PROVIDENCE — Six years ago a couple of developers came to the Valley neighborhood to tear down a throng of red-brick mill buildings and to build a suburban-style shopping center anchored by a supermarket.

After surviving a prolonged controversy over historical preservation and making a deal with the city, what they wound up with at Eagle Street, Atwells Avenue and Valley Street is quite different:

A supermarket and 21 to 23 other stores and restaurants, plus residential condominiums, professional office space, and, potentially, work and display spaces for artists.

A number of mill buildings were sacrificed for the project, called Eagle Square, but all or most of four mill buildings were saved for their historical value. The four are being renovated or even reconstructed.

And two of the components that the developers never intended to build, the 40 condominiums and the professional office space, have turned out to be hot items.

Gene Beaudoin, who is building the project with partner Barry Feldman, said that soon after they began to advertise the condos, they quickly presold 13. At this point, the loft-style units are nothing more than raw space in a reclaimed mill.

And all of the professional office space has been booked.

The condominiums have been so popular, Beaudoin said, that the partners are considering rehabilitating a mill at a nearby site to build more.

“My phone rings once an hour all week long with calls from people who want to buy one of these condos,” based only on a tiny classified advertisement in The Providence Journal, Beaudoin said.

At Eagle Square, there will be one- and two-bedroom condos, some configured as two-level townhouses with a mezzanine overlooking the bottom floor, selling for $185,000 to $295,000. Most are in the $215,000 to $225,000 range.

Eagle Square is 75-percent built and is expected to be complete by mid-June. The cost of the development has grown to $40 million.

In contrast to the condos and the offices, however, the artist lofts have been a dud.

Beaudoin said he has advertised the space at $15 per square foot and has had no takers. The $15, which he called a below-market price, as required by the deal with the city, includes the cost of heating, taxes and common areas.

“The experts are telling us that we have a real uphill battle,” said Steven G. Triedman, a spokesman for the developers. Artists seem to want live/work space — Eagle Square has work-only — or they cannot afford the $15-per-foot cost, he said.

What is affordable for artists, Beaudoin added, would not cover the developer’s costs.

The apparent problem is emblematic of the city’s struggle to accommodate the arts community in old mills that are costly to make safe as living places.

Artists and their boosters were among the more outspoken members of a coalition that mobilized to fight the original plan for the shopping center. They were aroused in part because a colony of young artists in a derelict mill, dubbed Fort Thunder, was evicted.

In the compromise that settled the battle, the administration of Mayor Vincent A. Cianci Jr. insisted that the project include work and display spaces for artists. It was understood that they would have to pay for their spaces, though.

Beaudoin said he does not know what would be done with the artist work/display spaces if they cannot be rented. According to the deal with the city, the developers would need permission to put the space to other use.

They probably could not be made residential condos, he said, because there would be no remaining indoor parking to offer buyers.

Of the 10 buildings in the development, four are rehabilitated: the former Uncas Manufacturing mill, the former Crawford Garden Supplies mill, the former American Woolen mill (Fort Thunder), and a small former mill office. The ground floors of the Uncas Manufacturing and American Woolen mills have been extended to provide the open spaces needed for retail stores.

The other six buildings, including a Shaw’s supermarket, are entirely new construction. At the urging of city officials and critics of the project, the developers designed the new construction to harmonize with the mills, using brick on the outside and mill-like architectural details.

One of the four floors in the Crawford Garden Supplies mill and one of the four floors in the Uncas Manufacturing mill were earmarked for artist work/display spaces.

The rest of the Crawford Garden Supplies mill and two of the three floors in the American Woolen mill will be devoted to condos.

Varying in size from 920 square feet to 1,500 square feet, the condos will feature maple floors, exposed brick walls, oversized windows and stainless-steel kitchens with granite countertops.

In the Crawford mill, the ceilings will be 17 feet high. And some of the American Woolen mill units will have 500-square-foot terraces laid out on the roof of a Staples store.

All the condo parking will be inside the American Woolen building. Residents of that building will be able to take an elevator directly to and from the garage.

That building requires drastic reconstruction: The entire wooden superstructure is being replaced with steel, and the dilapidated tarpaper and wood roof is being replaced with a rubber membrane roof.

What was a four-story building has been made a three-story building to accommodate the high ceilings of the Staples store.

As for how the condos and office space came to be, Beaudoin recalled that it took a year to negotiate with the Cianci administration which mills would be preserved, among other issues.

“We wound up with a lot of square footage that we hadn’t planned on using,” Beaudoin said.

It is not unusual to mix offices with retail, so that was one option. And the developers noted that residential condos were selling well at the refurbished Monohasset Mill, on the other side of Eagle Street, so that became the other new ingredient.

The condos have been selling, he said, because Eagle Square has ample parking and because mill or loft-style condos are popular and in short supply in the Providence metropolitan area.

Renting at $21 per square foot, mostly in the Uncas Manufacturing mill, the office space has been snapped up by a doctor, an accounting firm, and sales companies.

Software companies also are interested, and Beaudoin said the former mill office, which was set aside as restaurant space, might be devoted to offices instead.

About 170,000 square feet of space would be retail; 50,000 for residential; nearly 40,000 for offices and potentially 24,000 for artists. The figures exclude the 7,000-square-foot mill office.

The Providence Journal / by Gregory Smith