When it came to getting your hair done on Broad Street, Kandy’s Of Course Beauty Salon was the place to go. The owner, Kandy Rainey, lived above her beauty salon in a building named the Lola Apartments. Together, these two spaces bravely created an important nexus of community and a safe haven for trans and gender-nonconforming people in Providence. Kandy Rainey opened Kandy’s Of Course Beauty Salon in 1968. The salon was first located at 246 Broad Street at the intersection of Wickham Street, where the Upper South Providence and West Side neighborhoods meet. Providence was undergoing a massive shift at that time. The population of the city was decreasing and the city government’s hostile urban renewal policies began to push Black people and families in South Providence to the outskirts of the city. Kandy’s was located near the newly-constructed Interstate Highway 95 (I-95), which split the city of Providence in two. I-95 demarcated communities along the lines of race and class in the city. For most of Kandy’s time there, Broad Street was considered the declining outskirts of the city; but for LGBTQ+ people, the outskirts were safer than the so-called thriving parts of the city. The city itself was not a safe place for LGBTQ+ people in the 1960s, and while things improved slightly with communal events like the city’s first Pride March in 1976, LGBTQ+ people were still being harassed and assaulted by police and average citizens alike. As a sanctuary for trans people and drag performers, the Lola was more than just an apartment building; it was a family. Former resident Brian Belovitch wrote in his book, Trans Figured, “the Lola was an education at best in how to survive a life that was going to be extremely challenging.” This feeling of family and care extended to Kandy’s Of Course Beauty Salon. In its early years, below the Lola Apartments, the salon was known by the neighborhood kids who would, in Belovitch’s words, “watch the drag queens running in and out of the beauty salon.” Eventually, in the 1980s, Kandy’s moved to 802 Broad Street, a mile south of the Lola. As the only beauty salon along Broad Street for a long time, Kandy’s became an important part of the community. As so many beauty salons in Black neighborhoods do, Kandy’s Of Course provided a gathering space, a center of care, and a place of refuge. Kandy’s longstanding dedication to the neighborhood was even noticed by the local government, and Kandy received a commendation from the State of Rhode Island House of Representatives in 2005 for “outstanding and dedicated service to improve the quality of life.” Kandy’s went on for another decade and, after 49 years of serving the community, closed in 2017.

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The buses in the RIPTA parking lot on Melrose Street rest in orderly lines. Beside them, rows of cars glitter behind a chain link fence. This lot in South Providence used to echo with more than just the low rumble of engines-it was once the site of Melrose Park, a lively ballpark and home to the Providence Grays from 1906-1918. The Grays began playing in 1878, the same year that the Providence Baseball Association formed.

Their first ballpark was on Messer Street, just south of Willow Street; in 1884, they won what was, according to some, the first World Series, a playoff between the National League and the American Association. The Grays later joined the International League, and began playing in Melrose Park in 1906. The new ballpark had bleachers around two sides, a grandstand, and a dressing room on the corner where a parking attendant's hut now sits.

The highlight of the Grays' time at Melrose Park was the 1914 season; that year they won the International League championship, beating out the Baltimore Orioles 2-0 in a home game. ("Baltimore crumples under irresistible attack," reported the Providence Journal.) An important element of the Gray's "irresistible attack" was a visiting player: a mostly-unknown pitcher named George Herman Ruth, better known as Babe. Babe Ruth made his debut pitching with the Boston Red Sox in July of 1914; after two games with the Red Sox, he was sent to Providence, where he played with the Providence Grays for six weeks, helping them to win the championship before returning to Boston for the rest of the season.

Every year in early summer, Melrose Park also hosted a different kind of entertainment: the Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus. The circus would arrive with cages of animals they claimed "the largest menagerie on earth"--and more than 40 elephants, sideshow acts, and an enormous bigtop tent which they would unroll from trucks and erect in front of an eager audience. The circus attracted everyone from families to wandering pickpockets (the latter eliciting complaints from neighbors in wealthy Elmwood, whose strolls in Roger Williams Park were disrupted by unsavory wanderers in the years before I-95 separated the two areas).

When the Grays left the International League in favor of the new Eastern League 1918, they began playing at Weston Field in Cranston, and Melrose Park fell into disuse. In 1920, Whitins Machine Works purchased the field; they knocked down the grandstand and bleachers the next spring, but never built on the lot. It eventually became parking for the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority's garage on Melrose Street, with buses slumbering where ball fans and circus elephants once roamed.

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