Owner Lawton Plans  Arts and Design Center in Florence

 

                                                     By Edward Shanahan

  Since Robert Lawton and his family moved here not quite five years ago, he has found more than a few things to his liking and acted on those enthusiasms.

 In February of 2003 he purchased the estimable Pleasant Street Theatre from long-time owner Richard Pini. Then just about a year later he purchased from Edward Goll the downtown building in which the theater is located.

 Now, Lawton,  a former agent of various “rock and roll bands all around the world,” is setting his sites closer to home. A resident of Trinity Row in Florence,  he has purchased the Ross Bros. building at 28 North  Maple St., with plans to develop it in ways similar to the Arts and Industry building on Pine Street or Bill Arnold’s building next door at 30 North Maple St.

 That means he would like to create space for artists’ studios, galleries, offices, and other arts-based enterprises, which are “small, contained and controlled.”

 Largely self-taught, he says that his personal hobby and passion is for “mid-century modern everything, furniture, art, books, not just the 40s, 50s and 60s, but the width and breadth of the 20th Century.”

And he hopes that over time he will be able to turn the large structure at 28 North Maple St. into an arts and design center, perhaps even with arts-related retail shops. He has an architect preparing designs for the space, which would include an atrium to take advantage of the abundant exterior light that could be captured.

  He said he realizes that the space in the building he has bought is unusual and thus needs to be developed carefully. What Bill Arnold has done with his space next door is a good model, he said. “We can only aspire to love, honor and cherish the space,” he said, “as Bill has done.”

“We don’t want to put so many things in” the building that it loses its feeling of openness. “You want that light coming through,” he said.

However, he recognizes that to carry out some of his plans he would need a change in the industrial zoning  to allow for retail uses, which is likely to spark a good deal of community debate. He even points out  the need for a bike rental shop, because there is no place on this side of the river to rent bikes for those who would like to use the bike trail.

 “I want to do things, not just to pay the rent, but to help the community,” Lawton says.

 Lawton grew up in Middletown, R.I. , but spent much of his adult life in New York City from which he conducted his work in the rock music business beginning in the 1970s while pursuing his “hobby” or interest in the arts through extensive travel in this country and abroad. Asked about his age, Lawton says he was born in the 1950s, and is not yet 50, but he’s getting there

 These days, he works at the Pleasant Street Theatre and  spends 99 peprcent of his time here. He said affairs at the theater are tighter when he is on the job, and get looser when he is out of town. “I’m very happy to end up in Florence,”  as are his wife and two children, he says.

 

 

           

 

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