By the mid-twentieth century, the southern end of the original Towne Street had fallen on hard times. The conditions of the mixed commercial and residential buildings ranged from minimally acceptable to highly deteriorated. In 1966, the then ten-year-old Providence Preservation Society enlisted the assistance of New York’s Nassoit-Sulzberger & Co. (later Sulzberger-Rolfe), and they became appointed co-developers of this area by the Providence Redevelopment Agency. They proposed a ten-million-dollar project that included the rehabilitation of historic buildings and new construction. More recently, this area was further embellished by the installation here of military monuments for various twentieth century conflicts, all collected around the tall shaft designed in 1927-29 as the World War I Monument by Paul Cret, one of the early twentieth century’s best monument designers, and originally located near the confluence of the Woonasquatucket and Moshassuck Rivers several blocks north of here. Continuing the development along the waterfront south and west of the Crawford Street Bridge is particularly nice.
11 Heritage Building
Fenton Keyes Associates’ five-story brick building is an obvious response to Kallman, McKinnell & Knowles’s Boston City Hall, reaching completion at Government Center at the time this was built. Timid though it may be by most Brutalist standards, it nevertheless is all too aggressive on this street. So it suffers both architecturally and urbanistically.
– 2003 Guide to Providence Architecture
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