2024 Most Endangered Places

PPS assembles this annual list to bring attention to vulnerable places and heritage across the city that are of architectural, historic, or cultural significance. Previously known as the “Most Endangered Properties List,” and now called the Most Endangered Places List, this name change better reflects the diversity of place-based heritage in Providence. Nominated by members of the community, these are places of connection, history, and shared identity. By recognizing this at-risk heritage, PPS seeks to celebrate and protect our shared cultural landscape, helping to build a more just, equitable, and inclusive city.

2024 Most Endangered Places List

Neighborhoods Under Pressure from Student Housing Gentrification // Wanskuck, Elmhurst, Smith Hill, Washington Park, and College Hill.
Cranston Street Armory (1907) // 340 Cranston Street, West End.
Providence Public School Buildings, as represented by Asa Messer Elementary School and Mount Pleasant High School // Citywide, 1655 Westminster Street and 434 Mount Pleasant Avenue.
Grace Church Cemetery (1834, 1843, c. 1860) // 10 Elmwood Avenue.
Sacred Places, as represented by the Sons of Jacob Synagogue, Broad Street Synagogue, and Cathedral of St. John // Citywide, 24 Douglas Avenue, 688 Broad Street, and 276 North Main Street.
South Providence Waterfront and Providence Gas Co. Purifier Building // 200 Allens Avenue and South Providence Waterfront.
Atlantic Mills Complex (1863, 1882) // 100 Manton Avenue, Olneyville.
Industrial Trust Building, aka Superman Building (1928) // 111 Westminster Street, Downtown.

Neighborhoods Under Pressure from Student Housing Gentrification

Neighborhoods: Wanskuck, Elmhurst, Smith Hill, Washington Park, College Hill

Years on MEP: 2024

Rental properties on Eaton Street

“Over the past fifteen years or so, a single development company has bought nearly one hundred houses and other buildings in Providence, mostly along Providence’s Admiral Street and nearby side streets in the Elmhurst/Wanskuck neighborhood…House after house has been branded with signs on their facades identifying them as “Strive” dwellings. The situation is troubling. This company is changing the character of the area from one of mostly small homes characterized by individual ownership or rentals by a single landlord to a monopolistic complex under the management and control of a single company. Opportunities for home ownership are being reduced.”

— Wanskuck resident Patricia Raub, Adjunct Professor, Providence College

In many neighborhoods across the city, developers are buying affordable and mid-priced single and multi-family housing units for conversion into expensive rental properties. While this is not solely taking place in neighborhoods abutting the city’s many colleges and universities, it is pronounced in town-gown border zones surrounding Providence College, Johnson & Wales, and Brown University. Whole blocks that were once occupied by families are becoming high-end, high-occupancy rentals, many of them for students. Providence benefits in many ways from the presence of our institutions of higher education, but the pace and scale of these developments are fundamentally altering the nature and character of many of these historic neighborhoods across the city as families are displaced and community connections are broken. From its inception, PPS has advocated for the preservation of Providence’s neighborhoods – not just for individual buildings or landmarks – and in 2024, we seek to work in coalition with organizations and civic leaders who have long fought for housing justice, to preserve community heritage and connection in the face of these pressures.

Cranston Street Armory (1907)

340 Cranston Street

Neighborhood: West End

Years on MEP: 1996-2000, 2003, 2015-2017

“The ‘Castle for the People,’” as it has come to be known, has special meaning not just for those of us living within its shadows, but also for Rhode Islanders from all over the state who have fond memories of attending events there. From sports competitions and proms to polio vaccinations, countless people from across Rhode Island have had the Armory be the backdrop for important moments. Nationally, the Armory is also significant for its design, its history, and its unique setting on a 10-acre parade ground. Our community deeply cares about this building and wants to see it used in ways that are appropriate for a residential neighborhood and that serve both the surrounding community and the entire region. The Armory is a jewel, and we want to share it with the whole state.”

