Saint Mary’s Church of the Immaculate Conception Primary School

About this Property

#Last Tenant

This handsome turn-of-the-century parochial school building closed in 2009 due to low enrollment and high costs associated with maintaining the building. It was purchased along with the former convent next door in 2012 for a total of $800,000.

The convent has since been converted into ten condominium residences. Plans included 24 condo units for the former school, with multi-story new construction behind the school for an additional 60+ condos. Those plans have yet to materialize.

LLB Architects were hired as primary planners for the three-building complex. Their website details the plans and design phases.

Architecture

The former school is a monumental red brick and granite, three story building on a raised basement. A symmetrical facade consists of a central staircase flanked by two narrow windows on either side of a double door. A cross-gable roof projects this central design feature and tops it with a triangular roof, its gable set with a recessed statue of Mary. Directly below the statue entablature are three cast stone plaques — Reading from left to right, “A.D.”, “St. Mary’s School”, “1890”. Windows in this central section of the facade are topped with triangular cast stone lintels.

The brick cornice below the roofline has a stepped brick cornice detail. The roof is pitched cross gable with what appears to be asphalt shingles. Windows along the third floor are round arch topped while others have flat granite lintels and sills. A granite beltcourse runs between all window lintels and another beltcourse divides the basement and first floor.

A Boy’s entrance is to the right of the facade, with a Girl’s entrance to the left. The front and back facades are similarly designed, while the left and right sides are also very similar.

#Current Events

The building sits vacant as of the summer of 2024. The proposed renovation of the school has not yet moved forward.

#History

Excerpt from the RIHPHC Survey of Pawtucket, 1978, page 29

[…] A number of new churches were erected for Pawtucket’s expanding Roman Catholic community during these years, and complexes of related parish buildings continued to develop around them. The parishioners of St. Mary’s, the oldest Catholic parish in Pawtucket and the second oldest in Rhode Island, erected a brick Victorian Gothic church on their Pine Street site between 1885 and 1887. The new church is the focus of a handsome complex including a school, convent, rectory and cemetery. […]

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Part of the St. Mary’s Church of the Immaculate Conception complex, National Register, 1983

[…] At the opposite corner of the church property, near the corner of George and Randall Streets, stand the other two parish buildings — the parochial school building, erected in 1890-91, and the convent building, dating from 1895-96. Both are imposing red brick structures, the school standing four stories high under a tall, hipped roof, the convent being a story lower under a roof of similar configuration. Major exterior changes to the school include the replacement of the old wooden sash windows with new aluminum windows, and the loss of the original wooden cupola (blown down in the 1938 hurricane). […]

The St. Mary’s Parish Complex derives its primary significance from its historical importance as the home of the first Catholic parish in Pawtucket (the second oldest in Rhode Island) and its architectural importance as a unusually complete and relatively well preserved example of a typical turn-of-the-century Roman Catholic parish complex.

Pawtucket has historically been the center of one of the oldest and strongest Catholic communities in Rhode Island. As early as 1823, the bishop of Boston baptized five Pawtucket children. Five years later, David Wilkinson donated a tiny lot of land on Pine Street “…for the benefit of the Roman Catholics settled in the neighborhood and to have a church erected upon it.” The wooden church building raised here the following year was the first structure specifically designed as a Catholic church in Rhode Island. […]

#In the News

Convent to condos

by Christine Dunn
Providence Journal | January 30, 2016 (abridged)

NOTE: This news story is about the nearby convent building, but it contains details about the school

[… A] Massachusetts developer is nearing completion of the first phase of an ambitious plan to build 100 condominiums at the former St. Mary’s convent and elementary school, which stand side by side on George Street, near Route 95.

Four of the 10 condominiums built in the 121-year-old convent are already on the market, priced from $149,999 to $399,999.

Alia Fadili, who is managing the project — named Clock Tower Residences — said 24 condominiums are planned for the former school building in the second phase, which will begin in the spring. The school was built in 1890-91.

A third phase will include the construction of 66 condominiums in a new 70,000-square-foot building behind the existing structures.

“We haven’t seen condos for a little while,” said city Planning Director Barney Heath. One of the largest housing developments built in Pawtucket recently, he said, is the renovated American Wire mill complex at 413 Central Ave., which has 139 loft apartments.

St. Mary’s Parish School had operated for 154 years when the Roman Catholic Diocese of Providence made the “very difficult” decision in 2009 to close it due to declining enrollments and the “financially strapped parish’s inability to subsidize the school’s shortfalls and make the necessary repairs on the building.”

The former convent housed the Sisters of Mercy until about 2000, and was later used as office space by architects, then a hospice care organization, and most recently by the state for employees working on construction of the Route 95 Pawtucket River Bridge, according to the Rev. William J. Ledoux, who formerly served the Pawtucket parish but is now the pastor at St. Mary’s in Cranston.

In 2012, ID Holdings LLC purchased 167 George St. for $350,000, and it paid $415,000 for 163 George St., according to city records. Fadili, who is from Wakefield, Mass., is a managing member of ID Holdings, along with Amir A. and Denise M. Fadili. As a condition of the sale, she said, the new owners had to promise that the property would not be used for any purpose deemed unsavory by the diocese, such as a bar or a strip club. […]

Many of the 19th-century buildings that once bordered the St. Mary’s complex on the north and east were lost to make room for highway ramps and to widen George Street south of the highway, the report said.

Today, that proximity to the highway is a selling point for Fadili and her Realtor, Jonathan Annear, of Lila Delman Real Estate International. In additional to local buyers, the two said they hope to attract people who work in Boston and are looking for an alternative to that city’s much more expensive real-estate offerings.

In the $1-million-plus renovation of the former convent, Fadili has chosen to highlight the unique nature of the historic property, including an array of layouts, unit sizes, fixtures and appliance colors and styles, so that every condominium is distinctive.

For instance, in one of the condos, built in the convent’s former chapel, a gas fireplace was placed in an alcove with exposed brick walls, below three eyebrow windows. The doorway nearby, leading to the bedroom, has a stained glass transom window above the doorway.

“Nothing about it is cookie-cutter,” she said.

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Dunn, Christine. “Convent to Condos.” Providence Journal, 30 January 2016. Accessed 15 August 2024 from https://www.providencejournal.com/story/business/real-estate/2016/01/31/conversion-of-pawtucket-convent-leap-of-faith-in-condo-market/32582585007/