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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When the US Naval Academy in Annapolis was created by an Act of Congress in 1845, its admissions policies were codified into law. Members of Congress have the privilege of personally nominating the majority of candidates in each class. This is the story of one such candidate, Captain Reeves Ramsey Taylor (1929- ), nominated at 18 years old and the only Black student to graduate with his class in 1953.  Captain Taylor was born in 1929 and lived most of his early life at 60 Carrington Avenue in Providence. As a young man, he took an interest in the environment. Taylor once wrote a letter to the editors of the Providence Journal about the smoke coming from factories and its effect on people and the city. He was a member of the Sea Scouts and spent two summers as a seaman on fishing vessels. This enticed Taylor to the idea of a career on the sea. He set his sights on Annapolis, the US Naval Academy in Maryland.  While a student at Hope High School, Taylor involved himself in a variety of clubs. He was a member of the band, orchestra, track team, and Omnibus club, which concerned itself with race relations. As part of the band and orchestra, Taylor played the saxophone and clarinet. While Taylor was very musically inclined, he was also into photography and had his own dark room at home. He did some work for Hope High School’s “Blue and White” yearbook as well as for the Hope Log newspaper. Taylor graduated from high school in 1947 on the honor roll and in his last year won the Anthony Medal for English composition.   After high school, Taylor attended Brown University, where he joined the Naval Reserves Officers Training Corps (NROTC), one of eight programs like it in the country initiated under the direction of Brown University alumnus, Senator Theodore Francis Green. The Navy was one of Rhode Island's largest employers at the time. In 1947, after Taylor earned the highest mark on the US Service Academies joint civil service exam, Senator Green nominated him for the US Naval Academy—Taylor was said to have a 13 point lead in his score. The year before Taylor had scored second.  After graduating from the Academy in 1953 and over a distinguished military career, Taylor flew 65 Vietnam missions from the carrier USS Constellation. He led a Minority Recruiting Program for the Navy. In 1968, he was awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal. Four years later, Taylor went on to receive the Air Medal-Strike/Flight as well as the Meritorious Service Medal. Taylor received the same Meritorious medal two years later. Taylor retired from the Navy as a Captain in February of 1975.

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It was Monday, April 23, 1928. The Providence Public School Committee was holding its regular meeting at Central Fire Station on the eastern edge of Burnside Park. The room was packed. Charity Bailey (1904-1978), an accomplished pianist and recent graduate of Rhode Island College of Education, was there to give a public statement against Superintendent Isaac Winslow, who, according to multiple accounts, told Bailey that he would not appoint a Black teacher to work in the school system. Bailey, at 23 years old, had already shown herself as a gifted musician and educator. In the years leading up to the hearing, she performed with her sister Amy at the Pond Street Church and delivered a memorable performance of the spiritual “Wish I Could Die in Egypt Land” for National Music Week at Brown University’s Sayles Hall. A writer for the Providence Journal captured the scene: “Both in the rendition of the weird, dirgelike piano accompaniment and in her singing of the haunting, plaintive melody, Miss Bailey approached an artistic triumph. Prolonged applause compelled her to give an encore number, the only one of the evening.” At the same time, Bailey applied for teaching jobs. Despite strong letters of recommendation from her professors, supervisors told her that there were no vacancies. And so, Bailey advertised as a governess.  A year later Bailey was fed up. She and a member of the school committee met with Winslow, who explained that Bailey had fulfilled all of the requirements but was “not in a group of candidates eligible to become teachers.” Bailey and her mother then contacted attorney Joseph G. LeCount, legal counsel and cofounder of the Providence Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), one of the oldest NAACP branches in the country.  On April 23rd, a crowd of teachers, students, and community members filled the school committee’s meeting room in the fire station to capacity. LeCount set-up an improvised witness stand. He questioned Bailey first, then Winslow. The following day the Providence Journal printed a partial account of Winslow’s testimony. A few blocks over at the Evening Tribune, the paper’s news editor, John Carter Minkins, an African American, published a big story with extensive testimony from Bailey and Winslow, as well as reactions from the crowd. “I think it’s a lot of bunk,” said one committee member after listening to Winslow defend himself.  Later, local activists leveraged Bailey’s case to mobilize Black voters toward the Democratic Party. They ousted at least one member of the school committee who had backed Winslow and elected Democrats into high offices in exchange for support on civil rights.  Like so many promising educators at that time, Bailey left the oppressive culture of Providence for New York City, where she worked for the Federal Works Progress Administration, studied piano at Juilliard, and taught music at The Little Red School House.  Between 1954 and 1956, Bailey hosted the television show, Sing a Song, a pioneering, interacial children’s program. She recorded albums and published a bestselling book, Playtime with Music, in which she shared her progressive philosophies. Bailey challenged the traditional teachings of music appreciation. As she argued in Playtime, musical rhythm and word pattern should be felt and enjoyed by children without preliminary instruction because, “Children, like all of us, do best and learn most from that which they love to do.”