— Siobhan Callahan, President of the West Broadway Neighborhood Association

Several people nominated the Cranston Street Armory for the MEP list this year, which is no surprise, as its future is once again uncertain after the Governor scrapped an approved development plan by design and development firm Scout in 2023. The Armory was built in 1907 to house the Rhode Island National Guard. Designed by the local architectural firm William R. Walker & Son, the distinctive castle-like building has served as a resource and symbol of neighborhood identity for decades and is the namesake of the Armory District. From 1909 to 1981, the 165,000-square-foot building was known as the Providence Civic Center and hosted a wide variety of events, including track meets, boxing matches, circuses, auto shows, inaugural balls, and political rallies. When the Civic Center closed due to structural problems, Rhode Island’s National Guard moved back into the building, moving out in 1996.

Due to its local as an architectural landmark and civic and community hub, the Cranston Street Armory was listed as one of America’s Most Endangered Sites in 1998 by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and it has now appeared on PPS’ MEP list ten times over the last twenty-seven years. During this time, PPS has continued to work in partnership with a long list of community organizations and civic leaders to save this important building, and we will continue to do so, with the hope that a new generation of 21^st-century Rhode Islanders has the opportunity to live, work, or play in the unique, voluminous spaces inside.

Providence Public School Buildings, as represented by Asa Messer Elementary School and Mount Pleasant High School

Citywide, 1655 Westminster Street and 434 Mount Pleasant Avenue

Neighborhoods: Federal Hill and Mount Pleasant

Years on MEP, Providence Public Schools: 2020, 2023

Years on MEP, Asa Messer Elementary School: 2007, 2008, 2011

Mount Pleasant High School, courtesy Kenneth C. Zirkel

“School buildings are anchors of the community. Students, alumni, and neighbors view them as symbols of strength and longevity. In my four years at Classical High, I’ve witnessed the benefits of school renovations first-hand. In my freshman year, the building seemed in disrepair – there were leaks in the stairwells, colorless concrete walls, and no working water bubblers. The district decided to renovate Classical, upgrading the interior while maintaining this landmark’s structural integrity for decades to come. The district considered demolition and replacement for Nathan Bishop Middle School, but after community response, it was found that renovations were cheaper and its initial estimates were wrong. Now Nathan Bishop is an environmentally sustainable gem among Providence Public Schools. While these schools which disproportionately serve white students are saved, PPSD has opted to close Broad Street School, Carl G. Lauro, and more in majority-minority neighborhoods. Mount Pleasant High, which serves a primarily Latinx neighborhood, is being considered for demolition. All students, regardless of neighborhood or ethnicity, deserve school buildings they can expect to remain for the next generation.”

— Dexter Vincent, Senior at Classical High School

Asa Messer Elementary School and Mount Pleasant High School were nominated for the MEP list by community members who are concerned about the potential demolition of both of these historic neighborhood schools. Asa Messer is a handsome red brick school designed in the 1890s in the Queen Anne style by William R. Walker & Son, the same firm that designed the Cranston Street Armory. Since 2018, Asa Messer has been vacant and is now used by the Providence Public Schools Department (PPSD) for storage.

Completed in 1938 to designs provided by architects at the Office of the Commissioner of Public Buildings in Washington D.C., Mount Pleasant High School is a monumental four-story red-brick-and-limestone building in the Collegiate Gothic style that at the time was popular for educational institutions across the country but relatively scarce in Providence. It is currently occupied, but its future is decidedly murky. In the summer of 2023, PPSD conducted a study of the school and in September 2023, released budget figures for three options: a $190 million renovation, a $120 million partial demolition retaining only the auditorium, and $110 million full demolition and rebuild (details have not been released about how the agency arrived at these numbers – a neighborhood resident filed a request for public records via the Attorney General’s office and has so far been turned down).

