Grebien said the Fortuitous group was highly motivated and very willing to construct housing and storefronts on the perimeter of the stadium. It was during these discussions that project developers Fortuitous Partners proposed the first ideas for Tidewater Landing.īrett Johnson, founder and partner of Fortuitous, said that the company thought Pawtucket was the perfect city for a new soccer stadium, given the large soccer market in Rhode Island, the new train station being built in the city and the chosen site standing right off I-95. With the city and state governments eager to move on from the PawSox failure, the city solicited development proposals for the now-vacant McCoy Stadium site. Pawtucket Mayor Donald Grebien said the state government “realized they needed to do something” to revitalize the city after the PawSox left. Pawtucket “is in a state of decline,” Porter said, citing the closure of Memorial Hospital in 2018 and the relocation of many small businesses from the downtown area. When the PawSox stadium proposal failed, Steven Porter said he was left with “extreme disappointment.”
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Instead, the site where the stadium would have been is an empty, cracked parking lot hosting the old Apex department store, a futuristic, pyramidal building constructed in the 1960s that has been largely unused for several years. Now, “that’s all gone,” he said.ĭawn Porter, co-owner of Stillwater Books downtown, called the area “sad and depressing.” Porter and her husband, Steven Porter, viewed the proposed PawSox stadium as a potential economic spark for the area. The city of Pawtucket, whose Old Slater Mill is recognized as the birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution, was once a thriving industrial city.īut after manufacturing left and strip malls opened outside the city, businesses failed or moved away.įormer Pawtucket City Councilor John Barry III remembers that when he was a kid, “there was not a vacant storefront” in the city’s downtown. “Everybody was happy,” said resident Diane Proulx. But after the proposal ran into roadblocks in the state legislature and was renegotiated to remove controversial state bond guarantees that lowered the cost of the project, the owners of the PawSox decided they no longer wanted to build a new stadium in the city. Pires was involved in a 2018 proposal to build a new $83 million stadium for the PawSox. “I think a lot of people’s hearts were broken.”
The project, developers and city officials agree, will likely provide greater economic benefits than the proposed new baseball stadium would have, while at the same time catering to a fast-growing soccer fanbase in Pawtucket and Rhode Island.īut among both city officials and residents, regret and sadness about the loss of their beloved PawSox still lingers.
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The stadium will be home to a team from the United Soccer League Championship, the second tier of professional men’s soccer in the United States, and will host games beginning in spring 2023 - fewer than five years after the PawSox announced their departure. The site is part of the future home of Tidewater Landing, a development announced in December 2019 that, when finished, will include new homes, shops and a professional soccer stadium as part of a new chapter of Pawtucket’s sporting and economic history. Now, he was collecting some final souvenirs.Īt the same moment, on the western bank of the Seekonk River, just south of Pawtucket’s downtown, three yellow excavators sat beside mounds of sediment in a mini-wasteland surrounded by green brush. He remembers playing baseball on the stadium field as a young boy. Pires, a former state representative and Pawtucket director of administration who fought to keep the PawSox in the city, was born two years after McCoy Stadium’s 1942 opening. The PawSox, a fixture in Pawtucket since 1970, left the town last year, after a long struggle to build a new stadium in the city’s downtown failed.
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