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In a 1936 Providence Journal exhibition review, the work of college student Mary Howard (1908-2011) fascinated art critic Robert Wheeler. He wrote, “It will be a strange thing if this young artist doesn’t go on a long journey. There is a rough vigor in everything she paints.” With a life spanning 102 years and an artistic career of abundance, Wheeler’s words were something of a prophecy. While Mary Howard experienced a gap in her creative productivity due to the demands of caring for her family, her “rough vigor” would sustain her artistic spirit throughout her life.  Born in 1908, Mary Cupit Howard was raised in a home on Thayer Street. In her youth, Howard developed a passion for art and found ways to finance her education during the Great Depression. After graduating from Hope High School, her skill proved strong enough to land a scholarship to the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). She attended RISD from 1927 to 1933 and gained valuable lessons from her painting professor, John F. Frazier. Following her success at RISD, Howard’s family sold some property, which funded her studies at Yale University. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Yale in 1935.  During her formative college and early career years, Howard produced acclaimed art and received many awards. Howard drew praise for her moody landscapes, her strongly-composed still lifes, and her exquisite portraits. In a studio on Eddy Street, Howard made prints and paintings. Her painting “Portrait of a Girl” won the prestigious Ives Award at RISD. It was displayed with the work of other RISD students in a young artists exhibition in 1932.  In 1936, Howard was the only woman in the state chosen to work on the RI Federal Art Project (FAP) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the agency created to fund and oversee public works projects and that provided income during the financially challenging 1930s. In November 1936, an exhibition was held at 30 Benefit Street featuring work by the young artists of the FAP-WPA. Among these artists was Mary Howard, who, in the words of Wheeler, evoked a “tonic sadness” through her atmospheric and memorably dark landscapes. Howard’s other works for the FAP-WPA included small prints of fishermen’s shacks, old houses on Benefit Street, and a large mural for the State House cafeteria depicting a family enjoying a picnic, described as “a delicately colored pastoral scene symbolizing the production and consumption of foodstuffs.” During the WPA years, Howard also painted a portrait of RI Governor Theodore Francis Greene, displayed in the Library at the University of Rhode Island until at least the 1960s.  After her marriage to Atlanta-born artist Wilmer Jennings, Mary Howard (now Jennings) was busy running a household and participating in social and civic clubs. She had three children, Corrine, Wilmar, and Laurel. Later, Howard put her vigor into teaching; She earned a Master’s degree in Education from Rhode Island College in 1969 and, for 17 years, worked in the Providence public schools as a third grade teacher. After retiring, Jennings began painting again and joined the Providence Art Club, Wickford Art Association, and RI Watercolor Society. With her lifelong talent and artistic spirit, Mary Howard Jennings created atmospheric paintings and lasting public works. She died on February 12, 2011.

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For the better part of the 20th century, the Occomy family called 85 John Street their home. Walter Calvert Occomy and Nellie White Occomy, noted humanitarians and members of the city’s Black churches, purchased the house in 1914 and it was a hub of academic and civic pursuits. Looking back at the lives of the Occomys’ three daughters gives us some sense of a family whose activities shaped the past in ways that resonate in the present.  Ruth Occomy (1891-1945) came first. Born in 1891, she graduated from Hope High School and assisted at the Providence Shelter for Colored Children, where she decided to enter nursing. The Lincoln School for Nurses in the Bronx—at the time one of the few training schools that admitted Black students—initially rejected her application, citing her small stature. Known for her strong personality, Ruth persisted in gaining an acceptance, completed her degree in 1921, and followed up with a year of courses at Columbia University Teachers’ College.  While Ruth studied nursing, her younger sisters, Katherine (1893-1980) and Nell (1897-1953), attended Hope High School. In 1910, Katherine and her husband Lawrence welcomed a son. After a few years, Katherine moved to New York City where she worked as a maid and presumably pursued her career as a dancer. In 1919, the youngest Occomy sister, Nell, graduated with a teaching degree from the State Normal School (now Rhode Island College). Because of discriminatory hiring practices in Providence public schools she moved to Harlem to seek work.  Nell flourished in New York City. She taught junior high and, like Ruth, enrolled in a post-graduate program at the Teachers’ College. In the 1930s, she honed her talents as an arts and culture writer, weighing in on debates of national importance like birth control, writing profiles of Black playwrights, and working as editor-in-chief of The Krinon, magazine of Phi Delta Kappa, a Black sorority founded in 1921 in New Jersey.  Ruth’s profession took her further from home. After a 1927 send-off that included lectures and a chorus of 200 men at Olney Street Baptist Church, Ruth sailed to London to study tropical diseases with Dr. Pauline E. Dinkins. The two then departed for Monrovia, Liberia, where Ruth worked as a missionary nurse for several years. Even when seriously ill with malaria, Ruth was not ready to abandon her post, explaining in a letter to her parents that the hospital had noticeably improved the health of a community living in the “most humble of circumstances.”  Regardless of where their careers took them, the Occomy women felt the pull of home. Nell returned to 85 John Street with her husband Leslie E. Becker for the birth of their first child. She enjoyed friendships with Providence artists, including Nancy Elizabeth Prophet. Ruth returned to the Occomy home in the 1930s to stay. She practiced nursing until suffering from an illness that ended her life in 1945. Katherine came home in the 1930s and lived at 85 John Street for the next five decades. She worked as a palm reader and raised her son, while living at home with mom, dad, brothers, grandchildren, and a handful of family friends. Katherine’s activities garnered less publicity than her sisters’, but even so we know something significant about her. She fulfilled her mother’s desires for an enduring family legacy through 85 John Street:  “I give and devise to my daughter Ruth E. Occomy for and during her natural life the real estate situated at #85 John Street, then to the survivors of my children and their heirs [to] forever share and share alike” - Nellie White Occomy, 1941

