This Just In

Is Struever Brothers targeting Olneyville’s Artcraft Braid complex?

Citywatch

By IAN DONNIS | February 14, 2007

While the development market has cooled, advocates in Providence’s arts underground remain concerned about what they see as a looming threat to the Artcraft Braid Co. complex in Olneyville, home to a mix of artists, musicians, and manufacturing jobs.

Struever Brothers Eccles & Rouse, the Baltimore-based developer pursuing the American Locomotive (ALCO) project in the nearby Valley neighborhood — among a number of offer efforts in Providence — has had an option to buy the Manton Avenue property going back to at least early last year.

Laura Mullen, coordinator of the Sustainable Artist Space Initiative, a collaborative backed by the Rhode Island State Council for the Arts and other groups, believes Struever Brothers is poised to buy the Artcraft Braid complex. “They’ve been announcing they’re going to buy it for a long time” — a process she dubs “eviction through atrophy” — that has led many of the 50 or so artists once there to leave.

As part of discussions between community members and Struever Brothers about the property’s future, “They had assured us that plans were still moving forward to buy the property,” Mullen says. She says Struever Brothers asked for a plan created by groups, including Olneyville Housing and the Olneyville Neighborhood Association, to preserve Artcraft Braid as long-term, low-cost commercial space, but “that was it,” so far at least, in terms of follow-up.

Struever Brothers’ Ethan Colaiace denies that a sale is imminent. “We haven’t bought anything and it’s quite possible we might not buy anything,” he says. “We don’t have a purchase and sales agreement. The only thing I can really say is that we don’t own the building and we may not [ever] own the building.”

Colaiace says “there are a lot of rumors swirling around” — something he calls part and parcel of the development business.

There are several other factors in play, however: Artcraft Braid, a rope manufacturer whose proprietor owns the building, is reportedly going out of business. Meanwhile, buying the property soon might benefit Struever Brothers, since the reconstituted City Council has yet to consider a controversial tax incremental financing (TIF) proposal considered crucial for Struever’s ACLO project.

Even with the previous departures, the manufacturing company Cathedral Arts employs about 180 people in the Artcraft Braid site, Mullen says. A handful of other remaining tenants include artist and musician Brian Chippendale, a mainstay of Providence’s creative underground, who has twice been forced to locate from old industrial buildings, first in Eagle Square and then in Olneyville Square.

Struever Brothers emerged as something of a white knight about six years ago when one of its principals, Bill Struever, offered an alternative vision to the bland strip mall that ultimately replaced a rich cluster of old mill buildings in Eagle Square.

In the time since, however, the company, with its growing footprint in Providence, has come to be seen by critics as a gentrifying force that is adversely affecting current residents and small businesses on the West Side (See “Class warfare in Olneyville,” May 24, 2006). City Hall, on the other hand, has enthusiastically welcomed Struever Brothers’ efforts, citing them as a valuable net addition for Providence’s less-than-robust tax base.

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