Jef Nickerson
Rhode Island Mall. Image from Bing.
Outlet stores won’t be coming to Warwick.
On Thursday, Adam Winstanley of Winstanley Enterprise LLC confirmed reports the proposal to convert Rhode Island Mall into an outlet mall has been abandoned and that the company has a contract to sell the property, which as Midland Mall was the state’s first suburban mall.
Winstanley sees Rhode Island Mall as “coming back as a big box mall,” meaning in place of smaller stores congregated around a couple of anchor stores, there would be five or six larger stores. He put those stores at between 40,000 and 60,000 square feet each.
Because we all know what a sure bet big box stores have been over the last decade.
Rhode Island, always getting our hopes up for something new and different just to be let down.
It’d be more beneficial to tear it down and build a riverfront park and/or with condos.
A suburban retrofit could be a good idea but I want to see bike/ped improvements to East ave first. The Washington secondary trail is really close to the CCRI Knight campus so the only road outside of Providence I would have to bike on to get to the Knight campus would be East ave. Heck if all roads in RI were bike friendly, that would be great.
That time 3-years ago when the hot new idea for the Rhode Island Mall was big box stores.
I really agree with Mark about a suburban retrofit for Warwick. The short-term chances of frequent transit in Warwick are small, but bike infrastructure would be extremely easy to put in given the extraordinarily wide streets. And it is really true–all of the things you might go to in Warwick, commercially speaking, are very close to the bike path. I know that CarFreePVD made a post about bike parking at the Rt. 2 Trader Joe’s, which I found slightly amusing, if only because a lack of bike parking is low on the list of problems I think Rt. 2 has. If we can remove Rt. 10, the bike path would become more useful for commuters and shoppers, and Warwick at that point would have a lot easier time transitioning into a more livable place.
Ugh.
Wanted outlets.
Blow it up and put the Pawsox there for all I care now.