By David Ortiz
PBN Staff Writer
A group of residents in Providence’s Summit and Mount Hope neighborhoods have been working for more than two years on a plan to revive and redesign North Main Street, a thoroughfare they say has fallen on hard times and is negatively affecting that part of the city.
“North Main Street really emerged as a problem that people had a lot of concerns about,” said Jonathan Howard, president of the Summit Neighborhood Association and coordinator of the North Main Street project. “The evolution of massage parlors, pawn shops, and then the decay of properties and the loss of businesses which has just continued, really worried people that it actually was having a negative impact on the quality of life in the neighborhood, on safety, on property values and so on.”
North Main runs along the bottom of the hill on the Providence’s East Side, south from the Pawtucket border toward downtown.
The street began its decline in the 1980s, Howard said, when Sears shuttered its landmark department store that anchored North Main’s retail district for decades and drew shoppers from Pawtucket, Seekonk, Attleboro and beyond.
The Miriam Hospital acquired the Sears building and other properties on the street with the intention to move some of its operations there, but the properties remained vacant when Miriam decided to expand at its current campus on Summit Avenue, Howard said.
The Summit Neighborhood Association made revitalizing North Main Street a priority in 2005, when more than 80 residents who attended an annual meeting of the neighborhood group named the street as one of their biggest concerns, he said.
The neighborhood association formed the North Main Street project, reaching out to local elected officials, their Mount Hope neighbors, Miriam and the city’s Department of Planning and Development.
The group held a series of meetings at Javaspeed Scooters and the Sandwich Hut – two businesses on North Main that Howard said share the residents’ concerns – to brainstorm and form a vision for North Main.
Those who participated in that process arrived at a set of priorities for the street, which include the creation of new job opportunities and small businesses – especially restaurants and retail shops; the development of affordable housing; new landscaping and the creation of green spaces where possible; more transit options; and safer pedestrian crossings and other measures to slow traffic on North Main.
After spending much of the past year fund-raising and with financial support from Miriam Hospital, the Summit Neighborhood Association recently hired East Providence-based Gates, Leighton & Associates, a landscape architecture firm, to help draft a more specific plan for future development of North Main, Howard said.
Those involved in the initiative hope their plan is essentially endorsed and formalized by the Providence planning department’s charrette process – in which the city is enabling all city residents to help draft a master plan for future development of their neighborhoods, and which is occurring from Sept. 24 to Sept. 28 on the East Side.
“This whole idea of how North Main is going to change will take on some color of policy with the city, and it’ll also have been widely exposed in the community,” Howard said.
North Main Street has experienced some amount of street improvement and private development in the past couple of years, Howard said. The city repaved some sidewalks and added trees, and in recent months a new office building was erected across the street from where another box store is currently being built that will house a Walgreens pharmacy.
But Howard said that’s not the type of development that he and his neighbors are hoping for on North Main Street.
“We want an urban street, not a faint echo of [Warwick’s] Bald Hill Road,” he said. “Even if you think that’s a good thing, we’ll never be that. It’s just not right for that. What we’d really like to see is much more in line with this New Urbanist and smart growth kind of ethic.” •
