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Brown University Plans Include New Walkway, Fitness Center

Posted on: Friday, 31 March 2006, 18:00 CST

By Karen A. Davis, The Providence Journal, R.I.

Mar. 31--PROVIDENCE -- Brown University plans to submit to the city next week its institutional master plan, outlining the university's development goals for the next five years.

The plan includes construction of two buildings on university property near the center of campus, a fitness center that would be attached to the intercollegiate athletic facility, and a landscaped pedestrian walkway that would be parallel to and midway between Brown and Thayer Streets.

The plan has three goals: develop a better circulation structure so the Pembroke campus is better connected to the main campus; consolidate the core, by targeting development in the center of campus and not along the edges; and move beyond College Hill for expansion.

The document reflects the university's strategy to not expand into residential neighborhoods on College Hill, according to Richard Spies, executive vice president for planning and senior advisor to President Ruth Simmons.

Instead, Brown officials are looking at opportunities to expand in the city's Jewelry District, where the university leases space in two buildings and purchased the former Speidel building on Shipp Street in 2003. That building was converted for use as laboratory and research space for molecular microbiology and related sciences.

Spies said city officials will not find any surprises in the plan.

In keeping with that expansion theme, the university last fall purchased an 11-story office building at 121 South Main St.

While some current tenants will remain in the building, the university expects to convert 50 percent of the space into offices for the School of Public Health in the next three years, according to the plan.

"There shouldn't be any surprises [in the plan]" Spies said in an interview yesterday, noting that university officials have held about a dozen community meetings about the plan in recent months and have met with students and faculty.

Spies said Brown officials will submit their five-year plan, which is required of all institutions, to the city next week and seek to make a presentation at the next city Plan Commission meeting.

The plan does call for demolition of a gas station and a building to make way for construction of the 45,000-square-foot, four-story Sidney E. Frank Hall for Cognitive & Linguistic Science, adjacent to the Brown Bookstore.

A 30,000-square-foot creative arts building would also be built nearby along a proposed walkway. It would be located on a vacant lot now being used for construction vehicles.

Both of the buildings could open in 2009 if the schedule goes according to plan.

One area of the master plan deals with traffic control on campus.

Spies said the university commissioned a traffic study of intersections on campus, as well as areas surrounding the university, between Benefit to beyond Arlington Street, to identify trouble spots and "create a baseline of data."

Traffic experts found that a great percentage of the traffic delays on Angel and Waterman streets,the two major thoroughfares, could be attributed to traffic signals that are not properly coordinated.

"Most problems come from the traffic signals," he said. "It's all wrong and mostly random."

Spies said Brown has begun discussions with the city to get the signal problems corrected and find out the university's responsibility in helping to finance those corrections and maintain the signals.

Brown also hopes to improve the pedestrian flow on campus by creating a walkway that would run through the Life Sciences building, which is under construction, and would connect the Pembroke campus to the main campus and extend to Lincoln field.

The purpose of the walkway would be to give pedestrians "a safe crossing that does not hold up traffic" at intersections.

The walkway would also take away some parking spaces, call for the demolition of the Shell gas station on Angell Street, and prompt a two-block move of the Green House on Angell.

University officials will also ask the city to abandon Olive Street between Thayer and Brown streets, so that the area could be used as a materials-handling area or loading zone that could centralize truck traffic and draw it away from surrounding streets.

That section of Olive Street has been closed during construction of the Life Sciences building.

The university does not plan to build a parking garage, a move that residents opposed for fear that it would be on the residential edge of campus.

Spies said an assessment of the university's parking situation, based on a formula that calculates separate ratios for the numbers of students living on-campus and off-campus and the number of faculty, found that Brown has a surplus of 192 parking spaces campus-wide.

He said the parking spaces might not be exactly where members of the campus community would want them to be, but that the spaces are there.

The university spent the last year promoting public transportation and the shuttle system in order to ease the parking crunch on the central campus.

The university has also begun soliciting faculty and staff who might be interested in purchasing nine vacant houses that the university owns on College Hill. They would purchase the houses, fix them up and agree to sell them back to the university when, or if, they chose to move.

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Providence Journal, R.I.

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Source: Providence Journal

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