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Excitement buzzed in the lecture hall at the opening of the 21st Annual Exhibition of the Rhode Island School of Design. Members of the RISD class of 1900 were awarded their diplomas, while other students received prizes. Among the award recipients was young Thomas R. Lewis (1880-1958), a student artist who earned a scholarship based on his abilities in the evening life drawing class. Addressing the lively crowd was Professor Poland of Brown University, and at the time President of RISD, who proclaimed, “The people of Providence and of Rhode Island are beginning to feel that we have made for ourselves a place that nothing else can fill, and that we are essential to the public wealth.” If anyone in the building manifested the words of Prof. Poland that night, it was Thomas R. Lewis, who later broke the status quo as a Black entrepreneur and made essential contributions to RI’s economy through jewelry making and philanthropy.  Born on April 5, 1880, in Providence, Lewis was raised in the pre-World War II caste system where Black men were largely limited to work in physically demanding fields. As a popular athlete in high school, Lewis could certainly find work as a waiter or bellhop. However, while employed as an errand-runner at Gorham Manufacturing Company, Lewis became interested in a career as a silversmith. A Black jeweler in the early 20th century had little hope of being hired, and Lewis’s family was not supportive. Lewis’s mother died during his childhood, and his father and sister thought his goal of becoming a jeweler was not viable. Eventually, Lewis was forced out of his home. He continued to practice his craft and attended evening classes at RISD while living in a small room with a friend.  Lewis graduated with a certificate from RISD in 1902. He worked as a laborer for at least another year at Gorham before finding a place with a small manufacturer where he produced, according to his employer, designs of “extraordinary quality.” After six years there, Lewis ventured into forming his own company. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the Thomas R. Lewis Company employed an integrated workforce, with upward of 65 employees, and created designer goods that sold in luxury stores such as Saks and to the high-end cosmetics manufacturer Richard Hudnut. Lewis’s designs included lavish cigarette cases, powder compacts, and exquisite dog collars.  In 1925, a lacquer explosion in Lewis’s shop at 171 Eddy Street sparked a fire and led to damage throughout the building. Despite this, Lewis enjoyed continued success in the jewelry industry by producing great designs and giving back to his community. Most notably, the Lewis Company aided in the employment of men and women from Providence’s Black communities. Lewis knew many of his employees from their childhood, and taught them the skills they needed to work with diligence. A philanthropist, Lewis was involved in the YMCA and What Cheer Tennis Club where he sponsored social events and helped to put up tennis courts on Willett Avenue in East Providence.  At one point in his career, Thomas Lewis was reported to be one of the highest paid jewelry manufacturers in Providence. He was a respected member of the New England Manufacturing Jewelers and Silversmiths Association. While wider acclaim proved elusive, Lewis took pride in his work, his designs, and his community. In pursuing his dream, Lewis became a pioneer in the jewelry design and manufacturing industry. He died in 1958.

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Grace Lee Boggs was an activist for equality and labor justice, working with her husband James Boggs in Detroit, and reached a global community with their campaign for workers' rights and understanding across racial and ethnic boundaries.

Boggs was born over her father's Westminster Street Chinese restaurant, Chin Lee, in 1915. Her father had immigrated from China, first to the West Coast and finally to Providence, where he became a successful restaurant entrepreneur, connected to the Chinese commercial community in Rhode Island and in his home country. The family lived on Somerset Street in South Providence for a number of years before moving to New York City, where another Chin Lee Restaurant was opened. Despite the family's financial success, young Grace felt the sting of racism and sexism growing up.

Grace attended Barnard College and received a Ph.D. in philosophy from Bryn Mawr. She lived and worked as a labor and civil rights activist in Chicago, New York, and finally Detroit, where she met and married auto worker and labor leader James Boggs. Her life was spent advocating for workers rights, critiquing the capitalist economic system, and working for interracial and cultural understanding. Grace died in 2015 in Detroit.

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Arshile Gorky was a significant Surrealist painter and a father of the American Abstract Expressionist movement. He was a refugee from Armenia in 1919, where Turkish forces engaged in a mass genocide of the Armenian people.

Gorky, originally named Vosdanig Adoian, was born in Armenia around 1902. His father and half-brother immigrated to Providence around 1908, while Gorky, his mother, and sister remained in Armenia. In 1915, the three Adoians fled Van in Armenia as a Turkish siege threatened mass murder. After years of living as refugees, Gorky's mother died of starvation in 1919. Gorky and his sister, with the assistance of family friends, fled to America. For a number of years, Gorky lived on Pond Street with his father and half-brother. He worked in a factory on Elmwood Avenue while attending the Old Beacon Street School, then the Samuel Bridgham Middle School, and ultimately the Technical High School. Gorky moved to his sister's in Watertown, Massachusetts before eventually settling in New York City, where he studied and taught drawing and painting. Gorky became a practitioner of Surrealism in the 1920s and 30s and was a father of the American Abstract Expressionist movement.

Tragically, plagued by the turmoil and upheavals of his life, Gorky committed suicide in 1948.

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In 1800, Providence had about 7,000 people. By 1900, the city was bursting with over 175,000 and still growing. The downtown commercial district, once centered on a stretch of North Main Street by the Market House, now extended across the Providence River and dominated Westminster and Weybosset Streets. The old wood-frame and Federal-style homes were replaced by brick and stone business blocks. Cathedral Square, which had been lined with handsome residences, had become commercial, too, as the trolley lines opened new fashionable neighborhoods to the west and south.

Entertainment as a form of commerce had grown along with industry and a larger laboring and middle class. After the Civil War, there were resorts like the Sans Souci Gardens near the intersection of Broadway and Jackson Streets where you could see comedic operettas like Little Lord Fauntleroy. The Academy of Music and Howard Hall served as assembly spaces and entertainment venues--featuring the singers of the Pond Street Baptist Church, the African-American singing sensation the Hyers Sisters, and political speakers like Frederick Douglass. Soon "museums" and nickel theaters sprang up around the intersection of Westminster and Mathewson Streets.

Entertainment impresario Colonel Felix Wendelschaefer had been the manager of the Providence Opera House, but he also saw opportunity in the city's westward growth. In partnership with Charles Allen, who had run the Star Theatre in the old High Street Congregational Church for a season, the Colonel opened the Imperial Theatre in 1902 with a gala performance by the Four Cohans to a sold-out house. The luxurious theatre interior was described as Italian Renaissance. The upper floors of the building were dedicated to bachelor apartments, also reported to be the most well-appointed in the city.

However, it turned out to not be easy to draw crowds up the hill to the Imperial. Within a few years, the theatre converted to vaudeville. One neighbor of the theatre was the Women's Political Equality League, who in 1915, protested the vulgar burlesque being offered in the theatre, now dubbed the Colonial. Public boxing exhibitions, too, were banned at the theatre by the police commissioner, another sign of the friction around morals and entertainment in the city.

