PROVIDENCE, R.I. — When Brown University opened its new $45 million medical school in August about a mile from its campus here, it was the institution’s first academic department to be located away from its home on College Hill overlooking downtown Providence.
Brown’s reasons were twofold: there was little room on its campus for a building large enough for an Ivy League medical school, and it would bolster a 360-acre so-called Knowledge District that would draw high-tech, high-wage jobs to Rhode Island, which was among the hardest-hit states in the recession.
The Warren Alpert Medical School is in a converted, four-story, 134,000-square-foot factory building that dates to 1928 and was once used to make watchbands. At a ribbon-cutting ceremony in August, Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, said that the Speidel Twist O Flex watchband was a Rhode Island innovation, and likened it to plans for the state’s biotech industry.
“The future is the double helix,” Mr. Reed said, “and that’s what this building is going to allow.”
The Knowledge District is three years in the making, and involves a combination of financial incentives, rezoning and coordinated planning among Providence’s major hospitals, colleges and universities.
In addition to the medical school, the toy maker Hasbro, which has its headquarters in nearby Pawtucket, and 38 Studios, a video game company started by the former Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, are moving into existing buildings in the Knowledge District.
The state, through its Economic Development Corporation, agreed to a $1.6 million sales tax exemption for Hasbro, which said it would create 284 new full-time jobs, and a $75 million loan guarantee for 38 Studios, which has promised to bring 450 jobs to Providence.
Several years ago, in what Laurie White, the president of the area Chamber of Commerce, called a “grass-roots effort,” prominent figures in the public and private sectors came together to create a strategy for Providence’s economic future. The city’s manufacturing base was waning, and the luster of the city’s so-called Renaissance in the 1990s, which focused on the arts as a means of revitalizing, was losing steam.
The resulting blueprint called for an economy based on “meds and eds,” as the hospitals and colleges are sometimes called, in a district with a lot of underutilized factory and office space, as well as vacant land. The state’s governor, Lincoln D. Chafee, an independent, has embraced this vision and called Brown’s new medical school a “terrific catalyst” for the new district.
“Good things are happening here,” Mr. Chafee said.
After he was elected in 2010, Mr. Chafee traveled to Baltimore, Houston and Pittsburgh to tour the University of Maryland Medical Center BioPark, the Texas Medical Center and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, all of which were attracting high-tech and research companies. He said he came away from those trips impressed that growth was occurring there despite the sluggish economy, and was persuaded that Providence had the assets needed to make the concept work in Rhode Island.
In addition to Brown, other major institutions in Providence include the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence College, Johnson Wales University, Rhode Island Hospital and Women Infants Hospital.
“It’s just a good fit,” Mr. Chafee said.
Hasbro chose to expand in Providence because the young talent it needed to attract to its gaming division preferred an attractive, urban environment, said Dolph Johnson, Hasbro’s senior vice president for global human resources. The toy maker, which employs approximately 6,000 worldwide and 1,700 in Rhode Island, also wanted to invest in the city’s future, he said.
For Brown, the decision to move its medical school into another part of the city came in 2007 after an internal planning process revealed that it essentially had no choice if the university wanted to grow, said Richard Spies, Brown’s executive vice president for planning. New science buildings, in particular, require a sizable footprint and significant infrastructure, two requirements not readily available in historic College Hill, he said.
“Our capacity to grow was not zero,” he said, “but it was clearly limited.”
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