Past Projects

Chapin Street

In the late 1980's and early 1990s, the Rhode Island economy suffered a double whammy that brought the state to it's knees. The first hit was Black Monday, in October, 1988, when Wall Street's record bull market hit a wall. Then, on January 1, 1990, Rhode Island Governor Bruce Sundlun closed every credit union in the state, and therefore half the checking accounts in the state, driving a nail into the coffin of the Rhode Island real estate market. At the time, The Armory Revival Company was just finishing up its Hammond – Harrison Street project, and was sitting on eleven completed but unsold single family homes and condominiums and a huge payables backlog. The crisis brought The Armory Revival Company to its knees. The partners turned to the blighted eastern end of Chapin Avenue, where five of the first six houses on the street sat vacant, vandalized and burned. Using federal historic tax credits, with equity supplied by insightful private investors and with construction lending from a very different Citizens Bank than the one we know today, Armory shifted its focus to the renovation of apartments in historic buildings. The resultant cash flow enabled Armory to dig itself out of the hole it found itself in, selling the last of the Hammond and Harrison Street homes and paying off its considerable construction payables.