By the 1930s, Providence had entered a slow and painful decline. The theater became seedier, a true "scratch house," a place where you scratched yourself from the fleas jumping off the seats. The apartments became the Del Mar and police reports reflected the change in clientele. After World War II, as the city's decline accelerated, the theatre ended up as an abandoned ruin sitting next to the Grace and Hope Mission. No clearer example of the changes in the city's fortune can be found.

The building was taken down in the late 1960s as part of I.M. Pei's plan for the redevelopment of the Weybosset Hill area, including Cathedral Square, thus adding another layer in the life of the city.

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In 1889, the Young Men's Christian Association opened a grand new Romanesque Revival building on a prominent corner of Westminster Street in Cathedral Square. The building contained a gymnasium, auditorium, classrooms, libraries, parlors, and reception areas. The Y, which had been formed in 1853, the second in the United States, had been born out of anxieties around industrialization and urbanization. Young men coming from the country were vulnerable to the temptations of the corrupt city, so a group of evangelical churches created a space for white Christian men. In the 35 years from the creation of the YMCA to the construction of this grand new building, the organization adapted--and would continue to adapt--to the changing needs of the growing city. The YMCA had been formed to provide moral instruction, but this new Y also offered professional and language classes, skills training, an employment bureau, as well as a gymnasium. The library was open to all--men and women--as were the lectures and events. Over time, the organization opened its doors wider, dropping its religious requirements. Confronted with accusations of racism and segregation around World War I, the Providence YMCA affirmed that its open-to-all policy included Black residents of the city.

Similarly, an evangelical Christian organization for women was established in 1867, initially focusing on boarding houses for single women who worked in the city. The Young Women's Christian Association, along with a similar organization that was formed in 1889, the Providence Evangelical Young Women's Christian Association (the two merged in 1902), also offered lectures and classes, including some focused on technical skills like telegraphy, typewriting, and stenography. In 1906, the YWCA opened a brick building on the corner of Jackson and Washington Streets, which still stands today, offering more rooms for women to meet the continuing demand for good housing. A YWCA gymnasium was opened on the top floor of the Columbia Bicycle Building on Snow Street in 1898.

As the city's population peaked at close to 250,000 around World War I, both organizations continued to expand and adapt. Unfortunately, the grand YMCA building was obsolete within 25 years. The Stone, Carpenter and Willson building was demolished to make way for an office block in the transformed square. A new, larger building with accommodations was built on Broad Street, where it still stands today, now adapted to providing support and services to the city's homeless. Both the YMCA and YWCA today focus on mind, body, and spirit. Each organization also focuses on social justice and open doors, reflecting the evolution of these organizations as well as the city and communities they serve.

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In September 1878, a "magnificent" new high school was dedicated on Pond Street from plans made by prominent Providence architect William H. Walker. The old high school at Benefit and Waterman Streets had been overcrowded for years. The expansion of the school system--both the number of students served and the buildings that served them--was one of Mayor Thomas Doyle's major achievements during his eighteen years as mayor. Throughout the 19th and into the 20th Century, the city had always played catch-up to its exploding student population and the complex needs of its diverse, global youth.

The public school system around 1878 included one high school, eleven grammar schools, thirty-five intermediate schools, and forty primary schools, serving over 12,000 students, both boys and girls as well as Black and white. See Maritcha Lyons' story about the integration of the public school system in 1866. Mayor Doyle's sister, Sarah Doyle, was principal of the girls' department of the high school and an important advocate in the fight for equal education for women.

The battle over public education in Rhode Island had been fought for centuries already. Town leaders in the 17th Century struggled with creating a common school and how to pay for it. Under pressure in 1800 from newly influential groups like the Providence Association of Mechanics and Manufacturers, the General Assembly created a state-financed public school system, but reversed course in 1803 in a conservative backlash. Providence had to fund its public school system independently until the state passed a new public education law in 1828.

A schoolhouse was first built on Pond Street in 1819. This stretch of the street became a focal point for city schools, with a grammar school first, then the English High School (1878), the Manual Training High School (1892), Classical High School (1897), and Central High School (1921). This concentration led to the redevelopment of the school campuses in the late 1960s. Most of the old schools were demolished, including the English High School, to make way for new, modern school buildings and a more campus-like feel, with playing fields and open space.

Today's Providence school system comprises 41 schools serving over 24,000 students who speak 55 different languages and trace culture and heritages to 91 countries. Providence still struggles to provide the basics of an education for its young people. The challenges of defining what a public education means also remain as complex and controversial as they were over two hundred years ago.

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Eva Belle Clemence lived and worked in Providence as an independent artist, a difficult space for a woman to find success in early 20th-Century America.

Clemence was born in Worcester, Mass., in 1869, but her father Martin was from Rhode Island, tracing his lineage back to 17th-Century Providence. He had made a career as an actor, but ill health forced him to give up acting and take up graining, a popular faux finishing treatment in many 19th-Century homes. He had encouraged his daughter to act as well, and she was remembered for her childhood roles in stage plays like Uncle Tom's Cabin, Rip Van Winkle, and William Tell. Like her father, Eva Belle gave up acting and eventually took up painting.

In a profile from 1913, Eva remembered a family friend showing her how to paint flowers on porcelain, something she excelled at and which became a focal point of her career. She painted Colonial clock faces, belt buckles, hair pins, even rocks. Recognizing the difference between work as a commercial artist versus the fine arts, she said she didn't have time for headaches. She was a member of the Providence Art Club, the Providence Watercolor Club, the Handicraft Club and the Basement Studio Group.

In 1913, at the age of 44, Eva married John P. Evans. When Central High School was being built, her family home at 17 Spring Street was purchased by the city and demolished. Eva Belle and John moved to boarding houses and later an apartment on Providence Street. She died in 1947.

