Retrofitting Art Deco buildings ain't cheap

The United Shoe Machinery Building, on Federal Street in Boston's financial district.

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com

Providence’s Industrial Trust Building (aka the Superman Building) might be best used for design studios for Providence’s big art and design community on the first few floors over the ground floor (which could have restaurants and shops), and then apartments and condos and then a restaurant near the top. If none of these soon become economically plausible, then tear the damn thing down; it’s starting to fall apart. The building is probably too clunky and outdated (with its step-backs) to lurea big company.

Of course, if Providence were as rich as Boston, there would be enough money around to retrofit the mini-skyscraper as well as was done at the great art deco United Shoe Machinery Building in downtown Boston.

Robert Whitcomb: Open woods; the aim is merely fame; Art Deco challenge

A version of this first ran in the Digital Diary feature on GoLocalProv.com.

The other week, as I drove through miles of woodsin inland southern New England where caterpillars had consumed the leaves of so many trees, I thanked God that no one has suggested spraying to kill the creatures. You hear enough about massive spraying campaigns to kill mosquitoes carrying the Zika virus.

The trouble with these campaigns is that they kill a lot more than the targeted culprits. They kill, for example, bees, which we need for pollination of our crops,  as well as birds, fish and many other creatures.

The trees will come back without chemical bombing. For now, we can enjoy the eerie sight of midsummer woods looking like November’s.

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In picking Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate, Donald Trump has shown yet again that he really doesn’t have any “policies.’’ His only real apparent interest is maintaining himself as a “winner’’ and Mr. Pence might help.

Mr. Pence’s support for “free-trade’’ agreements that have helped kill jobs and lower wages in the U.S.; his backing for open immigration (which also cuts U.S. wages), and his evangelical  Christian views don’t jibe with Mr.  Trump’s rhetoric or behavior.

Mr. Trump has two main issues:  Crack down on “free trade’’ and on immigration. On the latter, he wants to kick out 11 million illegals, build a “wall’’ on the Mexican border and make it tough for Muslims to enter America. Operational details to come.

Maybe.

The governor has also been a loyal servant of the Koch Brothers and other very rich  people.  For a time, Mr. Trump made  vague populist noises about the need to reduce the power of  Wall Street big shots and Washington lobbyists but that has gone away as he realizes the Republican reality. The public has less and less patience with details anyway, and citizens rarely remember what a candidate said a few months back.

Judging by how he has conducted his business and much of his personal life, The Donald would rank high up on most metrics of, to be polite, ‘’amorality’’.

But that matters little in the Reality TV and Twitter age, even to the Boy Scouty Mr. Pence, who has decided to try to ride the Trumpmobile back to Washington, where he was an ineffective, if pleasant, congressman promoting the usual collection of Tea Party and supply-side nostrums that,  although having been tried for much of the past few decades, do not seem to have ushered in a golden age for the middle class.

Anyway, the aim is fame. Isuspect that Donald Trump originally ran for president  simply to keep himself and his businesses in the news. He may have been surprised that his incoherent, virtually detail-freebut entertainingly demagogic primary campaign did as well as it did. And this pathological liar and con man will get a lot of votes in November from people who won’t admit their choice to their neighbors. As for Mike Pence,  he knows that there’s a good chance that a vice president can become president.

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People tend not to like Hillary Clinton because she has told some self-protective lies; because she has a reputation for extreme secretiveness; because she seems to feel herself privileged to make her own rules (but not as much as Donald Trump), and because she and her husband have made a fortune by mingling/cross-self-promoting government work, “nonprofit’’ work and for-profit work (especially by being paid vast sums to speak to companies and other special-interest groups).  And, as unfair as it is, a lot of people find her voice grating.

Not surprisingly, she generally avoids press conferences. But she could do herself a big favor by holding a long press conference in which she takes any questions. She could, for example, elaborate more on why she used a private server to conduct top-secret discussions by email and  also explain the mysterious workings of the Clinton Foundation. Such a forum might help lance the boil of public distrust, if not dislike.

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David Sweetser, whose High Rock Development owns the Industrial Trust Building,  in downtown Providence, is smart to have arranged for public tours of the Art Deco skyscraper to be offered over the next couple of months to, he hopes, get people excited/intrigued enough to rent there (or buy the whole place).

It’s a gorgeous structure, although, of course, fading. The model in New England of how to retrofit such a stepped-back Art Deco building is the gold-topped United Shoe Machinery Building, on Federal Street in downtown Boston, which is now fixed up and full. But it’s  usually a lot cheaper to tear down an old building and put in a cheap utilitarian replacement than to save it.  And there’s much more money in Boston than in Providence. But hang in there, Mr. Sweetser!

