Union Studio celebrates our first (and hopefully ONLY) Bad Holiday Sweater Event

We have a lot to be grateful for this year... and we hope that 2012 has been good to you as well. As the year wraps up, we'd like to extend a hearty thank you to our amazing clients, new and old, and to the engineers, consultants and builders who join forces to make projects a shared success.

To all friends of Union Studio, we wish you a healthy and prosperous 2013!

Our talented intern and videographer, Malcolm McLean, captured a few days in the life of Union Studio. If you have 5 minutes, take a look and see what makes us tick!

 
Above: Westminster Street in Downtown Providence

Part Three of a Three Part Series - By Donald Powers, AIA, LEED AP, CNU
Note: This piece is written about Main Street in East Greenwich, RI, however we believe that many of the general issues and recommendations discussed in this series can be applied to main streets everywhere

In Parts One and Two of this commentary, I asserted that our Main Street was less than it could be aesthetically and economically. Central to my theme was that aesthetics and retail health were related: to the degree folks want to be on Main Street for the sheer enjoyment of it, the retail performance will improve. I claimed that the assumed problems, such as the lack of parking in front of stores, and an average retail unit size that was too small for most national "credit tenants" (e.g. J. Crew, etc.), might not be the source of the problem. These elements may even be assets, if properly understood. I promised to be more positive in the third part and offer some constructive suggestions. So, I am convinced that traditional main streets succeed economically to the degree that they succeed socially, by being a "place" that people want to be. Solve for that issue and the other structural issues such as perceived or actual lack of parking and the insufficient "floor plates" of 100 year old buildings become easier to deal with. I'll outline here a few concrete approaches towards improving the social / aesthetic part of the problem, and then add some thoughts on those "structural" issues such as parking.

Part Two of a Three Part Series - By Donald Powers, AIA, LEED AP, CNU
Note: This piece is written about Main Street in East Greenwich, RI, however we believe that many of the general issues and recommendations discussed in this series can be applied to main streets everywhere

In the first part of this series, I looked at our little section of the Post Road through the lens of my understanding of what makes a successful retail street. Though our Main Street has great “bones,” we have failed to create a memorable place that attracts visitors – a.k.a. patrons of retail businesses in the context of a successful Main Street. And if we are talking about attracting retail patrons, we must address parking which is the focus of Part 2 of this series.

Despite Main Street’s virtues, we residents and many store owners lament the problems inherent on Main Street. “There is no parking.” “The stores sizes don’t work for today’s ‘credit’ tenants like The Gap or Banana Republic.” For the moment, let’s leave aside the fact that, if the demographics were there (ie: sufficient number of pedestrians), the Gap and Banana Republic would – and do– find ways to make ANY location work, big or small, parking or not - the moon would have an Old Navy if the “demo” was there. In any event, focusing first on solving these problems would be to do more harm than good…and in any event would be hopeless. Main Street can’t beat Route 2 at its own game of making a heaven on earth for the automobile, and it shouldn’t try.

Part One of a Three Part Series - By Donald Powers, AIA, LEED AP, CNU
Note: This piece is written about Main Street in East Greenwich, RI, however we believe that many of the general issues and recommendations discussed in this series can be applied to main streets everywhere.

Like parents of a gifted but underachieving teenager, many residents of East Greenwich, this one included, want Main Street to rise to its own potential, to stop just getting by, and to take advantage of its God-given opportunities which so many less fortunate main streets would die to have. We shake our heads and ask ourselves why Main Street can’t be more like Wickford. And we suspect that we are somehow to blame for not being nurturing or firm enough as a community to raise a truly thriving downtown of galleries, restaurants, boutiques, hardware stores, groceries and café’s with the self-esteem of say, Bristol.

The good news: Main Street is largely intact and, though not exactly thriving, it has an undeniable appeal that can be built on. Moreover, there are proven techniques which can and have transformed many moribund main streets with far less going for them than ours. The bad news: These techniques largely require political will, community consensus, and a unified group of merchants to be successful, all of which are remarkably elusive in a town and state which was founded on principles of individual freedom and political dissent. So our Main Street is a mixed bag; full of opportunity, beset by obstacles...