Property developer floats idea for riverfront project
Beauparlant pitches plan to build hotel, riverwalk
WOONSOCKET – When you have a room full of Rhode Island residents gathered to honor some of the state’s most noteworthy citizens, it never hurts to espouse a little bit of hope for future.
And that is what Albert R. Beauparlant did Sunday as he wrapped up the 2016 Heritage Hall of Fame dinner at River Falls Restaurant at Market Square.
With historic Woonsocket Falls just outside the restaurant’s windows, Beauparlant, a Hall of Fame director and the dinner’s chairman, offered a glimpse of a riverside development plan he hopes will breathe “new life” into the long neglected waterfront corridor.
The riverfront is, after all, part of the main street area the city has been attempting to revitalize for decades. City officials most recently adopted a downtown overlay district zoning plant to help move that process along.
Beauparlant pointed out that the Blackstone River and its waters powered the city’s industrial emergence 150 years ago, and remain a resource today also capable of powering development of a new economic corridor in the area.
“We have the biggest drop in the river between Pawtucket and Worcester,” Beauparlant said of the river’s water power fueling the early textile industry. “We have the greatest population, the center of the Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor, the most river frontage, physical structures and walk- ability and the greatest history,” he said. The dinner was held in a former mill that had been the site of one of the old Woonsocket economic engines along the river, Joseph Banigan’s Woonsocket Rubber Co., which eventually became part of the U.S. Rubber Company, a national manufacturing operation selling vulcanized rubber products worldwide.
Beauparlant and other speakers during the evening such as labor historian and Hall of Fame member Scott Molloy, and Patrick Conley, Hall president, pointed to the city’s past industrial strength— the success Banigan achieved as related by Molloy in his book “The Rubber King”— as a blue print for its resurgence with a new economy.
The vision offered by Beauparlant would see a “$325 million plan” titled New City Project created for the city’s riverside corridor featuring a “Simply French” theme combining tourism, cultural experiences, arts and entertainment, select retail and high density housing.
The plan would make use of land, about 95 percent of it already owned by the city, along the river’s course from the South Main Street Bridge at the Blackstone to the riverside city property at the Harris Public Library and into the Social Flatlands area— approximately a linear mile, according to Beauparlant.
“River Island Park will be replaced with a hotel and conference center. The Main Street By-Pass will be replaced with a working canal system with a connecting river walk from River Falls, along the river, to the canal, breathing new life into the area, and ending in the Social Flatlands.
The Truman Bypass is actually constructed long the route the historic Blackstone Canal followed along the Blackstone in the 1830s and 40s, and a canal boat holding pond was located in the area of the parking lot now located off the Bypass below Main Street.
Beauparlant also pointed to the expected completion of the Blackstone Valley Bikeway’s next leg through the area and the arrival of a new train connection to Worcester and Providence at the city’s old train depot off Main Street as other key components of his development plans.
“Bluntly put, the train is coming, the bike path is coming – to what? Let’s make Woonsocket a destination,” Beauparlant said.
Beauparlant said he has been working with his business partner, Paul Belhumer, a Reading, Penn., real estate developer to come up with the New City Project concept.
“We went on a tour of industrial areas through Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania in search of what works,” Beauparlant said of his attempts to create a new economic future for his native Woonsocket.
“We are still working on the concept and it is still in the planning stages and I will soon be pre- senting the whole intellectual package behind it,” he said.
During his remarks to the Hall of Fame gathering, Beauparlant said the development plan would be similar to the San Antonio River Walk in Texas, or look of Old Quebec City in Canada.
“( Robert) Billington said the Blackstone riverfront is 45 miles up and 45 miles down, 90 miles total of river front and the only place you dine on the river is here in Woonsocket,” Beauparlant said of River Falls Restaurant’s overlook of the Blackstone below.