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In the summer of 1840, Perry Davis was sick. Physically, debilitatingly sick. His businesses had failed, one after another. His family was living in penury. He had, however, an enterprising spirit and creative mind. He concocted a combination of opiates, ethyl alcohol, and herbs, and miraculously, he felt better. He dubbed the tonic "Perry Davis' Vegetable Pain-Killer" and even trademarked the term, which we still use today. He began hobbling from door to door, walking as far as Boston to share his new miracle drug. Not surprisingly, a mixture of highly addictive narcotics and alcohol found its market. Davis' Pain-Killer was the beginning of a phenomenon of patent medicines and tonics in the 19th century. Davis moved his family and his manufactory to Pond Street and became one of Providence's wealthiest and most philanthropic citizens.

Davis' elixir travelled the globe, becoming one of the first global brands. He was a devout Baptist and interestingly a life-long temperance advocate. He sent free cases of his "medicine" to Baptist missions around the world and dubbed himself Dr. Davis. His product was promoted door-to-door, in pharmacies and apothecaries, and in newspapers, magazines, and trade cards. The Pain-Killer was one of the first medicines to not address a specific ailment, but to promise freedom from pain, any type of pain. Ague-wracked sailors, injured mill women, gouty fathers, female complaints, babies' scratches or colic, all could be cured with the Pain-Killer. Davis said it was a medicine cabinet in a bottle, and trade cards showed winged cherubs carrying the elixir next to the words "Joy to the World." At the time of Davis' death in 1862, during the Civil War, the Pain-Killer was so crucial to the Union Army that they took control of the factory on Pond Street.

While making a fortune from his product, Davis engaged in city politics. He built a handsome brick church at the corner of Stewart and Pond Street. His own brick mansion stood beside the church. His son Edmund, richer still, built an extravagant brick mansion right on Westminster Street near the factory. The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 began to limit the availability of patent medicines, but Davis' tonic continued to be sold into the 1940s.

Today, only images and paper ephemera of Perry Davis' life remain to help us understand the contradictions of this world and the judgments we might make about a man whose fortune was built on the fleeting promise of an escape from pain.

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Providence's population grew at an extraordinary rate throughout the 19th Century, from about 50,000 in 1850 to 175,000 in 1900, driven by the region's ever-expanding industrial complex. Providence was at the heart of New England's industrial boom--that boom was started and maintained by the production of cotton and woolen cloth.

No titans sat higher on the apex of industry than Benjamin Brayton Knight and his brother Robert. Irish, Italian, and other immigrants of the 19th Century provided the labor that created the spectacular wealth of these two men. Here on this corner bordering the interstate is where B.B. Knight built his showplace around 1861: a mansion in the French style with a high mansard roof, expansive gardens, and a brick carriage house with greenhouses behind it. The service buildings sat on a narrow alleyway called Angle Street, which was also a center of African-American community in this neighborhood. Just a few yards down Broad was Hoyle Street, one of the most impoverished enclaves of Irish immigrants in the city. These strong contrasts reflected the reality of urban life in 19th Century Providence: wealthy, working class, and poor, living shoulder to shoulder.

Benjamin Knight and his brother Robert grew up on a farm in Cranston; both went into business at a young age. Benjamin in dry goods, while Robert began working in the mills he would later own. Well-connected, the brothers were able to leverage capital and opportunity to expand their business interests. Their partnership B.B. & R. Knight was formed in 1849 with the purchase of the Pontiac Mill. During the Panic of 1873, a catastrophic economic crisis on a scale of the Great Depression, the once-wealthy Sprague family lost their textile mill empire to bankruptcy, and the Knight brothers scooped up more properties, becoming one of the largest mill combines in the world.

At the time of Benjamin's death in 1898, the firm owned 21 cotton mills in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, housing a total of 11,000 looms, 400,000 spindles, and employing close to 7,000 people. They also owned fifteen mill villages where housing and goods for sale were owned and managed by the company. Many of these mills employed the new arrivals to this country, and in Knight's own mansion, young Irish women worked as servants as they struggled to gain their footing in a new and confusing world.

After the turn of the century, New England mills entered a period of decline, and after Robert and Benjamin's deaths, the business was broken up. But, their signature brand "Fruit of the Loom" still exists. Knight's extravagant mansion, a monument to the wealth and power concentrated in the hands of a single person, was demolished in 1915 to make way for a car dealership, which too met the wrecking ball when the neighborhood was bulldozed for the interstate in the late 1950s.

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Maritcha Lyons was an African-American teacher, writer, and activist who testified before the General Assembly as a 16-year-old girl to desegregate the Providence Public School System. In 1869, she was the first African-American to graduate from Providence High School.

Lyons was born in New York City in 1848. During the New York City Draft Riots of 1863, Black people, homes and businesses were targeted and attacked, including Maritcha's family. The Lyons fled the city, ultimately resettling in Providence. Her father made and sold ice cream and other frozen desserts and her mother was a hairdresser. They lived at 16 B Street, two doors down from the celebrated painter Edward Mitchell Bannister and his wife, Christina Bannister, also a successful hairdresser and activist. The Providence public school system was segregated at the time, and there was no high school for students of color. Black community leaders like George T. Downing had petitioned for equal access to the city's schools for years, but the requests did not gain traction until the end of the Civil War. Because of her testimony, Maritcha became the first African-American graduate of Providence High School in 1869. She went on to become a civic leader, educator, writer, and activist in Brooklyn, New York. Lyons supported African-American anti-lynching activist and journalist Ida B. Wells and co-founded the White Rose Mission in Brooklyn, New York, an organization that offered support to Black immigrants from the South and West Indies.

Maritcha Lyons died in Brooklyn in 1929.

