there.
As James Hall, PPS executive director, who was not with the organization in 2009, told Providence Business News, historical-landmark designation guarantees that a building’s façade cannot be altered. No such safeguard is in place for a landmark’s interior.
“I would say The Arcade [has] the most significant interior in downtown Providence because it’s so unusual. You can’t take the interior out without doing irreparable harm to the history of the building,” Hall said. “I’m tremendously in favor of [Granoff’s] plan. He’s come to understand the great essential elements of that building.”
The Arcade will see some interior modifications, though they appear to be minor with the exception of adding a bridge on the third floor that will be four feet wide, about one-third of the second-floor bridge’s size.
The most noticeable difference on the first floor, where retail space will rent for about $1,000 per month and for which Granoff will target niche shops, will be the absence of an open eating area and the addition of bay-style windows to the storefronts.
That’s not to say Granoff and Abbott haven’t had fun digging up what they’ve had to in order to complete the renovation.
“We’re seeing the original trim and baseboards and holdings and the like,” Abbott said. “It’s really neat to see all the stuff that’s been covered over. I think of it as peeling back the layers of an onion. We’re getting to the real meat of it.” •

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