Pawtucket City Hall, a nationally recognized landmark building with flourishes that recall when America built grand public works to lift itself out of the Depression, could close as soon as next year because of its condition.
The building suffers from persistent leaks in the roof that make the walls inside a sorry mess of flaking plaster and paint. The city runs plug-in air purifiers throughout the building to meet health and safety standards.
Recent estimates from a pair of construction consultants suggest a full historic preservation of the building would cost over $90 million.
Instead, in the final weeks of a 16-year run in office, Mayor Donald Grebien is moving some municipal functions to a “City Hall annex” in a partially renovated factory complex just over a mile away. In bid documents outlining the annex’s ongoing expansion, the Grebien administration already calls the property at 100 Freight Street the “New City Hall.” The city bought the property for $14.8 million and has invested another $8 million to renovate part of it. A spokesperson for Grebien, Jennifer Almeida, said the budget for a larger second phase of renovation remains private as the city evaluates competitive bids for the construction contract.
Grebien lost re-election this fall partway through the project. Incoming mayor Adam Greenman, who defeated Grebien, said he will review the plans closely because he has some misgivings about moving City Hall away from downtown to a more remote location that lacks direct public transportation.
“Honestly, it's one of the most complicated questions that I'm thinking about as I prepare to take office,” Greenman said
Even if it’s temporary, relocating City Hall underscores the change happening in downtown Pawtucket today, and the challenge of preserving buildings and institutions once central to life in the city’s industrial past.
Pockets of downtown show signs of new investment after a long post-industrial slump. A cluster of new apartments has opened near a recently opened commuter rail station, and more apartments are planned near the city’s recently opened soccer stadium about a mile away.
But the winds of change are also blowing away from downtown. If all goes according to plan, the neighborhood will lose a large public high school and its City Hall in quick succession.
An Art Deco City Hall
Located by the banks of a waterfall that helped spark America’s industrial revolution, the old City Hall tells Pawtucket's history. It is a stone’s throw from Slater Mill, the first successful water-powered cotton spinning mill in the United States.
City Hall, built in the Art Deco style in 1936, matches other New Deal-era Works Progress Administration projects, which subsidized its construction.
Local legend says Pawtucket’s colorful political boss, Thomas P. McCoy, hoped to use the building’s iconic tower as a mayor’s office. Grebien said federal officials denied matching funds for this indulgent flourish, but Pawtucket’s political machine built the tower anyway, and mounted their symbol, a tomahawk, as the weathervane.
McCoy was implicated in an election fraud scandal just a few years later, but the unfinished tower has been causing problems for Pawtucket ever since. It remains completely empty, and city officials consider it to be a major source of the building’s persistent leaks.
City officials talked about lopping off the tower completely as early as 1960, according to Pawtucket Times articles archived at the city’s public library.
The tower has also rained bricks and concrete onto the sidewalk many times, and it still does today. Scaffolding that protects visitors at both entrances is now effectively permanent.
A ‘new City Hall?’
But over and over again, Pawtucket voters have approved bonds to patch up City Hall, even after some repairs lasted just a few years.
Only under Grebien, Pawtucket’s longest-serving mayor, did the city reject this patchwork approach. But the cost of a thorough preservation also seemed out of reach to him. Greenman, his successor, agrees, even though he dislikes the symbolic loss of a grand, municipal building downtown.
“There are so many things that Pawtucket needs to address that $92 million can address,” Greenman said. “And so that part I struggle with.”
The municipal building under renovation on Freight Street has better cellphone reception and more parking, and its City Council chamber, already in use, is set up for modern governing needs like livestreaming and video calls.
“The historic value is not there, necessarily,” Grebien said of the building, “but the operational value is there.”
Greenman already works in an unfinished office in the new building, but he said there may be cheaper ways to keep City Hall downtown, like renting another building. He and Grebien both think the original City Hall has a better chance of surviving under a private developer.
That’s a hard truth for some residents to accept.
Robert Geake, a Rhode Island historian who lives in Pawtucket, admired the architecture at City Hall recently after voting inside.
“You just don't see that type of artwork and materials and craftsmanship in buildings like that anymore,” Geake said. “The municipal buildings built today are certainly practical, but they're also drab and uninspiring in many respects.”
Geake says Rhode Island had a stronger historic preservation movement in the 1960s and ‘70s, which saved Pawtucket City Hall from an earlier death. But he worries that the appetite for preservation isn’t there anymore.
That changes with the economic times and priorities change,” Geake said. “Now, people are worried about the roads and the bridge structures and things like that more so than the buildings themselves.”
Pawtucket City Hall is on the National Register of Historic Places. But that designation isn’t a guarantee against demolition, and its survival may depend on whether a private buyer sees another use in it.
This story was produced as part of Ocean State Media In Motion, our community-centered initiative focused on listening, connecting and sharing stories from across the state.