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The Second Free Will Baptist Church (SFWBC) is one of the oldest Black congregations in Providence, formed around 1830 by a group who left the African Union Meeting House, itself formed from the departure of African-American congregants from the white-dominated First Baptist Church in 1819. By the early 1840s, the SFWBC had a church on the west side of the growing city, and in 1842, a new church building was erected at the corner of Pond and Angle Streets, where it would remain for over one hundred years. From its origins, church members were politically active, choosing to join the Free Will denomination because of its opposition to slavery rather than the Baptist convention, which countenanced bondage at that time.

From 1846 until the Civil War, Reverend Edward Scott, himself a man who escaped slavery in Virginia, led the congregation and organized annual Emancipation Day parades to agitate for abolition in this country. Reverend Scott also led the community in action to advocate for equal rights for people of color. Another notable congregant included Sissieretta Jones, the most famous African-American soprano of the late 19th Century, singing at the White House and Carnegie Hall as well as internationally. The activism of the church continued into the 20th Century with pastors like the Reverend Dr. Samuel DeWitt Proctor, an educator, college president, and political activist. Congressman Joseph E. Newsome was also a member of the church, chair of the Board of Trustees, and church organist. While attending a conference in Ivory Coast, Newsome learned of the struggle of Liberian students in the midst of civil war and organized an exchange program that brought many Liberian students to Providence. Many of those students became residents of Providence and members of the church. They continue the church's tradition of providing a haven for immigrants and refugees in a dangerous world.

When the city announced in the early 1960s that it would purchase and demolish the church's home on Stewart Street, the congregation entered a period of crisis and uncertainty. Deacon Ralph Simmons was among those who chose to keep the congregation together and build a new home on Chester Avenue in South Providence. Deacon Simmons is the living memory of the church. He joined the congregation in the 1940s and has been gathering, preserving, and sharing the church's history since that time.

Today, the church building contains the pews and old woodwork of their former home on Stewart Street and embodies a long tradition of activism, community, and welcome.

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I want to thank Deacon Ralph Simmons for his hard work over many years gathering and preserving the archives of the church and for his generosity in sharing that work.

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During the early 19th Century, textile mills, like Grant Mill in the city of Providence, were being built across Rhode Island. The textile industry required hands to work the many machines that produced the new wealth, and Providence’s population grew dramatically with this industrial expansion. From 7,000 inhabitants around 1800, the city had near 20,000 in 1835 and 50,000 in 1860--seven times the 1800 population in three generations.

The pull of the new industries drew people from not just local and regional farms and towns, but from across oceans too. A new wave of immigrants began to pour into Rhode Island in the 1820s, first to build canals and railroads, and later to labor in the mills. This wave was drawn largely from Ireland, reaching a peak during the Irish Famine of the 1840s. In 1860, about 10,000 (or 20%) of the inhabitants of Providence had been born in Ireland. When American-born children of Irish immigrants are included, they made up about 40% of the total population of the city, a radical transformation.

Back in the 1830s, when there were only a few hundred Irish families in Providence, the first Catholic parish in the city was organized to serve the spiritual needs of these new arrivals. Father John Corry, an Irish immigrant himself, was appointed parish priest and began to look for a site to build a church. He found it impossible to buy a plot of land himself. Protestant-dominated Providence did not want to sell land for a Catholic church. Prejudice against Catholicism--and Irish immigrants in particular--was widespread. Francis Hye, one of the few Irish arrivals to become a citizen at the time, was able to purchase a plot along High Street where the Cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul stands today. He bought the land from Isaac Mathewson in Duty Greene’s store near Hoyle Square, today’s Canonicus Square. When Mathewson learned that Hye intended to transfer the land to the Catholic diocese, the story goes, he offered to buy back the lot at a significant premium, but Corry refused, realizing the value of the land and its position in the westward growing city.

The first Cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul--the first Catholic parish in the city serving these new immigrants from Ireland--was dedicated in 1838. In 1872, when Rhode Island was elevated to a Catholic diocese, the newly appointed bishop planned a grand new cathedral to serve the ever-expanding Catholic population of the city. The Cathedral became a monument to the Irish Catholic experience in Providence, facing hostility and prejudice, but ultimately reweaving the fabric of the city to become central to its civic life.

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I want to thank Diocesan Historian Reverend Robert Hayman for his hard work assembling a history of the Catholic Church in Rhode Island and his generosity in sharing that work.

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While redevelopment often erases a city's past, the constant re-building of a city over time also leads to the loss of historical memory. One such site is 755 Westminster Street, a historic building from 1899, which replaced the High Street Congregational Church originally built in 1835.

In the 1830s, Providence was still in the first phase of industrial expansion, growing from less than 7,000 people around 1800 to almost 20,000 by the mid-1830s. At the time, churches were often at the center of people's lives and informed how they understood their place in the world.

Congregationalism is a Protestant sect that still exists today and was born out of the Puritan faith brought to this area with the English immigrants of the 17th Century. By the 1830s, Congregationalists were one of the leading faiths in Providence, along with Episcopalians, Baptists, Methodists, and Universalists: all Protestants. The Second Great Awakening, a religious movement that was spurred--in part--by anxiety around changes in society caused by industrialization, revitalized religious life in the early 19th Century. At the time, many churches focused not just on an afterlife, but on reforming the living world through moral practice and belief. They often supported the education of women, the strict observance of the Sabbath day, total abstinence from tobacco and alcohol, and notably, the abolition of slavery.

While the economic expansion of Providence was tied to the cotton produced by enslaved people in the South, that expansion also reshaped society and produced social movements that targeted the roots of those changes. Many Protestant sects, following the early moral leadership of the Quakers, became staunchly anti-slavery. In 1836, this movement gathered itself for the first meeting of a statewide organization dedicated to the abolition of slavery. They met at the High Street Congregational Church, newly built on this site. Over 200 people gathered here for speeches and lectures and famous Boston abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison made an appearance.

