NAP- Neighborhood Alliance of Pawtucket

Pawtucket

Is Pawtucket the Mecca? according to Phillipe & Jorge 2-14-08

Is Pawtucket a mecca?
“A blue-collar, gritty mill town that needed a way to revitalize itself a decade ago, Pawtucket just might be God’s Mecca for Working Artists.” So reads the lead sentence in an article about Vo Dilun’s Mighty Bucket, part of the cover story in the March issue of Art Calendar: “10 Great Towns for Working Artists.” The publication calls itself the “business magazine for visual artists.”

With many fine efforts, on a number of art fronts, all over Providence, it is Pawtucket that seems to have the best model for integrating creative arts projects with municipal economic development goals.

Pawtucket has worked hard to fashion artist-friendly tax and zoning policies, aggressively pursuing renovation projects, and it then walks artists through the steps needed to set up shop. And who knew that the face of the future would look just like . . . Herb Weiss?

P&J nonetheless find Art Calendar’s comparison of Pawtucket to Mecca a bit strained. Maybe Fay¬ette or Nauvoo would be a more appropriate locale, as the history of the Latter Day Saints is far more colorful and amusing than that of Mohammed.

The picture of Fun

We celebrate our new bridge in 2012 on 95 and what did you think of the annual Mayor's Neighborhood Summit 6/2@ the Woodlawn Community Ctr at 210 West Ave?
Was anything helped for you?

Re-Building with brownfields money

PAWTUCKET — Standing amid weeds growing through the pavement in front of the burned-out hulk of a former industrial laundry factory, Mayor James Doyle stood with two U.S. Senators and a regional EPA administrator to announce that Rhode Island is receiving $1.8 million to clean up such “brownfields” industrial sites.

The brick mill building on at 354 Pine St., with most of its windows gone and little roof left, became vacant in the 1990s and was being cleaned up and readied for redevelopment when the fire struck in March, 2007, halting the remediation and leaving the structure to languish and deteriorate.
Now with $200,000 in federal brownfields funds, and another $40,000 that the city will kick in, the work of cleaning up the chlorinated hydrocarbons that were part of the solvents used by the laundry can resume and the mill can be renovated and sold for re-use to become, in Doyle’s words, “a vibrant building once again.”
He noted that, if it can be renovated for residential use, it would be a little more than a block away from the train depot that is being revamped as a commuter rail site, providing public mass transit to residents who work in Providence or Boston.
Doyle said that with other large-scale renovations underway nearby, such as the million square feet of the former Paramount Cards and Schoolhouse Candy buildings, the entire once industrialized area of the city can be replaced with a mixed use of commercial, industrial, office and residential spaces.
After the fire, Doyle said, the city was offered the building for no money, but it did not have the cash to continue the clean-up of the contamination. The federal funds will allow the work to begin again.

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