A Tale of One City: Pawtucket’s Old and New
Nicholas Miller
February 10, 2022
A giant mural decorates the main concourse at Pawtucket, Rhode Island’s McCoy Stadium, the abandoned home of the Boston Red Sox’s former Triple-A affiliate, the Pawtucket Red Sox. It displays a green box score with 33 innings in commemoration of the longest game in baseball history, played at McCoy in 1981 by the PawSox and the Rochester Red Wings. Next to the mural is a photograph of the PawSox’s Marty Barrett scoring the winning run. The caption reads, “A Moment in Baseball History.” But now, not just the photograph, but the entire stadium is a relic of the past. The PawSox, a part of the Pawtucket community since 1970, left for Worcester, Massachusetts in 2018 after a long and emotional fight to keep the team in the city failed. McCoy has been largely unused since then. High tufts of grass pop up unevenly in the outfield. Section placards rest in the stands, having fallen from the walls. Pawtucket, a 70,000-person city 20 minutes northwest of Providence on the banks of the Seekonk River, is filled with these memorials to a former time, which are decaying even as the city shows signs of an evolution. It was in Pawtucket that the American Industrial Revolution began in 1793. Samuel Slater, the superintendent at a British mill, fled to America with stolen textile factory designs and established the country’s first fully mechanized cotton-spinning mill at Old Slater Mill, a site just 400 feet from Pawtucket’s current city hall. It was the beginning of the city’s prolific manufacturing career, which would remain prosperous through the 19th century and into the 20th. But eventually, in the mid-20th century, much of the city’s textile industry closed or moved elsewhere. Together with the later construction of strip malls outside of the city, this development led to the decline of Pawtucket’s downtown economy. Further, the construction of I-95 through the downtown area, allowing travelers to whizz past the city with their dollars unspent, meant that the city became passed by both literally and metaphorically. When former city councilor John Barry III, 72, was a child, he couldn’t walk in the downtown during the Christmas shopping season because there were so many people. “There was not a vacant storefront. There were clothing stores, appliance stores, hat stores, and bakeries. That’s all gone,” he said. Instead, what remains are old buildings with empty storefronts and “For Rent” signs and, fitting with the city’s aged aesthetic, a collection of apartment buildings inhabited by the elderly. Even one of the businesses that does exist is a call back to a former time. Stillwater Books, a quaint bookstore owned by husband and wife, Dawn and Steven Porter, sits on the corner of the city’s central intersection and supplies a clichéd representation of the sense of the past that hangs over Pawtucket. But while Stillwater is a charming piece of nostalgia, just across the Seekonk River looms the Apex Building, a futuristic, pyramidal monstrosity that shows the ugly decay of Pawtucket. It was built in 1969 as a department store for the Apex Company, with its huge ziggurat design allowing for the company to broadcast its name to I-95 drivers while avoiding billboard regulations. But the company faltered in the early 2000s and the building has been mostly empty since 2015. The Apex served as the cover for Business Insider’s list of the ugliest building in each state, and while perhaps intended to seem sent from the future, its sci-fi-like pillars and pyramid crown only convey a lamentable architectural style of the distant past. The city’s proposal to keep the PawSox in the city would have torn down the Apex and built a stadium in its place, which Dawn Porter hoped would revitalize the “sad and depressing” downtown. The PawSox had agreed to a deal with the city and state to pay for half of the 83-million-dollar stadium, more than any other minor league team has paid for their ballpark. Former Pawtucket Director of Administration Tony Pires was part of the effort to build the new stadium, and said the deal, which also included new hotels and houses, was a “home run,” and would’ve raised significant tax revenue for the city while also energizing the declining downtown. However, many Rhode Islanders were wary of significant statewide investment after the Rhode Island legislature had sunk $75 million to bring to the state 38 Studios, a video game company that quickly went bankrupt. “There was always resistance from the general public [in Rhode Island],” said Pawtucket Mayor Don Grebien. He said he understood public hesitancy but that keeping the PawSox and developing around the stadium would have meant “more taxes, more jobs, more revenue in the long-term for the city.” “It’s hard to explain that to people,” he said. After a public outreach campaign to try to win support, the bill to approve the spending passed the Rhode Island Senate in 2018, but in the House, Speaker Nicholas Matiello never put the bill to a vote, citing worries about the legislation’s state bond guarantees, which would have left the state on the hook for the money if the team defaulted. Matiello proposed a new bill, without state bond guarantees, but without