7 minute read
Making Community the Goal
by Rhea Hirshman
The five-mile-long Seekonk River flows through the heart of Pawtucket, Rhode Island — a birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. A tidal extension of the Providence River, the Seekonk has long been the home to the Brown University mens rowing team. It was also, for well over a century, the dumping ground for the toxic effluvia spewed by the manufacturing plants that lined its banks, inundating the area with everything from fuel waste to heavy metals. “The word I use to describe the state of that river when I rowed at Brown,” says Brett Johnson ’88, “is ‘apocalyptic’.”
Now, thanks to Brett, his business partner, Dan Kroeber ’00, and Choate Rosemary Hall connections, the area around the Seekonk is undergoing a fullscale renaissance — the Tidewater Landing Project — anchored by a multipurpose stadium and the presence of the Rhode Island Football Club, a professional soccer team in the United Soccer League (USL).
Dan Kroeber ‘00 & Brett Johnson ’88
Pawtucket, a city of 75,000, has experienced long-term socioeconomic decline with the loss of its manufacturing base and persistent vacancies and blight in its downtown commercial area. It had been on the verge of bankruptcy for several years. In 2018, its only hospital closed its doors. That same year, the Pawtucket Red Sox (the “PawSox”) — the triple A affiliate of the Boston Red Sox, Rhode Island’s only professional sports team, and a source of great pride for the city — announced that, after nearly 80 years, they were abandoning Pawtucket and the state for a new home in Worcester, Mass.
On the same August day in 2018 that the PawSox’ departure was announced in the Boston Globe, a casual dinner party invitation from one Choate board member to another set in motion a sequence of events that culminated in the Tidewater Landing Project.
That August morning, Brett had run into Marshall Ruben, a Choate trustee and parent, near Marshall’s home in Watch Hill, R.I. Although he had to turn down Marshall’s impromptu dinner party invitation for that evening, Brett was curious about Marshall’s remark that the guest of honor — Rhode Island’s then-governor, Gina Raimondo — was likely to be in “a very bad mood” at the event.
“I learned from Marshall about that morning’s announcement that the PawSox were leaving the state,” Brett says. “I called the CEO of United Soccer League (USL), and made a bid to buy the option for a USL franchise in Rhode Island.”
In 2015, Brett had put together a syndicate to acquire a professional soccer team for Phoenix, Ariz. — which he named Phoenix Rising — and had been thinking about other markets for a USL franchise. “Rhode Island was the best untapped market in the country for a new pro soccer team,” he says. “It’s a melting pot of West Africans, Colombians, Italians, and Portuguese in a small geographic area — all communities devoted to soccer but with no local team to call their own.”
With that perspective in mind, Brett made his next call to Dan Kroeber. Dan, a civil engineer who lives in Wallingford, had years of experience designing athletic facilities — including major projects at Yale and Choate’s junior varsity baseball field and the Class of 1978 Field. He also had Brett’s complete trust. Another chance encounter — this one at a Choate classmate’s 2016 wedding — had put Dan back in touch with James Healey ’01, who had invested in the Phoenix Rising soccer team and who then connected Dan to Brett. In the fall of 2017, Dan was the person Brett turned to for advice when the team proposed plans to build a new stadium and training center on a former landfill owned by the city of Phoenix.
After a thorough site evaluation, Dan gave Brett the news: “I don’t care what they offer you,” he told Brett. “The costs and risks are enormous. Don’t do it.”
From that moment on, Brett says: “I knew that Dan was my guy. A lot of people would have tried to make it work because he and his firm could have had a very lucrative contract. But that’s not who Dan is.”
So when he decided not only to bring a soccer team to Rhode Island but to create a sports-anchored real estate development project that could transform an entire region, Brett again called on Dan, this time to mastermind the details of a comprehensive plan to revitalize downtown Pawtucket and its riverfront. They met with the mayor and the governor and spent time with community leaders. The proposal they submitted to the Rhode Island Commerce Corporation was announced as the winner of the selection process and given the go-ahead in December of 2019. In 2020, Dan and Brett incorporated a series of affiliated entities for the Rhode Island project into Fortuitous Partners — the developer of record for the undertaking.
When completed, Tidewater Landing will be a sports and entertainment hub for the entire state and region, with a 10,500-seat-multipurpose-stadium scheduled to open next year. The Rhode Island Football Club already has over 4,000 season tickets deposits, and music acts have inquired about performance possibilities. The site, much of which is scheduled for completion in 2026, will feature retail stores, a food hall, commercial spaces, and over 500 units of multifamily housing, including affordable units. The project also includes a pedestrian bridge connecting the two sides of the river for public use, public parks, a river walk extending along both sides of the Seekonk River, and an expansion of public transportation. The venture will create thousands of temporary construction jobs and permanent facilities jobs.
The Rhode Island Football Club is also in the process of launching a charitable foundation that will use soccer as a force to create positive influence in the lives of Rhode Island’s youth.
There have been some nightmare moments for Fortuitous Partners. “Working through a pandemic,” Brett says. “And supply chain issues. Labor and material shortages …” Dan adds, “We came through COVID-19 and got our permits and were on budget and ready to launch into building in December of 2021. Then Putin invaded Ukraine and the world shifted with the cost of construction materials skyrocketing overnight. We couldn’t go back. We had already raised and spent money. There was a gigantic hole in the ground waiting for a stadium to be built. We had to keep going forward.”
And they did, with both their public sector and private investors — the project is supported by a public-private partnership — pitching in again to close the gap. The private investment is one of the largest in Rhode Island’s history. And, among those investors are at least 20 individuals associated with Choate Rosemary Hall — alumni and alumnae, trustees, and parents.
This project, Dan and Brett say, is a testimony to the power of the Choate network — both through chance encounters and through planning. “This was a low-income community that had suffered blow after blow,” Dan says, “and when the PawSox left Pawtucket, the heart was torn out of the town.” Brett adds:
