ARCHIVES | The Former Structures

Architect’s vision of Kaiser Tower

The present-day visitor to the monastery may be puzzled to see standing to our north a high-rise luxury tower and wonder how it came to be constructed. Such a visitor may be even more surprised to learn that the land was once owned by the monastic community. In the late 1950’s, the monastery began to realize that maintenance of some of the extensive northern property it had acquired in its early decades was no longer feasible and under Prior Aelred Graham decided to shed some of its land. That land, in the area of Portsmouth’s historic former coal mines, had a historical association with industrial use. And while the massive edifice to be constructed there would be in active operation on the site for only two decades, 1967-1987, it would leave the gargantuan tower as a reminder of its heritage.

Aerial view of the Kaiser plant (Image: Hogan Assoc. Blog)

Purchased by the Kaiser Corporation, the plant and tower that was to be constructed on that parcel was in fact part of a larger industrial development happening in the latter half of the 20th-century along the western side of Aquidneck Island. A 1979 assessment of the town of Portsmouth’s resources notes, “The Raytheon Company, a manufacturer of sonar devices and very closely tied to the navy’s underwater system center in Middletown, built a plant here in 1959 and is now one of Rhode Island’s largest employers. Pearson Yachts established a plant in the early 1960s, Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical Corporation located here in 1966 and Transcom Electronics Inc. came in 1967. These industries, plus the U.S. Naval Reservation at Melville, today dominate the western side of Aquidneck Portsmouth.” (Historic and Architectural Resources of Portsmouth, Rhode Island: A Preliminary Report, 1979). The Kaiser Aluminum Corporation had a significant presence here throughout much of the late 20th-century. The company, that derived its name from Henry John Kaiser (1882-1967), a pioneering industrialist known for shipbuilding, metal works, and such projects as the construction of the Hoover Dam and the creation of Kaiser Permanente insurance for workers and their families, saw the Portsmouth location as well-suited to its production plans.

The Newport RI Real Estate Blog by Hogan Associates, which offers a concise history of the tower’s transition from industry to luxury, provides some details about the former plant. The Kaiser facility, it notes, “covered nearly every inch of what is now Carnegie Harbor Drive, The Carnegie Tower and the Royal Cottages at Carnegie Village.” The tower itself had a vertical reach of 220 feet – more than two-thirds of a football field, or 22 times the height of a basketball hoop, depending on your preferred sport analogy. While it offered its most notable visual impact vertically along the horizon, the foot print of the enormous tower was itself dwarfed by the sprawl of the surrounding complex. To give a sense of the scope of the plant, as well as the difficulty of its renovation, the Real Estate Blog states, “The long, low building surrounding the manufacturing tower sat on a concrete slab over 6 feet deep and 10 acres wide.” It quotes local attorney Eric Chappell who took a tour of the plant: "This is the only property tour I have ever done that required a car." The height of the tower permitted an extended vertical fabrication process: “Strands of cable passed from the top floors to the bottom as they underwent various manufacturing processes. On the ground floor, the coated cable was cut, spooled, loaded onto trucks and driven away.”

Coal mines impacted the plant construction (Pierce collection)

Renovation or reuse of such a plant, once Kaiser ceased operation there in the late 1980’s, seemed an impossible task. Yet after Peter de Savary had developed the Carnegie Club golf course, opened in the year 2000 on land leased long-term from the monastery, the adjacent and unoccupied Kaiser land and tower also came into play as part of an extended luxury development. The vacant and obsolete tower, constructed with massive amounts of steel girder and situated on its acres of concrete slab, was seen as a visual blight that many hoped to address, but presented a formidable challenge, from both engineering and environmental perspectives. The entire area had a history of industrial use – including coal mines, copper works, aluminum cable fabrication, wood products – and was still zoned for “heavy industry.”

1972 PAS Yearbook: students fishing in sight of tower

At the time of its re-development, The New York Times ran a real estate article (August 2005) entitled, “Eyesore to Upscale: One Brownfield at a Time.” This title hints at some important information about the Kaiser inheritance. The article quotes the late Robert Driscoll, then serving as the town administrator: “It was a real eyesore for the community and Narragansett Bay in general." The town, he said, had been working with Middletown and Newport on a comprehensive plan for the island’s west side, to both utilize the area while preserving its natural beauty. While the removal of the tower may have been a top priority for the latter, its transformation into high-end real estate was inspiring developers to get involved. The Times notes: “But eyesores are O'Neill's specialty. Founded in 1988 by J. Brian O'Neill, the company says it believes it has the largest brownfield portfolio in the country, with more than 12 million feet of space in various stages of development in the Northeast.” O'Neill Properties had been in the business of developing polluted former industrial land into residential and retail space, including the conversion of an old paper mill in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania and a former arsenal in Watertown, Massachusetts.

The Times reported that the O'Neill company bought the Kaiser parcel for $13 million, with an eye towards the construction of condominiums and luxury cottages, with a prime location overlooking Narragansett Bay, which has since become a reality, slowed by but surviving the 2007 real estate debacle. In 2005, it noted that “the cottages start at $1.9 million and the condos range from $795,000 to more than $7 million. People who buy a residence on the former Kaiser property must also buy a membership to the Carnegie Abbey golf resort, where the initiation fee ranges from $75,000 to $150,000.” Rather than the “eyesore” Kaiser Aluminum had left, the Real Estate blog reported that O’Neill’s project successfully transformed the now 79-unit condominium site: “It was completed in 2009. The penthouse unit occupies the entire top floor offering 360 degrees of unparalleled views of the Bay including Newport, Providence and Warwick.”

While the view looking up from the monastery grounds may have changed “from eyesore to upscale,” our northern perspective remains defined by the singular tower dominating that horizon, now for more than a half-century.