Too old to be hip, too young to be venerated, the Brutalist icon in downtown Providence will be torn down and replaced with a high-rise hotel

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — The 1960s was the time of President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society and the War on Poverty, when America put a man on the moon and believed it could solve any earthbound problem if it worked hard and spent enough on it.

In Providence, that attitude took form along Weybosset Hill, where, financed by the federal government, a swath of old neighborhoods along Route 95 generally from Broad and Weybosset streets north to downtown, were torn down and replaced with high-rise apartments, office buildings and the Civic Center.

One of its icons was the distinctive Fountain Street building named for former congressman John E. Fogarty, who served 26 years in Washington and was a nationally recognized leader in health care legislation. The building, opened in 1967 as office space for the city's social services department, was a proud architectural symbol of the Great Society's faith in government. But 50 years later, the nation has not only lost faith in that big-government philosophy but has even turned against the architectural style that came to symbolize it.

What was once a jewel in the city’s urban renewal crown is now a downtown eyesore, abandoned, vandalized and slated to be knocked down to make room for an eight-story hotel.

The Fogarty building is downtown’s most visible example of Brutalism, a latter 20th-century architectural style that shunned ornate decoration in favor of angles, curves and exposed concrete. The word Brutalism comes from "béton brut," French for bare concrete.

But today the public’s taste for Brutalism has waned. What was once a modern, triumphal style is now seen as impersonal, drab and boxy.

The hotel plan by the Procaccianti Group Inc., which has owned the building for some 10 years, is being welcomed by construction-trades unions, city officials and surrounding business owners. But Ned Connors, an architect and historian of the Weybosset urban renewal project, says he will miss the Fogarty building.

It’s not ugly, he said, it’s just … different. At about 50 years old, he said the Fogarty building is in the most dangerous time in a structure's life: when it’s too old to be hip but too young to be venerated.

He stood outside the building last week, looking up at the line of shadows Fogarty’s long, angular mullions created in the setting afternoon sun and scoffing as he compared that effect to the flat-walled buildings around it.

“And they’ll replace it with a building that isn’t half as interesting or half as robust as this,” he said. “We’re just getting boxes, indifferent boxes.”

Downtown is like an enormous architectural museum, he said, and it should have examples of every style. Seeing different types mashed next to each other isn’t jarring, he said, it’s eclectic.

"At one time it was like, ‘Oh my God, polka dots and plaids, that’s horrible,'" he said. “Now, in 2016, we walk through there and we think they fit together perfectly.”

But the public consensus is that for the part of Fountain Street with Murphy’s Pub, Trinity Brewhouse and The Dean Hotel, the Fogarty building no longer fits.

Fogarty's dark days

The human services offices at Fogarty moved out in 1999 in anticipation of the building being converted to a temporary police and fire headquarters, while the then nearby LaSalle Square headquarters was demolished for a hotel project. That deal fell through, as did one for a sports museum, and Fogarty wound up being used as a middle school until 2003. Classes ceased after students complained the building caused breathing problems.

Since then there have been multiple proposals for hotels and a parking garage on the site. The city’s Downtown Design Review Committee has approved the Fogarty building's demolition before, in 2007, but the permission expired. In light of that previous vote, expectations are that when the committee meets Monday afternoon, the new Procaccianti request will be approved.

More than exterior aesthetics are working against Fogarty. Its interior isn’t up to current design needs and building codes.

Duncan Pendlebury, the architect who designed the tower addition to the then-Westin-now-Omni Hotel just down Sabin Street from the Fogarty building, said in a 2006 analysis of the building that, looks aside, the structure’s layout didn’t mesh with what the surrounding neighborhood, which includes the Rhode Island Convention Center, had become.

“The Fogarty building seems to represent a style of architecture that forces a formal interplay with the government function,” he wrote, “rather than the casual interplay between pedestrian and building that is more desirable in the Downcity.”

Retailers want display windows that can look out on Fountain Street where passersby can see what’s for sale. Pendlebury noted that the building’s first floor is more than five feet higher than the sidewalk. Its walls are set back about 20 feet. That porch-like layout means any display windows in those walls won’t be easily seen. For businesses seeking to catch the eye of people as they walk by, that’s a problem.

In the Procaccianti Group’s demolition permit application, Vice President Michael A. Voccola said that particular characteristic “has proven to be a major factor for national tenant prospects to decline the property.”

Pendlebury found problems inside as well. The elevators, built to fit in the narrow first floor, can’t accommodate wheelchairs, making handicapped accessibility renovations difficult. The heating and cooling systems were not up to building code standards.

And where Connors admired the way light played off the structure’s geometric angles and lines, Pendlebury was, well, not a fan.

“In its effort to represent a formal municipal function it has perhaps become antisocial with its gray and somber coloration and its darkened porch and depressed driveway,” he said.

Other nearby projects

Besides the Fogarty building, the Weybosset Hill renewal effort included more than 20 projects, including Cathedral Square, between Washington and Weybosset streets, the then-Holiday Inn on Atwells Avenue and the Regency Plaza Apartments on Broadway.

All that work made the 1960s and '70s a good time to be an architect in Providence. Ten buildings went up in the 1960s, nine more in the 1970s. The last was completed in 1984.

Jana Planka, a vice president at Coastway Community Bank, was 8 years old when her father’s firm, Castellucci, Galli & Planka Associates, designed the Fogarty building. She said back then the family’s dinner table conversation often included laments by her father, H. Michael Planka, about overruns.

“I remember him talking about that building quite a bit,” she said. “They had a scale model of it that he brought home. He was so proud of it. When I was young I used to play with it, with my Matchbox cars.”

She said she was wistful about knowing that one of her father’s favorite projects was slated for demolition, but reflected that it was the demolition of other architects’ buildings that allowed him to build his.

“It’s a shame to see it go,” she said, “but I think he would understand that.”

jhill@providencejournal.com

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On Twitter: @jghilliii