that security, the cost of building the stadium would likely have spiked. The new bill, introduced the day before the legislative session ended, passed both the House and the Senate, but the lack of state bond guarantees seemed to be a dealbreaker for the PawSox owners. On Friday, August 17th, the owners held a press conference to announce their agreement with the city of Worcester, and suddenly, the PawSox, after 48 years, were set to leave. “My heart was broken,” Pires said. “I think a lot of people’s hearts were broken.” “It was such a good vibe in the neighborhood,” said resident David Lithgoe of having the PawSox in Pawtucket. “To see families, little kids excited with their glove… it was real, real nice.” “Everybody was happy,” said resident Diane Proulx. “Now there’s nothing.” When the PawSox left, they joined the city’s Memorial Hospital and beautiful Leroy Theatre as community institutions to depart in recent decades. The hospital was built in the early part of the 20th century, and went through a number of expansions, serving a large portion of Rhode Island and Massachusetts. It began to have financial difficulties in the mid-2000s and closed in 2017. The Leroy, a lavishly decorated movie theater, was built in 1923 and destroyed in 1997, even after it was added to the National Register of Historic Places. “It feels like Pawtucket is losing everything,” a customer of McCoy Market–a convenience store next to the baseball stadium–told me. “It’s like the wild, wild west.” It’s a harsh description, but I know what he means. Walking through Pawtucket means taking note of the creepy deserted warehouses, office buildings, and stores. At one point, I walked into the shadow of an abandoned school building that towered over the sidewalk. It had a symmetrical brick structure, with the roof forming a sharp triangular peak in the middle. “St. Mary’s School” was carved into a stone patch on the front façade, with “A.D.” and “1890” chiseled on either side, and a crumbling stone sculpture of the Virgin Mary above. All the windows were wide open; many had holes in their glass panes. Behind the spiky, metal fence, the front yard contained ugly, overgrown vegetation. And of course, there was a graveyard right next door. But beyond the occasional horror-movie feel, the deserted buildings are indicative of a more serious reality. The Pawtucket of today seems an artifact of the past, a sad collection of remains from a better, more prosperous time. But there is also another, more hopeful side to Pawtucket, Rhode Island. The most obvious piece of evidence sits on the western bank of the Seekonk River. For now, the site doesn’t look pretty. Three yellow excavators rest beside mounds of sediment in a mini-wasteland surrounded by green brush. But in a year and a half, the site, together with its counterpart directly across the river, will hold new shops, restaurants, apartments, a riverwalk, a pedestrian bridge, and the chief feature, a brand-new 7,500 seat soccer stadium, which will host Pawtucket’s own professional soccer team from the United Soccer League, U.S. soccer’s second tier. Labeled “Tidewater Landing,” the project, with a $284 million price tag, will be the largest development in Pawtucket’s history. The idea for the project arose when the city listened to development proposals for the deserted McCoy Stadium shortly after the PawSox left. While nothing has come to fruition for McCoy, out of those discussions, the city established its relationship with project developers, Fortuitous Partners, and began conversations about Tidewater Landing. Grebien said the city didn’t have the intention of replacing the PawSox with the new project, but added that the loss of the PawSox made the state government more willing to help out Pawtucket. They “realized something needed to be done,” Grebien said. For the Tidewater Landing project, the state will provide $50 million in incentives, including a $36 million loan that will be repaid with future tax revenue. The stadium itself will be entirely privately financed. Rhode Island’s Department of Commerce estimates that the project will create 2,500 construction jobs and 1,200 permanent jobs, and Grebien said that over the next 20 years the project is expected to bring in an additional $800 million in tax revenue. And while some residents and business owners I spoke to questioned how much new business the soccer team will really bring to the struggling downtown area on the other side of I-95 from the stadium, Brett Johnson, founder of Fortuitous Partners, argues that the development will “lift the collective boats in the broader region.” More corporations and investors will want to take advantage of the increase in economic activity, Johnson reasoned, and that will lead to new ventures located in the areas beyond Tidewater Landing, including the downtown. Compared to the failed PawSox stadium, “It’s a much bigger, better project,” Mayor Grebien said. And by investing in soccer, the city has an eye to the future. “Baseball is a slower sport” mostly watched by the older generation, Grebien said. “You’ve got the younger generation that wants soccer….It’s an up-and-coming sport.” In addition to Tidewater Landing, the city is also building a new train station that