Mount Pleasant could be the first in what may be a slew of demolitions of Providence’s historic schools to build new ones: there are reportedly plans for an additional $400M bond in 2024, with the goal of putting all the city’s students into new or renovated buildings by 2030. From a policy and public/social investment perspective, this plan to provide better schools for Providence’s public school communities is urgently needed and laudable. The issue is that PPSD does not seem to be giving careful consideration to the possibilities of adaptive reuse: architects who are familiar with decision-making inside of the PPSD report that demolition and new construction tend to be preferred over adaptive reuse because they are perceived as easier, so adaptive reuse is not adequately explored. This is despite the fact that many of these schools are beloved community landmarks, have spacious auditoria or interior gathering spaces that cannot be replicated in new buildings due to today’s cost constraints (this seems to be the case at Mount Pleasant), and already embody the carbon it took to construct them. At nearly 300,000 square feet, Mount Pleasant is about twice the size of the Cranston Armory; demolition would produce considerable waste for Providence’s landfill.

What happens at Mount Pleasant may be decisive for the future of Providence’s entire body of school buildings: if the community and other stakeholders cannot rally and force consideration of the possibilities of adaptive reuse there, the other schools would likely be demolished with less opposition. A recent notable successful adaptive reuse school project – Nathan Bishop Middle School, on the East Side – began similarly, but the community rallied to save it, and it was ultimately renovated for $26M, less than original estimates and less than what it would have cost to build a new school on the same site.

Grace Church Cemetery (1834, 1843, c. 1860)

10 Elmwood Avenue

Neighborhood: Elmwood

Years on MEP: 2014, 2015, 2021, 2022

A walk through Grace Church Cemetery will take you through 200 years of Providence history. The 9-acre site at the junction of Elmwood Avenue and Broad Street contains about 8,800 burial plots. One of its most illustrious residents, the well-known Black soprano Sissieretta Jones, was buried here in 1933. This cemetery is popularly considered a gateway into South Providence, predating most of the neighborhood’s buildings. It was established in 1834 and incorporated into Grace Church in 1843, when the Church bought four acres of land for the parish burial ground. Large graveyards of this nature became common during the early 19th century, as most families opted for small parish or family plots. Urban cemeteries such as this one were designed as picturesque green spaces and served as parks during a time when shared recreational space was not often available.

The Gothic Revival caretaker’s cottage located on the northern tip of the cemetery was completed in 1860. This cottage has been the recipient of multiple restoration efforts, including by the Elmwood Foundation (now ONE Neighborhood Builders) in 1982 and the Providence Revolving Fund and other partners in 2008. Today, both the Cottage and Cemetery remain largely in disrepair. The cemetery is locked up, gravestones are knocked over or broken, and the grounds are littered with trash and hazardous materials. Several neighborhood organizations are working valiantly to preserve and improve this beloved significant community heritage site, including the Trinity Gateway Historical Improvement Association, the Trinity Square Together coalition, Stop Wasting Abandoned Properties (SWAP), and Amos House. Grace Church Cemetery was established around the same time as Cambridge’s Mount Auburn Cemetery, a meticulously cared for National Historic Landmark, which now includes a publicly accessible archive and an artist-in-residence program, established in 2014. Can we collectively envision and work toward a similar future for Grace Church Cemetery?

Sacred Places, as represented by the Sons of Jacob Synagogue, Broad Street Synagogue, and Cathedral of St. John

Citywide, 24 Douglas Avenue, 688 Broad Street, and 276 North Main Street

Neighborhoods: Smith Hill, Upper South Providence, and College Hill

Years on MEP, Sons of Jacob Synagogue: 2016

Years on MEP, Broad Street Synagogue, also known as Old Temple Beth El and Congregation Shaare Zedek: 2010, 2014-2022

Years on MEP, Cathedral of St. John: 2007-2012, 2014, 2022

Sons of Jacob Synagogue, courtesy of Samuel Gruber

“The Sons of Jacob (SOJ) building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It is a plain red brick building believed to have been modeled after the Kassel synagogue, built 1836-1839, in Western Germany. The SOJ building was constructed in two phases: the first floor built in 1906, expanded in 1912, and then the sanctuary raised in 1920-22. It was a remarkable achievement for working-class immigrants of Smith Hill to raise the money and construct a building of this size and with interior characteristics unique to SOJ.”

