How many people know that it's 100% vacant? Is it common knowledge among RI residents who aren't architecture nerds?
I think it's a question of: if Providence can't fill a historic, iconic skyscraper what hope is there of the city being able to fill a new one?
I guess it depends on how Providence sees itself and what it expects its economy to look like in the future. There was a point where it was competitive with some of the nation's largest cities, but nowadays it seems to think of itself as being closer in stature to Lowell than to Raleigh. And maybe that's okay.
I agree with DZ in that PVD tearing down the Superman Building would be like BOS tearing down the Custom House. Filenes isn't exactly the same scale.
I think it's been pretty well-known for some time that the building's been vacant since 2012--BofA's departure back was pretty damn well publicized, precisely because of the symbolism of leaving Providence's largest and most iconic office tower vacant, if for no other reason.
Anyway, try this on, as pure speculation: what if the Providence market can't fill the skyscraper not because demand in Providence is so chronically terrible/underperforming...
but merely because this sole office tower, among all of them in downtown PVD, is so singularly uncompetitive, because of something inherent in the product?
If downtown Providence office vacancy rates are comparatively healthy for the COVID era--at, say, 85% or so--and keeping pace with if not exceeding peer markets, such as Springfield, Worcester, Hartford--then that tells me the issue may be all about the building itself, and nothing about the overall market, necessarily. After all, it's approaching 100 years old. It was engineered/designed to Jazz Age market pressures and aesthetic sensibilities.
If that's the case, then the building's decade-long vacancy isn't at all a referendum on the Providence office market's health (which in itself is just one slice of Provience's overall economic dynamism, eh?), but merely an indictment of its defective characteristics (market-wise, NOT aesthetically, as a structural icon), or incompetence/stubborness/inertia by the owner.
Finally--do you really think Providence was that competitive with larger cities that recently? I always figured Boston and NYC started significantly pulling away from it starting after the Civil War, as those two got integrated into the massive new Gilded Age global economy of hyperindustrialization and hyperconsumption and Providence slumped to becoming a second-tier regional city. A process greatly accelerated once the Cape Cod Canal was dug in the 1920s or whenever. And if the Great Depression had any leveling effect due to everyone being equally ^$%$ from 1929-1940, surely Providence was fully left behind by no later than 1975 or so?