will be completed in the summer of 2022 and will connect to Providence and Boston, an idea that has been in the works since 2005. City officials hope the train station, while making it easier for residents to commute, will also draw both visitors and new residents to the city, and therefore, promote business investment. But beyond these plans for economic prosperity, Pawtucket’s social dynamics also invoke the coming of a new age. One of the reasons the city government and developers are so confident in Tidewater Landing’s success is Pawtucket’s demographic mix. The city has large immigrant communities from Cape Verde, Portugal, and Latin American countries, for whom soccer is very important. But Pawtucket’s immigrant population—25.85% of the city’s population was born outside the U.S.—does more than just supply sufficient interest in soccer. It positions the city as a representation of the future of the United States, where the immigrant percentage has tripled since 1970 and is only continuing to rise. While walking to the Tidewater Landing construction site, I passed a community garden with signs written in three languages in addition to a trilingual school. When knocking on residents’ doors in search of interviews, I had to on multiple occasions awkwardly apologize and slink away when I realized my potential source didn’t speak English. In this way, Pawtucket, while representative of the American manufacturing town fallen from its prosperous past, also symbolizes the future American community in which diversity is high and English as the primary language is not taken for granted. Pawtucket’s connection to a new America also reveals itself in the city’s politics. In the 2020 city council election for the city’s fourth ward, Alexis Schuette, a 34-year-old progressive, queer woman from North Carolina defeated Barry III, a 72-year-old, 30-year incumbent. One of Schuette’s first actions was to remove all gendered pronouns in city council procedures. “Pawtucket is an amazing place,” Schuette told UpriseRI. “It is progressive.” In her conversation with me, Schuette showed the idealistic positivity that defines progressive youth in America. She expressed intense excitement about the potential for Tidewater Landing, and when I asked about the current state of Pawtucket, she spoke with remarkable passion and pride about several small businesses that have thrived even through the pandemic, and others that have recently opened up. “I don’t see it as a city in decline,” she said. “I see it as a city that has room and potential to grow.” Barry, who, in addition to his political career, spent nearly five decades working for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Providence, is less optimistic than Schuette. He thought the new soccer team would provide some enjoyment for people, but questioned how much the soccer stadium would really help the city’s businesses. “I think people will go to the game and then get in their cars and leave,” he said. Regardless of who’s right, the transition of power in Pawtucket’s fourth ward seems not just a harbinger for new, progressive policies in the city, but also a representation of a new optimism and energy. Still, amidst these changes, reminders of Pawtucket’s sad aging process remain prevalent. In addition to the decaying McCoy Stadium and Apex Building, both of the city’s high school buildings are over 80 years old, and the city hall building was constructed in 1933. All three will need to be replaced soon, Tony Pires told me. Many residents also expressed continued anxiety about the departure of Memorial Hospital. One woman told me the hospital was where she gave birth to her two daughters, and she said was worried about how far people now have to go for medical care. The closest acute care hospital is now Kent Hospital, about 25 minutes away. Even as the city awaits the arrival of a professional soccer team, the loss of the PawSox still pains the community. A woman who lives behind McCoy Stadium told me the city has too many memories of the PawSox for the soccer team to make up for the team’s departure. Even Mayor Grebien agreed, saying of the PawSox leaving, “We’re losing part of our history, part of our being. So I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to replace that.” At the construction site for the new train station in the northwest part of the city, behind an excavator, black rubber tubes, and mounds of rubble, an attractive stone brick wall rises partially completed. While the new station takes shape, just a half-mile away, Pawtucket’s historic former station, constructed in 1916 and closed in 1959, is crumbling. It is covered with trash and graffiti; it attracts squatters and drug abusers. Once considered for nomination to the National Register of Historic Places, the miserable condition of the building’s structure means that it now is a significant safety risk. “This building has fallen into such disrepair, and it is disheartening,” Mayor Grebien told The Providence Journal. The two train stations seem a representation of the Pawtucket of today, where residents celebrate the burgeoning of an exciting future while at the same time mourning the demise of a cherished past.
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