Holding Out for a Hero: A Timeline of the Superman Building

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The Industrial Trust Company was formed in 1887.

By 1926, the design for the tower was finalized. The building’s iconic set-backs were made to accommodate the city’s zoning and height regulations. The Rhode Island General Assembly had authorized municipalities to create zoning ordinances just five years earlier on April 22, 1921. Excavation for the Industrial Trust building was underway by December, the Evening Bulletin reported. The Art Deco tower was designed by Walker & Gillette, who would go on to design the Flatiron Building in New York a few years later.

Construction was underway throughout 1927. Starrett Brothers was the builder on the project, a firm with experience building skyscrapers in New York City, including the Empire State Building.

After being commissioned by the Industrial Trust Company three years prior, the building officially opened on Oct. 1 of that year.

The building featured plaster, bronze work, electric work, and other structural components from local firms like Gorham; Otis Elevators and Narragansett Electric Company.

By 1930, the Industrial Company had grown considerably, with total deposits soaring to $125,000,000, the Providence Journal reported.

“The Providence National Bank and Union Trust Co. merged, becoming Providence Union National Bank,” according to ArtInRuins.

Another merger with Industrial Trust Co. brings about another name change for 111 Westminster: the Industrial National Bank.

When we searched the Providence Journal archives, the first reference to 111 Westminster as the “Superman Building” was in 1978. People have said the building acquired the nickname in the 1950s, due to its similarity to the Daily Planet building in the Superman television series.

In 1982, Industrial National Corp., the parent company of Industrial National Bank, opted for a rebrand. The new name of the company was Fleet Financial Group, Inc., and the local bank was renamed Fleet National Bank. “Fleet” was meant to evoke the nautical traditions of New England.

The Fleet Center, a modern tower next door to the Superman Building, officially opened. It was designed by Hellmuth, Obata, & Kassabaum.

Fleet merged with Shawmut National Bank, moving its headquarters to Boston. The bank was renamed FleetBoston Financial. Just three years later in 1998, the company was acquired by Bank of America.

FleetBoston Financial Corp puts three iconic downtown buildings on the market: the Hospital Trust Tower, the Fleet Center, and the Superman building. The three buildings included 920,000 square feet of office space, the Providence Journal reported in October 2002.

The Providence skyline’s most identifiable eminence was planned and built as the tallest building in New England, a distinction it retained for more than twenty years. In a splendid show of booming 1920s provincial boosterism that far outstripped the hubristic Biltmore of just a few years earlier, the bank gained as its signature headquarters one of the country’s most architecturally progressive buildings. The stepped-back skyscraper was a response to New York zoning regulations created to allow greater amounts of light and air in densely built Lower Manhattan, but this building’s New York architects, Walker & Gillette, had no such constraints here. 

Only a handful of skyscrapers like this had been built anywhere when this was designed in late 1925 or early 1926. The building, taller by only three stories than the Biltmore Hotel across Kennedy Plaza, is far more commanding a presence because of its site, detail, and massing. It stands on a lot relatively narrow for its depth and consequently presents widely varying profiles in both near and distant views, especially from the hills that rise around Downtown Providence. The tall, smooth base which originally matched the cornice heights of adjacent, now replaced four-story buildings neatly connected this massive and unusual building to its setting. The relatively conservative decorative vocabulary likewise eased the visual absorption of the ziggurat profile. The interior public space is largely intact, including a monumental banking hall whose approach from either of the narrow ends is one of the city’s most dramatic sequential experiences. On the south side toward the top of the building erupts a small bump from the building’s vertical thrust. The proffered explanations for its presence range from the mooring for dirigibles to pied-a-terres for corporate officers, but it probably served as a bibulous retreat for bank officers during the dry days of Prohibition, a private forebear of the sumptuous, building-top cocktail lounges on John Portman’s hotels of the 1970s. 

— William McKenzie Woodward, 2003 Guide to Providence Architecture

Inland Real Estate Acquisitions purchased the Superman building after FleetBoston put three iconic downtown skyscrapers onto the market. The building sold for $21.3 million, and FleetBoston agreed to remain in Providence for at least a decade. In 2003, the Providence Journal reported that FleetBoston occupied much of the building, with 750 employees.

David Sweetser of High Rock Development, the owner of the tower today, buys the Superman building for over $30 million.

With the financial crisis, Bank of America was looking to cut about 30,000 jobs across the country. At the time, the bank employed 3,500 Rhode Islanders, the Providence Journal reported on Sept. 21, 2011.

Bank of America decides not to renew its lease with High Rock development. The company starts pulling staff out of the Superman building.

By 2013, the building was vacant.

In 2017, Paolino Properties and Gilbane Development proposed demolishing the Superman building to create a new headquarters for Hasbro — the plan never gained traction.

In 2019, the Superman building was listed on the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s 32nd annual list of America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places, indicating its national architectural significance.

In Spring 2020, PPS partnered with RISD’s Interior Architecture department on a graduate design studio titled Saving Superman.  Working against the challenges of a pandemic-impacted semester, the architecture students produced seven creative and plausible reuse plans — from housing to entertainment to a vertical garden. These proposals were featured in the London-based magazine Dezeen.

At a press conference on April 12, Governor McKee announced plans for the historic preservation and rehabilitation of the Industrial Trust Building (1928). Which had been vacant for nine years by this point. It was announced that the $220 million redevelopment project would proceed with $41 million in state and municipal funding.

The skyscraper was set to be converted into 285 housing units (20% of which would be affordable or below market-rate), commercial office space, and mixed-use space in the historic banking hall with a financing package that included city, state, and federal funding.The Industrial Trust Building was highlighted as “Saved” in the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s magazine, Preservation, in the summer of 2022.

In March 2023, PPS celebrated its Winter Bash in the Industrial Trust Building’s lobby, selling out with more than 800 attendees and raising more than $55,000 for the organization’s preservation advocacy and education initiatives.

In November, over a year after the tax stabilization agreement was passed, construction began at the Industrial Trust Building.  After 10 years at the top of PPS’s 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. For the next six to nine months, the building would undergo interior demolition, asbestos abatement, and other needed work to prepare the building for restoration.

Two years after the start of the process, improvements to the structure proceeded in baby steps, not leaps and bounds. 

The developer, High Rock Westminster LLC, sought additional public financing to complete the project as construction prices rose so rapidly over the last few years, and as a result, construction progress has slowed to an agonizing pace.   

While the developers and Mayor Smiley have not disclosed to the public exactly how much will be needed to get the building “over the finish line,” Smiley did concede to the Boston Globe that it is over $10 million. After hundreds of millions of dollars of investment into the building over the last several years, fatigue has begun to set in for the taxpayers of Rhode Island. In a PBN poll from earlier this year, roughly 45% of respondents said they didn’t feel any more state funds should go towards redeveloping the site.

In June, Mayor Brett Smiley told The Journal that High Rock had said they had at least a $10 million gap in their financing still.

This spring, the Rhode Island General Assembly has been considered a tax change that would make the Superman developer’s construction materials tax exempt and grant an additional $15 million tax credit.

The House bill was held for further study in April. In June, the Senate passed the companion bill as amended.