— Shelley and Larry Parness, lifelong Sons of Jacob congregants and Board of the Rhode Island Jewish Museum, a non-profit secular institution dedicated to cultural preservation and community engagement that plans to use the building to tell the stories of those who fled persecution and civil unrest in their former homes to find sanctuary in Rhode Island.

Some of Providence’s most beloved buildings are its cathedrals, churches, synagogues, temples, mosques, meeting houses, and other sites of religious or spiritual gathering. Many of these congregations were founded – and continue to be founded today – by immigrant communities seeking to connect with traditions, beliefs, and lifeways of their homelands in a new and unfamiliar country. As some congregations have decreased in size, many of these buildings are now vacant or on the edge of vacancy with no clear plan for the future. The local architecture firm of Banning & Thornton designed and constructed the Broad Street Synagogue in 1910-11, with later renovations added in the 1950s by Providence’s treasured modernist architect Ira Rakatansky. The synagogue has been closed since 2006 despite multiple efforts to revitalize the building and continues to face an uncertain future; it was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1988 and has been on PPS’ MEP list almost every year since 2010. The Episcopal Cathedral of St. John on North Main Street, designed in part by the noted local architect John Holden Greene (First Unitarian Church on Benefit Street) and Richard Upjohn (Trinity Church in New York City) is similarly vacant and faces an uncertain future. It has been on the MEP list eight times since 2007.

On the bright side, creative adaptive reuse projects in sacred spaces across the country have transformed empty churches into recreational spaces, restaurants, theaters, dance clubs, and housing – housing being a critical possible use for these places given the housing crisis. One such model project in Providence is the Rhode Island Jewish Museum, which is working with community stakeholders to find the best community use for the Sons of Jacob Synagogue in Smith Hill in collaboration with Partners for Sacred Places, based in Philadelphia. And too, communities continue to establish new places of worship in vacant storefronts and repurposed homes, transforming secular spaces into sacred spaces in a constant cycle of settlement and community-building.

The South Providence Waterfront and the Providence Gas Co. Purifier Building

South Providence Waterfront and 200 Allens Avenue

Neighborhood: Washington Park and South Providence

Years on MEP List, Providence Gas Co. Purifier Building: 2022

Photo courtesy of David Lawlor

Today, the South Providence stretch of Allens Avenue suffers from vacant and neglected properties, traffic congestion, and little pedestrian safety or access measures. This part of the waterfront also has some of the highest rates of asthma in New England and is home to chemical-processing plants that emit cancer-causing compounds. It is an uncommonly polluted stretch of the city, and continues to serves as a case study for environmental racism – 75% of the residents of South Providence and Washington Park are people of color. As one of the nominations put it, “I’m calling for a relocation of the industrial sites at Fields Point and adjacent properties to a less populated area that no longer targets the poor and/or racially discriminated populations. I’m calling for advocacy and for a government that treats its population justly and appropriately by removing these toxic sites that are unnecessarily located on our waterfront.”

South Providence and Washington Park community members and activists with organizations such as the People’s Port Authority and the Racial Environmental Justice Committee continue to work to change conditions along the waterfront through policy, public health, and planning initiatives – a project that is, in part, about restoring this part of the waterfront and reclaiming it as a neighborly and safe place for vibrant community life, which aligns with modern principles of preservation and its cousin, conservation. Through the collaborative efforts of many of these organizations and Save the Bay, Public Street was designated a permanent public right-of-way to the shoreline. To ensure that the Public Street access point is optimally designed as a public space, a coalition of residents, neighborhood and environmental justice organizations have partnered to plan and design Public Street from Allens Avenue to the shore, transforming this area back into a community resource.

