In order to make room for the new Medical Education Building in the Jewelry District, offices at 222 Richmond St. have been relocating for the past year — most recently, the Education Alliance, a department that works for education equity, on March 22.
Almost all of the organizations with offices formerly in the Richmond Street building, including the Education Alliance and the University Investment Office, are in the process of moving, or have already relocated to other locations, said Richard Spies, executive vice president for planning and senior adviser to President Ruth Simmons. Many of the organizations that have been moved out of the building, including Big East Conference Athletics, were in fact outside organizations renting the space from Brown, Spies said.
The Med Ed building is a part of a long-term development project at Brown that also includes expanding infrastructure on the main campus and in the Jewelry District, he said.
The original $80 million project was intended to build an entirely new building dedicated to the Alpert Medical School, but following the economic downturn in fall 2008 and losses in the University's endowment, plans were revised to instead renovate the Richmond Street building, reducing the cost of the project to $45 million, Spies said.
Planning for these expansions began seven to eight years ago, corresponding to concurrent plans of increasing Brown's faculty by another 200 members, Spies said. Since expansion of Brown's main campus was limited by the surrounding neighborhoods, the University began to look elsewhere.
"The possibilities for growing the campus horizontally weren't very good," Spies said. "That led us to think of possibilities downtown."
Currently, besides the 222 Richmond St. property, the University owns other buildings in the Jewelry District, including a former factory at 70 Ship St., converted into the Med School's Laboratories for Molecular Medicine.
The Jewelry District also recently became home to various biotech companies including Isis Biopolymer and NABsys, a gene-sequencing company that has licensed intellectual property developed by Brown researchers, Spies said.
In spite of recent development in the Jewelry District, the area is still a relatively underdeveloped part of downtown, Spies said.
"It has a long way to go before it will be well-developed," Spies said. Nonetheless, he said he is optimistic about its prospects. Due to the Jewelry District's proximity to College Hill, the goal is to "make everyone feel that it's just another part of campus," Spies said.
The Education Alliance, which will move east, works with governments and public schools across the nation with the goal of "addressing the needs of historically underperforming populations" said Adeline Becker, its executive director.
The move from the Jewelry District to Richmond Square, though stressful, went smoothly, Becker said.
"It was a complicated process, but it was very smooth," Becker said. "We didn't have much dead time at all."
The Education Alliance is one of the oldest tenants in the 222 Richmond St. building, Spies said. Even though the Jewelry District is supposed to become the center of development, the decision to move the Education Alliance out of the Jewelry District entirely was "purely practical," Spies said. "There just wasn't enough space."
"There was no particular advantage to us to remain there," Becker said.
