Coro Company Building

also known as Cohn & Rosenburger Jewelry

Once the largest manufacturer of costume jewelry, this building was vacant in the 80s but then revived by Lifespan as their corporate headquarters

images of this Property

Photo by Rick Greenwood, 1985, for the Providence Jewelry Manufacturing Historic District nomination form
167 Point Street from a Google satellite capture circa 2021

10 images: Press to view larger or scroll sideways to see more. Contributions by Rick Greenwood for the National Register Form and Google Maps

About this Property

Redevelopment

The Coro Building is a 270,000-square-foot, multi-wing Art-Deco style commercial building built for the Cohn & Rosenburger (hence, CoRo) jewelry firm right before the great depression and the stock market crash of 1929. The firm survived and thrived, expanding with a four story wing in 1947. The company continued to thrive, expanding with factory locations in Olneyville and Bristol, Canada, and England at it height in the 1960s and early 70s. In the late 60s, just around the time that the interstate highways cut through the city, the Coro building was attached to the former Phenix Iron Foundry as additional warehouse space. By 1979, however, fortunes had changed and manufacturing was closed by its parent company.

The building was vacant at the time of its photo and inclusion in the Jewelry Historic District nomination of 1985. The Lifespan non-profit hospital group purchased and renovated the building in the late 80s/early 90s. In a similar timeframe, Brown University redeveloped the former Phenix Iron Foundry building for medical-related use. Between 1988 and 1997, a large eight-story parking garage was built for Lifespan employees.

Current Events

Not far from the Eddy Street hospital campuses across the highway — Rhode Island and Hasbro Hospitals — the Coro Building houses the majority of the research laboratories in the Lifespan system as well as Lifespan’s administrative offices. The Coro Building also includes an outpatient clinical research unit that includes five examination rooms in a close partnership with the Division of Adolescent Medicine at Hasbro Children’s Hospital.¹

History

From the Providence Jewelry District National Register nomination form, 1985

Frank S. Perry, architect. This is a 3-story, flat-roof, U-shaped, reinforced-concrete building with pier and panel exterior walls. The panels are filled with large banks of industrial sash windows, with bands of beige brick beneath. The piers rise up to a low parapet that is trimmed with a moderate amount of Art Deco styling. The main entrance is in the center of the south facade, recessed between two projecting wings. A large aluminum-sheathed marquee shelters the doorway; the legend, “CORO BUILDING 1929”, adorns the wall above; and the parapet swells in an ogee arch at the roofline. Unlike the other factories in the district, the Coro Building has a front lawn planted with trees and shrubs and enclosed by an iron fence. The original contractor, the Edward Sturgeon Company, built a 4-story wing in a similar style (without the parapet!, on the western end of the building in 1946-47.

From the RIHPHC’s survey of Providence Industrial Sites, July 1981

167 Point Street, The Coro Company, which started as the Cohn & Rosenburger jewelry firm located in New York City, formed a Providence branch in 1911 at Abbott Park Place. Having outgrown its rented quarters, the Coro company commissioned Frank S. Perry to design a new building which was dedicated in 1929. The Coro building is a 3-story, U-shaped structure with a flat roof and a decorated parapet. Other features include a reinforced-concrete frame and a glass curtain wall. In 1947 the Edward Sturgeon Company (which was the contractor for the main building) constructed an addition to the west side of the factory. According to the Providence Journal, The Coro Company was the largest manufacturer of costume jewelry in the 1950s and 1960s. By 1964 Coro Inc. operated three branch plants in Providence, Olneyville, and Bristol. Two subsidiary companies were located in Canada and England. By 1970 the Coro Company had bought several other firms. The same year the Coro Company became a subsidiary of Richton International Corporation. In 1979 Richton International closed its Point Street factory; the Coro building is currently vacant.

Information captured from a PDF snippet of a larger story about Rhode Island Hospital and Lifespan, dated April 2014, at http://www.rimed.org/rimedicaljournal/2014/04/2014-04-47-news-porter-lifespan.pdf ↩

5 Anecdotes from people like you

I worked there during the same summer as Mike McGuire! I don’t remember him, unfortunately, but I sure remember my job of putting the jewelry pieces into the plastic bags, over and over again. Like Mike, I remember well the feeling of the building: the high walls and that wooden floor and the feeling of fresh air and sunlight when I walked out the door at the end of the day. I formed friendships with the women I worked with, eating brief lunches together at a long wooden table next to all that jewelry. As a fairly sheltered girl, I learned a lot about life when they shared their stories. When I was hired, I was desperate for summer work before starting URI in September. I lied and said to my boss that I intended to make this my permanent job. I justified my dishonesty to myself by saying, “Well, maybe I will.” But like Mike, I was happy to leave, and I rarely wear costume jewelry.

Virginia Lockwood April 13, 2024

I’ve worked k. The Coro building for 10 years, and it’s changed over the years but You could always feel the building had a story to tell.

Melissa May 2, 2016

Around 1976 or 1977, looking for programming work, I stopped in this building. The resulting Twilight Zone experience i will never forget. As I walked in through the main door, it was totally silent. There were some desks but something wasn’t quite right. I shouted “hello” several times but it remained totally silent with no response. Then I noticed the desks, the office furniture was from the 1940’s, ancient metal file cabinets, old reclining wooden office chairs, metal desks with old rotary phones on them, many with a mechanical adding machine complete with crank! Finally, as I was about to leave, I encountered the janitor who directed me upstairs to the second floor where jewelry operations were still going on. They were still using RPG, an old IBM macro language I would not touch if you paid me, thanked them and left, still astounded that they could not keep a receptionist on at the front office.

James R. Pannozzi March 13, 2016

The old building with high ceilings and worn wooden floors wasn’t the Coro Building; it was the Phoenix Building (c. 1854) which Coro purchased and attached to the Coro Building in the 1950s. I worked in both buildings in the 1970s. They’re no longer attached, and a decrepit annex to the Phoenix Building was demolished in the 1990s. The remainder of the Phoenix Building has been very nicely rehabilitated!

(A.I.R.: Indeed, aerial photos from before 1997 show a connecting structure between the former machine shop and the Coro building)

R. J. Marr January 16, 2013

My twin brother and I worked in the Coro building during the summer of 1966. As summer employees, we worked in their stock and shipping rooms. pulling costume jewelry items already placed in plastic bags from bins and packaging them in cartons for shipment by truck. We also worked in the storage rooms where newly manufactured items were stored in metal buckets or pans and the main function would be to dump the pans into a funnel-type contraption that fed down to the lower floor where the packaging department was located. I distinctly recall climbing the stairs to the upper floors where we worked and passing the manufacturing floors where the din of the machines was almost unbearable. This was my first taste of blue collar work and inspired me and my brother to go on to college and law school so that we would never need to work in such a gloomy building doing menial, mechanical, and boring tasks. The building was old, had high ceilings, worn wooden floors and tall frosted windows. The place gives me the chills just remembering it! The surrounding area was occupied by decrepit multi-story apartment houses that obviously boarded factory workers and their families for decades past. My brother and I could hardly wait for summer’s end! I remember seeing both cheap and expensive pieces of jewelry, mostly the former, and at the end of our stay, we never wanted to see costume jewelry again.

Mike Maguire

Leave an Anecdote

The information about each building grows as visitors let us know about their experiences. Did you or a member of your family work here? Did you grow up near it as a child? Let us know. All entries will be moderated and may be posted in an edited form. We will use your name unless you tell us otherwise. We will not make your email public.

images of this Property

About this Property

#Redevelopment

#Current Events

#History

Redevelopment

Current Events

History