The Rhode Island Anti-Slavery Society continued to agitate for the end of slavery until after the Civil War when the U.S. Constitution was amended to abolish it. After the war, the High Street Church reorganized, and the building became the home of the State Normal School, a teachers' college that eventually became Rhode Island College. For a short time in the 1890s, the church was the Star Theatre, which burned in 1899 and was replaced by the brick business block that still stands at 755 Westminster Street...another layer in the evolution of the ever-changing city.

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The redevelopment of Cathedral Square in the late 1960s left few traces of what this busy city intersection once was. One of those remaining traces is the Arnold-Palmer house, moved in 1967 through the prescient preservation efforts of the Beneficent Congregational Church, to its current location at the corner of Pine and Chestnut Streets.

When the house was built, Cathedral Square was changing from a place where farmers weighed their produce on a hay scale to a posh residential district. The local economy had been transformed by the rise of finance and industry in New England. The need for labor drove immigration. All the new people and new jobs created new markets. The newly wealthy from this economic expansion were merchants and mill owners who built fine brick homes like the Arnold-Palmer House.

Daniel Arnold did well in the economic expansion of the 1820s and 30s. His trade focused on flour, but he speculated in cotton as well, as did almost all of the merchants who built their homes in the square at this time. Around 1830, five Federal-style brick mansions were built in a row on the north side of the square. Architectural historian Norman Isham has attributed these residences to skilled and prolific Providence builder John Holden Greene, whose signature monitor roof and fine craftsmanship argue for this attribution. Another merchant, Orray Taft, built his house at the corner of Jackson Street. His business focused almost exclusively on the cotton trade with Southern ports like Savannah, Mobile, and New Orleans. Emma Taft, Orray's daughter, remembered that her father had spent his early business years in Savannah where he had met Greene, who was there to build a church.

Connections between Southern cotton ports and businessmen like Taft and Arnold--as well as architects like Greene--demonstrate how tightly bound Rhode Island's industrial economy was with Southern cotton and the enslaved people who produced it. Those ties would remain as long as there were cotton mills in Rhode Island.

By the 1850s, Arnold's house was sold to Joseph Palmer, who, through the firm of Palmer & Capron, manufactured gold rings in Providence's growing jewelry business. By the 1950s, the demographic and economic decline of the city altered Cathedral Square from the wealthy residential square and busy commercial district it had been. The house had become the Grace & Hope Mission, a nonprofit focused on providing support and services for the most vulnerable in the city. By the late 1960s, the wrecking ball threatened, and thankfully, the congregants of the Beneficent Congregational Church preserved this rare piece of the past.

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In the early 19th century, the agricultural and mercantile economy of Providence was transformed by the Industrial Revolution in America, begun in nearby Pawtucket at Slater Mill. One essential ingredient for this transformation was capital. Money. The ability to gather funds from investors who were willing to extend potentially risky loans to entrepreneurs who were developing new methods of production.

Here, in Canonicus Square, there still remains one such institution formed at the time of the early industrial expansion that was driven by cotton and woolen mills. Citizens Bank now sits at the intersection of Westminster and Cranston Streets on the site of the old Hoyle Tavern (another institution of finance and exchange from another age). Citizens Bank, however, got its start just a few dozen yards east where the High Street Bank was established in 1828. The first bank established in Rhode Island was the Providence Bank in 1791, organized by local merchants who took advantage of the young country's new banking laws to pool their capital to fund ventures in shipping and industry.

By the early 19th century, smaller mechanics and entrepreneurs were opening banks to aggregate capital for their projects. Around the time the High Street Bank was formed, Rhode Island had more than 60 commercial banks, the largest number of banks per person in the country, and the highest per capita amount of funds and notes in circulation. This capital greased the wheels of the Industrial Revolution.

By the late 19th century, New England was the most capitalized region on the planet. Local merchants and leaders of the new industries were the founding partners of the High Street Bank, like Amasa Sprague, owner of a number of cotton mills and a governor of the state. Within a few steps of the bank, original founders Duty Greene and Robert Knight had stores that were also places of exchange and deal-making. Robert Knight's two nephews, Benjamin and another Robert, later became the most significant cotton mill owners in the country. Having an uncle on the board of a bank would have been a valuable connection for these early entrepreneurs.

Around 1800, Rhode Island banks reported capital stock from investors of a few hundred thousand dollars. By about 1860, the Rhode Island banking system had capital stock of $18.7 million; over half a billion dollars in today's money. As the city's economic fortunes declined in the mid-twentieth century, so did its financial sector, leaving only a few traces of this crucial component of Providence's once spectacular economic growth.

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Reverend Edward Scott was a political activist and anti-slavery agitator who had, himself, escaped from slavery in Virginia before becoming a minister and community leader.

Scott was born a slave in Virginia around 1812. He freed himself as well as others, eventually settling in Maine where he became a Baptist preacher. He led the Second Free Will Baptist Church (also known as the Pond Street Baptist Church) from about 1846 until 1864, living first on Angle Street as a boarder with the Gears family, also members of the church, and eventually with his wife at 54 Pond Street. Scott also worked as a clock and watch repairer with a shop at 98 High Street (today's Westminster Street).

In 1848, Scott led a public meeting that was widely attended to protest the expulsion of an African-American passenger from the Stonington and Providence Rail Road, one of the last unintegrated rail systems in New England. After 1854, he led the August 1st Emancipation Day celebration that promoted abolition in this country. The event included an invitation to all to march in a procession through the city and ended with speeches and a collation on Smith Hill. After Federal troops captured the South Carolina coastal islands during the Civil War, Scott travelled there to work with the Freedmen's Aid Society--helping the newly emancipated people adjust to freedom.

Reverend Scott died in South Carolina around 1864.

