While maybe less expansive than that of New York City or Chicago, Providence’s skyline boasts a number of iconic buildings. Amid the structures lining the Ocean State’s capital is One Financial Plaza — the city’s second-tallest building standing at 28 stories tall.
But what Providence locals can’t see from the outside is that the building will be up for auction this June.
JFR Global Investments, the Brooklyn-based owner of the building located on Weybosset Street, previously scheduled an auction on the tower for April 10, but postponed it to June 13. As of 2024, the building’s total value was estimated to be over $48 million, according to a public tax assessing document.
One Financial Plaza earned its new name following a 2003 sale of the Hospital Trust Tower. Soon after, the building saw a large swath of renovations aiming to sever the tower’s shared mechanical systems with its adjoining structure.
Since then, the building has changed hands several times. In 2005, it was sold to CV Properties for $46.2 million. Two years later, it was sold for $65.6 million to Meritage Properties. The most recent sale to JFR Global Investments was finalized a little over six years ago for $51.8 million.
But its history can be traced back to before these transactions.
Completed in 1973, the building is now 52 years old — “not quite old enough that most people see it as a historic resource, but old enough that it starts to need some maintenance, some real investment,” said Marisa Angell Brown, executive director of the Providence Preservation Society.
PPS is starting to focus its preservation efforts on buildings that are around the age of One Financial Plaza, Marisa Angell Brown added. While buildings like the John E. Fogarty Memorial Building may be demolished and only recognized for its architectural significance afterward, others, like downtown Providence’s Superman Building are, “almost a century later, still a building that people love,” said Edward Connors MA’94, a local historian.
“There’s a dangerous period that all art enters into where they don’t have the patina of age yet, and we’ve just grown tired of them,” Connors said.
One Financial Plaza was designed in 1970 by John Carl Warnecke and Associates. The tower was initially built as an addition to the Rhode Island Hospital Trust Co. Building, as a financial management bank, according to the Providence Preservation Society’s website.
“The funding for the original Rhode Island Hospital was so incredibly well-established that they had to set up a bank to manage that fund,” Connors said.
By the time construction was completed, the building stood 105 meters tall. While the area in front of it was too small to qualify as a true plaza, it echoed a “trend in the late 1960s to have buildings command a block and create a plaza,” Connors said.
But according to Tripp Evans, a professor of the history of art at Wheaton College, One Financial Plaza is a generic, mid-century skyscraper.
“The only thing that makes it stand out is the use of travertine on the outside,” a more luxurious material than typically used in buildings from that period, Evans said. Travertine is the same material used in the Colosseum in Rome and other ancient Greek and French architecture, according to the PPS website.
According to Connors, One Financial Plaza is an example of when modernism lost its greater “optimistic vision” and became “programmatic.”
For Marisa Angell Brown, “it’s modern in the sense of just how spare it is.”
“You would never have seen buildings that look like this previous to the 1950s,” she added.
