The transformation of South Street Station
01:00 AM EST on Sunday, January 18, 2009
By Philip Marcelo
Journal Staff Writer
The new hotel, once a power plant owned and operated by the former Narragansett Electric Co., will offer a panoramic view of Providence and the upper Bay.
The Providence Journal / Frieda Squires
PROVIDENCE ? On a frigid afternoon last week, Kenneth Orenstein stood on the icy ground inside a vacant power station and tilted his head upward.
The wind howled through massive spaces in the building?s brickwork where sunlight will one day illuminate through large glass windows.
This space, he signaled with a wave of his hand, is to be a soaring atrium, the great entryway and showcase space of Heritage Harbor, a museum that will tell Rhode Island?s history through the eyes of the diverse cultures that created it.
?It?s going to be dramatic,? said Orenstein, the museum?s interim executive director.
After months of work gutting the insides, there are outward signs that the project to reinvent the hulking former power plant on South Street is taking shape.
A 100-ton capacity crane has taken up residence on South Street. Steelworkers are laying beams atop the 100-foot high building for a hotel that will have views of the downtown skyline.
But the Dynamo House, the given name for the hotel-restaurant-museum envisioned for the Jewelry District property, is not yet all there.
The 350,000-square-foot space is more cavernous now that all the remnants of the building?s previous incarnation ? the structural supports for boilers and steam turbines ? have been removed. The ground floor, which is just bare ground in places, is a skating rink of rock solid ice. Viewed from afar, it looks very much like the same abandoned power plant.
It has taken a year to get to this point. By the end of 2009, officials hope, the building will be a fully realized, seven-story structure, although one not ready for occupation. The museum won?t open until June 2010, and the hope is the hotel will be open by March 2010.
The bustle of construction, especially through the coldest part of the year, are welcome sights and sounds in the city, which once had a skyline filled with such cranes and a glut of building projects that provided a steady stream of work.
Struever Bros., Eccles & Rouse, the company that is developing the project, says it is expected to bring in 150 construction jobs over the next year (there are currently 35 workers on site). When it opens, the museum will have a staff of at least 50. So when Joseph Alex, the project?s development director, opens a recent conversation with the line ?this is an exciting and challenging project,? it?s an understatement.
The project is, in fact, one of the most significant things happening in the city, the silver lining in the gloomy overcast. The symbol that Providence, the Renaissance City, has still got it.
Outside, the Dynamo House appears to be one solid mass of brick, but it?s actually a complex of three buildings that dates back nearly a century under the ownership of the Narragansett Electric Co., now part of National Grid.
Decommissioned in the 1990s, it had been in disuse for so long that the company intended to demolish it. But the building was donated in whole about a decade ago to the Heritage Harbor Museum, a then-newly formed coalition of 19 historical preservation and cultural societies in the state.
The goal was to build a museum and a permanent home for all those disparate organizations. The state went to voters for approval of a $25-million general obligation bond for the project in 2000, but it was rejected.
The museum group soon found it was financially in over its head. Struever Bros., a major for-profit developer, stepped in and the Dynamo House, a name echoing the building?s days as a power station (dynamo is the original moniker of the electrical generator), was born.
A Baltimore-based company, Struever Bros. has made its name in the city with major redevelopments of historic structures, including the Rising Sun Mills apartment lofts in Olneyville and the American Locomotive Works, a mixed-use development under construction on Valley Street.
The company agreed to purchase the building from the museum, developing about 55,000 square feet on two floors for the museum and allowing the organization to operate there rent-free once it?s open.
The rest of the former power plant will house a 171-room hotel on the top two floors, a restaurant on the ground level, and leased office space on three levels. The total cost of the project is at least $150 million.
Alex, the project?s development director, says the company is finishing up the initial ?stabilization? phase of work, in which it poured a new foundation and removed a latticework of steel beams and columns. The next phase is the interior improvements for the hotel and museum.
?There?s been an extraordinary amount of work done by Struever that just can?t be seen from the outside,? says Orenstein, who has been taking tours of people curious about the building?s progress onto the site for the past year. ?They removed an inordinate amount of steel and this massive floor in the turbine room. It took a great amount of time and labor to remove everything.?
Massive glass windows are being specially fabricated and should be in by mid-February, he says.
The Dynamo House hotel is slated to bear Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide?s aloft brand, a type of hotel that, according to Starwood, aims for a generally hip, social atmosphere. It features loft-like rooms with tech-savvy touches.
The return of the plant?s smokestacks, as decorative pieces, is still up in the air, however, Alex says. Those stacks, which are shown in all the promotional material of the museum and hotel, were removed by the power company prior to the station?s decommissioning.
Alex says the project, despite rumors to the contrary, is on secure financial footing.
The project?s primary financial lender is Citibank Community Development Bank, a division of the troubled Citigroup, of New York. The turmoil of that financial corporation has not affected the developer?s cash flow, says Alex, and the Dynamo House project is moving as scheduled.
?The overall economic conditions are affecting us, we?re certainly no different from anyone else, but we?re dealing with it,? he says.
The other major sources of revenue for the project were federal and state tax credits for historic preservation, which are basically direct, dollar-for-dollar discounts on the amount of tax owed to the state and federal governments.
But Rhode Island made major revisions to its tax-credit program effective last year that reduced the tax discount, forcing developers such as Struever Bros. to rethink the way they financed their projects.
Struever lost nearly $8 million in savings as a result of the changes, according to Edward F. Sanderson, executive director of the state Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission, which manages the federal and state tax-credit programs.
Alex says the company has made financial adjustments as a result of the decrease in anticipated aid, but declined to elaborate.
Meanwhile, there are big plans for the state museum, which is an idea that has been floated for nearly two decades.
Albert Klyberg, a member of the museum?s board of directors, says the museum will be an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institute, the national museum foundation based in Washington, D.C.
It will house a permanent collection of artifacts about Rhode Island?s history. There will also be a 10,000-square-foot space for traveling exhibits on loan from the Smithsonian, the only sort of arrangement in the state. ?The association with the Smithsonian elevates us to a New England regional attraction,? he says.
The museum has about $6.3 million more to raise of its $30 million costs toward the project. That includes the amount it will take to build exhibits.
Last month, the museum issued its first quarterly newsletter, the Heritage Voyage, and mailed it to potential donors, members and grant foundations. On its cover, the headline: ?The museum begins.?
Oh, Buddy is also a salesman for the condo building.