Along this stretch of Allens Avenue, the Providence Gas Purifier Building (also known as Conley’s Wharf), still stands as a testament to the 19th- and 20th-century history of this part of the city. Built in 1899, it is the oldest surviving building along Allens Avenue, representing the early days of industrialization in this part of the city along the Providence Harbor. Designed and constructed by the Berlin Iron Bridge Company, and occupied by gas, tire, and other industrial companies through the early part of the 20^th century, it has a distinctive modern arched roof and steel-framed interior, visible through the building’s expansive windows. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2006 and sits vacant today, and was nominated to the MEP List by a Washington Park resident who hopes that it might be repurposed for community use in a revisioned future waterfront.

Atlantic Mills Complex (1863, 1882)

100 Manton Avenue

Neighborhood: Olneyville

Years on MEP: 2009, 2010, 2014-2017

“For the past decade every weekend, Atlantic Mills’ nearly three-acre parking lot in Olneyville is completely packed as 1,500 locals arrive per day to visit the award-winning Big Top Flea. It’s so popular among area Latino residents that it’s become a communal hub – one of those critical ’third spaces’ that turn a city into a home. During weekdays, the Mills are among Providence’s most successful commercial spaces in terms of low vacancy rates. The vast building is filled with everything from nonprofit offices to light industrial businesses, such as woodworking and metalworking shops, as well as serving as a wholesale hub and retail store for Atlantic Furniture. The Mills are known for the beauty of their giant curved stairwells, contained in the two landmark towers. If you love woodwork and architecture, walk in and look up: the stairwell entries are open to the public.”

— Anne Holland, Atlantic Mills Tenant

For those who have been inside it, the Atlantic Mills Complex is unforgettable and unlike any other place in the city. The eastern section was built in 1863, designed by the local architect Clifton A. Hall for the Atlantic Delaine Company, with a western section built in 1882. This large complex produced worsted cloth, a high-quality lightweight wool fabric, and soon became the largest textile company in Providence by the 1880s, with over 2,100 workers, many of them living in small company-built houses close by. The company remained in business until 1953 when most New England textile mills struggled to compete with modern textile facilities.

The Complex has been on and off the MEP List for several years due to deferred maintenance and hazardous conditions. The future of the complex is uncertain as it was listed for sale several years ago, potentially putting an end to the diverse and vibrant community that exists in the Mills today (the City of Providence has an option to buy it and is reportedly studying a purchase).

Industrial Trust Building, aka Superman Building (1928)

111 Westminster Street

Neighborhood: Downtown

Years on MEP: 2014-2023

“The Industrial Trust Building is one of the most iconic buildings in New England. Its unmistakable Art Deco design stands out among a sea of more typical mid-20th-century office towers and hotels. Not only does every Rhode Islander recognize the 1920s marvel in their midst, but so too have millions of drivers traveling through the city over the past century. It has become synonymous with Providence. Having worked inside the Superman Building for 25 years, I can attest that its outward beauty is matched by the character of its interior design and layout…The thought and care with which we manage its transformation into its second century of functional operation will say a great deal about the ambitions of Providence and indeed Rhode Island itself.”

— Oliver Bennett, Senior Vice President, Bank of America

After 10 years at the top of the Most Endangered Places list, countless proposals, and a $26 million, 30-year tax stabilization agreement, construction on the Industrial Trust Building finally broke ground in late 2023. This 1928 Art Deco-style skyscraper was built by the New York City-based architectural firm Walker & Gillette. Affectionately known as the Superman Building for its passing resemblance to the fictional Daily Planet building, it has been the keystone of Providence’s skyline and Rhode Island’s tallest building for almost a century.

Since its vacancy in 2013, PPS has been at the forefront of efforts to save the Industrial Trust Building and ensure its future. It has appeared on every MEP list since 2014; was named to America’s List of 11 Most Endangered Historic Places in 2019 (National Trust for Historic Preservation) based on PPS’ nomination; was the subject of a 2020 RISD-PPS design studio on adaptive reuse; and was the location of our 2023 Winter Bash. It is not an understatement to say that PPS has made the creative reuse of this building one of our top priorities for over ten years. We have not done this work alone, and we are now optimistic that the Superman Building’s period of precarity may finally be coming to a close. We hope that this is the last time for at least a generation that the Industrial Trust appears on PPS’ MEP List.