The 108 Square Feet Deciding What Gets Built on Wickenden Street

"Fox Point's apparent maneuver to bypass parking standards seems to undermine the intent of the zoning regulations."

That's Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Lanphear, writing in December 2025 about a five-story building that has been fought over, redesigned, approved, and unapproved on Wickenden Street since 2023. If you live in Fox Point, you already know the corner he's talking about. What you may not know is that the entire two-year fight over 269 Wickenden Street has come down to one measurement: 108 square feet.

That's the difference between the lot's actual size and the 10,000-square-foot line in Providence's zoning code that decides whether a residential building has to provide parking. Get under that line, and the requirement disappears. Land above it, and a developer proposing 75 apartments has to find 75 parking spaces. The lot at 269 Wickenden measures 10,108 square feet. A city zoning officer had granted an administrative modification treating it as though it fell under 10,000. Lanphear's ruling voided that modification, along with the preliminary plan approval that depended on it.

The Case That Kept Restarting

The project started in 2023, when Fox Point Capital LLC, a Providence Realty Advisors entity tied to developers Dustin Dezube and Kevin Diamond, proposed demolishing the buildings at 251 and 269 Wickenden Street for a mixed-use building near the corner of Wickenden and Brook. The unit count moved as the design changed, eventually settling around 75 apartments with two ground-floor commercial spaces.

Lily Bogosian, president of the Fox Point Neighborhood Association, called the December ruling a "major victory," framing it less as a win against housing and more as a question of whether the city followed its own rules. Dustin Dezube's response was that the master plan approval still stands and that the development team will return to the City Plan Commission, once they've worked out a way to address the parking math the judge flagged.

Neither side is claiming the building is dead. What changed is that the shortcut is gone. Whatever gets built at 269 Wickenden now has to answer the same 75-space question that started this whole fight, or the developer has to shrink the project enough that the math no longer applies.

What Closed on the Same Street for Entirely Different Reasons

It's tempting to read every empty storefront on Wickenden as part of the same story. Most aren't.

Red Bridge Antiques, run by Richard Kahan for 35 years, closed at the end of June 2024 with no connection to the Fox Point Capital case. Kahan told the Fox Point Neighborhood Association he suspects his old building will eventually come down for apartments, but that decision belongs to his own landlord, on its own timeline, separate from anything happening at the corner three blocks up.

A few doors from there, the former Recovery Connection space at 381 Wickenden received a demolition notice in July 2024 after the business closed following a Medicare fraud investigation. The developer behind that redevelopment is Bahman Jalili, the former owner of Pizza Pi-er, planning 14 apartments with ground-floor commercial space. It's a different owner, a different parcel, and a different zoning path than 269 Wickenden, even though a passerby would file both under the same general heading of "another building coming down."

Then there's PVDonuts, which moved to Wickenden Street in 2023 under founder Lori Kettelle before she put the business up for sale. By 2026 it was operating under new ownership, Star Select Holdings LLC. In May 2026, the shop's landlord, Lower Wick Properties LLC, posted a commercial eviction summons on the storefront window, ordering the operator to appear in District Court. That's not a zoning story at all. It's a lease dispute between a tenant and a landlord, playing out on the same block as a headline-grabbing planning case, for reasons that have nothing to do with parking minimums or lot lines.

Three closures, three unrelated causes. The zoning fight over 269 Wickenden gets the hearings and the court dates. Lease matters and individual owners' decisions, like the ones behind these closures, don't show up on any City Plan Commission agenda.

The Places Not Waiting on Any of This

Some of Wickenden's fixtures aren't tied to either story. Amy's has been serving breakfast and coffee near the corner of Wickenden since 2000, when its founder bought the space then known as the Virgin Café with a loan from her grandmother. It's still run by the same family, alongside her sister, more than two decades later. According to the Fox Point Neighborhood Association's own description of the street, Brickway and Coffee Exchange are part of what still draws people to Wickenden, and Urban Greens Co-Op Market sits a few blocks over on South Main Street.

None of these businesses are named in the 269 Wickenden court rulings. Their day-to-day operations run separately from anything a judge or the City Plan Commission has decided.

Fox Point's other daily fixtures are similarly untouched by the case. The neighborhood is the Providence starting point for the East Bay Bike Path, more than 14 miles of waterfront trail running toward Bristol, and India Point Park and Blackstone Park remain the neighborhood's two main green spaces regardless of what happens at Wickenden and Brook.

The Rhythm That Didn't Pause

The Rhode Island Seafood Festival returned to India Point Park on September 12 and 13 this year, the same footprint it's used for over a decade, with local restaurants, regional beer and wine, and live music drawing crowds to the waterfront. It happened nine months after Judge Lanphear's ruling and while the developer was still figuring out its next move at the City Plan Commission. The festival didn't wait on the case, and neither did the rest of the neighborhood's calendar.

That's the part easy to miss if you're only following the headlines about height variances and parking exemptions. The court case determines what gets built on one lot. It doesn't determine whether Amy's opens for breakfast, whether the co-op restocks its produce, or how the lease matter at PVDonuts is resolved in District Court. Those run on their own timelines, separate from a 108-square-foot technicality in the city's parking ordinance.

Whatever eventually rises at 269 Wickenden, and whatever shape it takes once the parking math gets resolved one way or another, the street's daily character is being set by dozens of smaller, separate decisions happening at the same time, most of which never make it to a courtroom.

If you're trying to make sense of what a property on Wickenden Street or elsewhere in Fox Point is actually worth while this case works its way back through the City Plan Commission, The Moussally Group can walk you through what's changed and what hasn't. Reach out for a free market snapshot built around this specific stretch of Providence.