The Center of the City – Architecture Critic Morgan

Sunday, February 26, 2023

Will Morgan, Architecture Critic

Does the Turk’s Head Building mark the heart of downtown Providence? Despite rumors of downtown’s demise, the group of buildings around the Ottoman’s figurehead is the epicenter of Providence’s commercial world. More people work in the one-block area of the Turk's Head Plaza than anywhere else in Rhode Island.

The open plaza in front of the Turk’s Head–not 225 Dyer Street nor Parcel 8 beyond Trader Joe’s–is the past and future location of our city’s urban soul. This space is a bellwether for the return of downtown’s vitality. This is clearly demonstrated by GoLocal’s having established its offices on the ground floor of the Turk’s Head Building.  

Why is this one spot so crucial to the identity of Providence? What makes it both successful and timeless?

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History is always the starting point in Providence. The city’s early market area was on the east side of the river, but the mercantile nexus moved across the river as the port city flourished. The Arcade, one of America’s first indoor malls, along with the equally monumental Customs House, the set the tone for this area. The six-story Merchants Bank at the entrance to Westminster Street was the area’s first tall building, joined by the fancier Empire Bank of 1888 (now the Beatrice Hotel). The Banigan Building of eight years later was the city’s first skyscraper, heralding a boom of canyon-producing New York-style skyscrapers.

 

    

Like the Superman Building, the Rhode Island Hospital Trust was designed by nationally famous architects, here York & Sawyer, who were hospital and bank specialists, as well as designers of the U.S. Department of Commerce in Washington. Alas, these were the last really attractive tall buildings downtown. The addition to the Hospital Trust (by one of Jackie O’s favorite designers, John Carl Warnecke) is 28 stories of sheer boredom. Textron’s world headquarters is arguably the ugliest commercial project ever penned by Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, architects of the Empire State Building.

 

 

Despite the buildings crowding around it, the plaza can withstand a lot of changes in scale and style. A chief reason for this is the Turk’s Head Building itself. Architects Howells & Stokes embraced the curve formed by Weybosset Street and employed their structure’s presence to anchor the urban space. This is the abiding genius of the Turk’s Head plaza: It is not circular, square, or geometrical in any rigid way. Thoroughly informal, never static, its organic form has been left to maintain a European city vibe, recalling Paris, Rome, or Prague.

 

Turk’s Head Building, left; Beatrice Hotel to right. PHOTO: Will Morgan

    

Good architectural design can be less important than the space it occupies. The RISD/Turk’s Head/Textron square is an iconic example of organic townscape at its very best. As an antidote to the prevailing Roman-inspired French architectural aesthetic of broad boulevards and grand allées, an Austrian urban theorist published an influential book in 1889, called City Planning According to the Artistic Principles. Camillo Sitte traveled Europe analyzing what made certain cities human-scaled and hospitable. While it seems that the development of the area around Turk’s Head was not consciously planned this way, it could have easily served as an illustration by Sitte.

 

Providence calls itself a walkable city, and the plaza is a perfect place to start a trek of discovery. Instead of a predictable grid of straight lines, a pedestrian here finds only one long vista, looking westward down Westminster Street. All the other streets offer only truncated views, requiring one to explore down their curves or around their corners, catching glimpses of the river, College Hill, Kennedy Plaza, and so forth. One never sees exactly the same view, as there is a shifting landscape, a dynamism that is hard to find anywhere but medieval European cities and occasionally in early American ones, such as Annapolis, Boston, and Providence.

 

Such planning ideas should be instinctual to mavens of livable urban downtowns but are generally lost on developers who see opportunities as only defined by profits, parking, and excruciatingly mediocre design. But if we can understand the richness and endless possibilities of a space like that at the junction of Westminster and Weybosset Streets, we will be a lot closer to the Providence Renaissance we hope for and maybe deserve. If Providence respects that the Turk’s Head is the axis around which downtown revolves, then we will be less likely to led astray by such urban disasters as the Fane Tower or the disappointing buildings spawned by the 195 Commission.

EDITOR"S NOTE: An earlier version called the Banigan, the Barrigan Building. We apologize for the error.

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