Robert Whitcomb is the overseer of New England Diary.

Those overrated old mills; defending fraternities

 By ROBERT WHITCOMB

 There’s lots of romance around Rhode Island’s old mills. Many are castle-like structures, seemingly built to last for hundreds of years. Especially at dawn and dusk, when the low sun washes their brick or granite walls, they can be beautiful. Of course, some of them are gloomy/ugly.

Some can be renovated for artists’ lofts and small businesses and their owners can make a profit — often with special tax breaks. The mass of taxpayers must make up the lost tax revenue. And some owners are big tax deadbeats. Consider the owners of Hope Artiste Village, in Pawtucket, who owe the city $124,690 for the current tax year, or those of The Thread Factory, on the Pawtucket-Central Falls line, who owe Pawtucket $366,306 and Central Falls $410,000. There may be similar examples around the state.

It is hard to quantify how much Rhode Island has gained or lost from trying to preserve old mills because people think that they’re quaint. Many can never be retrofitted to make a fair (without tax breaks) profit. Preservationists (not a few of whom are financially secure and don’t have to worry too much about finding a job in the sluggish Rhode Island economy) fiercely fight to save as many of these mills as possible, once built for economically logical reasons that disappeared decades ago. Indeed, the Ocean State has not exactly become a boom town during all these years of trying to keep old factory buildings that don’t make anything anymore except the occasional arsonist.

Then there’s that Art Deco tower the Industrial Bank Building, which, because of its stepped-back structure and location in not exactly thriving Providence, has little chance of being a full-scale office building again. Maybe it would work for residential — but again with tax breaks to be paid for by people not benefiting from its redevelopment.

A rather similar stepped-back famous Art Deco skyscraper is the gold-roofed United Shoe Machinery Corporation Building, at 140 Federal St. in downtown Boston, which for many years was New England’s tallest building. It had been slated for demolition in 1981, after “Shoe,” as the once huge company was long called, disappeared. But Boston was/is a major financial center. The quantity of local money and tax breaks made retrofitting it attractive, and the building is now filled with Class A offices.

Providence doesn’t have that critical mass. Other than nostalgia, there’s little to justify taxing the public to maintain the now remarkably inefficient “Superman Building.” Anyway, Providence had its heyday before it was built and could have another after it’s gone. And even Chartres Cathedral will one day disappear. As Ira Gershwin wrote, “In time the Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble ... ”

The South Bronx, the famously poor and crime-ridden section of New York given up for lost 30-40 years ago, has enjoyed a revival in part because so many of the old buildings were torn down (often after arson) and new buildings put up in the newly available acreage. Perhaps Rhode Island should move away from its love affair with old factories that do nothing (or worse) for the macro-economy. New buildings can be beautiful too. Are old mills over-rated?

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The cover story in this month’s Atlantic is titled “The Fraternity Problem: It’s Worse Than You Think.” The article, surprisingly, spends a lot of ink on a nasty fraternity at very liberal/PC/“Little Ivy” Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Conn., where various outrages involving booze, sexual assault and so on have taken place. (Harvard also has fraternities, called “Final Clubs,” where, as a guest, I have witnessed grotesque behavior fueled by alcohol and other drugs.)

Busybodies and other social engineers cry out for closing all fraternities, though legally that would be impossible.

Speaking as a past member of a fraternity, I object. At most of these clubs, while drinking goes on sometimes, as it does at many social organizations, activities are much tamer than the “Animal House” cliché. And they play the healthy role of providing a closer sense of community than can the wider and anomie-ridden college or university community. Indeed, fraternities are frequently the venue for the start of lifelong friendships. Many college administrations should monitor these organizations with more rigor and call in the police (the town cops, not the campus cops) when necessary, of course, but, still, fraternities all in all do more good than harm. And without a modicum of freedom of association, society would be very dreary indeed.

I recently got a note from a group that was in the fraternity house I was in in the late 1960s. They’re planning a reunion for next October. As I saw the names, the years peeled back. Dozens are coming, out of (mostly lapsed) friendship and even morbid curiosity.

Robert Whitcomb (rwhitcomb51@gmail.com), a former editorial-page editor of The Providence Journal and a former finance editor of the International Herald Tribune, is a Providence-based writer and editor and a director of Cambridge Management Group (www.cmg625.com)., a health-care-industry consultancy.