Gabe Sender: A plan to extend Brown’s greenery and social spirit
In 2012, Brown University purchased the rights to three city streets and 250 parking spaces from the City of Providence for $31.5 million. The agreement seemed to be a victory for both sides at the time: Providence was able to stabilize its finances, and Brown immediately contracted architects to draft plans for the streets’ pedestrianization. However, while this agreement let Providence move past some of its immediate fiscal troubles, for Brown the streets remain glorified parking lots in the heart of campus more than a decade later. This costly investment has not led to any improvement in student life, and the streets remain frozen in time.
The streets that it bought are a two-block stretch of Brown Street, between George and Charlesfield streets; Benevolent Street between Brown and Bannister Street (formerly Magee), and Olive Street, between Brown and Thayer. For Brown and Benevolent streets, the university engaged the landscape-architecture firm Rader + Crews to develop plans for pedestrianization. These streets are essential to campus mobility, being between several large dormitories and the bucolic Main Green. Rader + Crews proposed to close the streets to vehicular traffic, remove all parking spots, and replace the 51,500 square feet of asphalt with new pavers, rain gardens and benches for congregating.
A view of the proposal by Rader + Crews, with a rough plan for transforming Brown and Benevolent streets.
Ultimately, despite its potential benefits, this plan ended up a victim of circumstance. In one of former Brown President’s Ruth J. Simmons’s final actions, she had Brown buy these streets and authorized plans to redevelop them. But when current President Christina H. Paxson took office, the street pedestrianization was slowly forgotten in favor of other institutional priorities. Today the project remains Brown’s biggest unrealized opportunity. This would be a low-cost undertaking which would have an outsized impact both environmentally and socially, and would dovetail perfectly with the campus’s centuries of evolution.
In the past decade, Brown has seen significant growth. Since 2014, undergraduate enrollment has increased by 1,009 students, or about 16 percent, to about 7,222, and its graduate enrollment by about the same percentage, to about 3,000 (excluding medical students). Brown has gone on a billion-dollar building spree to accommodate the needs of this increased student body, constructing three new dormitories, countless new classrooms and research facilities, and extensively renovating its recreational facilities. Yet Brown’s open spaces have remained virtually unchanged over this same period. The need for new green spaces only grows more pressing as the campus becomes more crowded. The pedestrianization project is oriented toward improving Brown’s social future by enhancing the quality of life on campus.
First, the pedestrianization plan promises to strengthen Brown’s sense of community. The university’s thriving academic and extracurricular environment is rooted in its vibrant community, which can only blossom if it has the space to do so. The Main Green is the embodiment of this “Brown spirit.’’ An observer on a sunny day sees undergraduates, graduates, alumni and faculty all socializing in that welcoming space. Converting Brown Street and a stretch of Benevolent Street to pedestrian promenades would extend this spirit southward. These streets currently serve as the busiest arteries for pedestrians and bicyclists between North and South Campus. However, due to the volume of people using the narrow sidewalks, few linger on these streets. Pedestrianizing them would open them up to the kinds of interpersonal experiences that help define Brown and allow its community spirit to grow with its growing student body.
Second, Brown is increasingly affected by climate change, and its effects are especially felt along Brown Street.
View, looking north, on Brown Street as it could look if this project were realized.
Over the past three years the Keeney Quadrangle dormitory has flooded during heavy summer rains, which have grown in intensity in the past decade. This dorm is on the corner of Brown and Benevolent streets and houses hundreds of Brown freshmen. As a result, some students’ introduction to their college experience is a rushed evacuation from their dorms as water pours into their rooms. This is clearly untenable. The full implementation of the pedestrianization program would prevent such events from occurring again. The Rader + Crews plan would address excess water flowing through the streets by directing it away from buildings and planting rain gardens to slow water flow. Indeed, Brown’s overall environment would improve with the new plantings, which would absorb air pollution, and using lighter paving materials would reduce the area’s temperatures.
It's a disservice to the ambience of Brown’s campus to let this project remain dormant. Brown’s eclectic mix of wonderfully ornate and innovative architecture, coupled with its vibrant green spaces, delight students, faculty and the larger community. The Quiet (aka Front) Green, between Prospect Street and University Hall, and the Main Green are central to the feel of campus because they lie in its heart and because they are beautiful and relaxing spaces in which to interact. Brown and Benevolent Streets should be such a space – modern greens adding to the beauty of Brown’s campus. No spaces are better suited for such a transformation, and in its most ideal vision, they can become an extension of the Main Green, thus enlarging Brown’s campus spirit.
Brown Street circa 1900, when it passed through the Main Green.
The project I envision is not without precedent. In fact, Brown has a long history of street conversions, in an effort to consolidate its campus. Before 1900, Brown Street ran straight along the east edge of the Main Green. Much more recently, one of President Simmons’s crowning achievements was construction of The Walk, a green pedestrian path that extends from Simmons Quad to Meeting Street and unites the two halves of campus. Once known as Dumpster Alley, students would negotiate this path, which mostly consisted of parking lots, a gas station and various back alleys, to traverse this distance. Beginning in 2003, and led by the Rader + Crews design team, Brown converted these spaces into a unified tree-lined path that revolutionized the feel of the campus.
Today, Brown faces a momentous turning point. I have spent the past three years working with a dedicated group of students and alumni, the Brown Pedestrianization Initiative, to bring this project to fruition. While many in the Brown community favor it, the pedestrianization plan will fade from memory again unless a donor, or group of donors, steps forward to fund the project. In what would be the perfect capstone to the incredibly successful BrownTogether campaign, Brown’s campus may once again be revolutionized, continuing its cherished tradition of human-scale design. It is a plan whose time has come.
Gabriel Sender, Brown Class of 2025, is founder and president of the Brown Pedestrianization Initiative.
Brown Street looking south, from the Rader + Crews plan.