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Right here in the heart of the city lies a trace of an ancient trailway used by the Indigenous Peoples who inhabited this region for thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans. This stop is located on a ridge of land looking east over the floodplain of a tidal marsh--today's downtown Providence. Much of downtown was an estuary, flooded at high tide except for a finger of land that pointed toward the east side about where the College Street bridge is today.

The Pequot Trail, leading from the tribal lands of the Pequots and Niantics in today's Connecticut, then through Narragansett lands, followed the high ground here into the marsh to that easterly pointing finger where you could wade across the river at low tide to reach the Wampanoag lands on the other side. The trail continued north to the lands of the Massachusetts, Nipmucs, and other tribes.

Weybosset (the street you're on) is a Narragansett word meaning the crossing or half-way point.

Narragansett villages, large and small, could be found every few miles along these trails and highways throughout Rhode Island. A complex network of Native communities existed across southern New England, estimated as high as 100,000 people when Europeans arrived.

This native society and its culture were disrupted by devastating conquest after the explorations of this region by Europeans in the late 16th Century. Just imagine the shock and confusion of the survivors of the "Great Dying" years of 1617-1619 when some coastal communities suffered mortality rates as high as 90%, the Wampanoag being particularly affected. Over the next fifty years, scholars estimate more than 30,000 English people arrived on the New England coast, establishing settlements, first trading and living peaceably with these First Peoples, and then as English encroachments increased, coming into greater conflict, culminating in the brutal and bloody King Philip's War of 1675-76.

Today, we still remember some of those First Peoples who lived on these lands. Massasoit and Metacomet, father and son and leaders of the Wampanoag people in peace and war. Narragansett leaders Canonicus and Miantonomi who sustained the English colonists but were ultimately betrayed by them. In 1638, Canonicus and Miantonomi made an agreement with Roger Williams over this land whose meaning is still debated today.

Despite conquest, disease, forced assimilation, and the impacts of industrialization and urbanization, the First Peoples of Southern New England have survived and continue to practice and preserve their history and tradition. Today, the Narragansett Indian Tribal Nation is one of many tribal nations that preserve their history, continue their culture, and pass down their traditions. For more information about that history, spend time exploring the First Peoples of Rhode Island Rhode Tour.

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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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Field's Point sits at the southeastern tip of Providence, jutting out into the Narragansett Bay. The shoreline is studded with broken reeds, stones, and sea-worn trash; seagulls and brants bob in the water. Worn foot paths lead wanderers through an industrial area with swaths of open space and waterfront, past the headquarters of Save the Bay. Geographically removed from most of the city, Field's Point has been used for a huge variety of purposes: summer cottages, a shore dinner hall, the city's sewage treatment plant, a Revolutionary War fort, military ship-building, a smallpox quarantine hospital, a yacht club, and a liquefied natural gas storage facility. For thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans, the peninsula was home to a Narragansett Indian village, and numerous sites of indigenous artifacts remain on and near the point.

In 1824, the City of Providence bought the land on Field's Point for a smallpox hospital where patients could be housed in relative isolation, away from crowded neighborhoods and tenement houses where the disease spread quickly. The resulting structure was "a homely affair" with "a rough unfinished frame" and a poor water supply. Renovations in 1892 and 1902 overhauled the plumbing and brought electric lights; that same year, the (not necessarily unbiased) Report of the Superintendent of Health noted that the smallpox hospital on Field's Point offered "very comfortable accommodations" for 12 to 14 patients.

The proximity of recreational facilities to the hospital was a point of concern for the Superintendent of Health, who noted that "the small-pox hospital is situated... on a bluff about 600 feet from the clam-house, where the guests are entertained during the summer months. The wharf is perhaps 300 feet from the hospital and a much used path runs along the foot of the bank about 200 feet from the hospital. There are fifteen or twenty summer cottages from 500 to 1,000 feet from the hospital, and a much used road about 450 feet distant."

His concerns were proven warranted when, in 1901, Asa Witter, a stable hand on Field's Point, contracted smallpox. Witter was immediately moved into quarantine, and the stable was sprayed down with disinfectants. It was later determined that, unable to work after breaking his arm, Witter had visited with hospital attendants to pass the time (believing himself immune, having had smallpox previously), and presumably contracted the disease from this close contact rather than through long-distance airborne contagion.

The smallpox hospital at Field's Point remained in use until the Providence City Hospital (later Chapin Hospital) opened in 1910 on the current grounds of Providence College. The abandoned hospital was torn down following a 1918 resolution.

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The dirt and gravel parking lot at the corner of South Water Street and Tockwotton Street is modestly sized, giving little clue to the extensive iron foundry complex that once existed on the site. The Fuller Iron Works, founded in 1840, was a manufacturer of "small steam engines; but particularly hoisting for a great variety of uses--coal docks, quarries, ships' use, etc. Also ice elevators, machinery, castings of all kinds, water steam, and gas pipe, and every variety of special castings for same," according to The New England States.

In 1840, Frederick Fuller purchased a series of wooden buildings that the Fox Point Foundry Company had built but never operated; he filled them with equipment and opened his iron foundry that same year. When he died in 1865, his sons, Frederic and George, inherited the business; they eventually tore down the wooden buildings, erecting a dramatic, brick and steel replacement in 1893. The main iron works adjoined an older, 3-story brick building (still standing), which served as the machine shop. To the rear was the office, foundry, and a large fenced yard, extending into what, in 2019, is a grassy field bordering South Main Street.

The works was designed and built by Berlin Iron Bridge Company of Berlin, CT, which produced large steel support beams for bridges and industrial buildings. It was a notable building during an era of innovations in steel framing, with long expanses of windows alongside load-bearing brick curtain walls enclosing a steel frame. The striking, heavy ribbed-glass windows on three sides filled the cathedral-like interior space with "perfectly diffused light." One source claimed that "it is probably the best lighted machine shop in the country." A foundry building was added in 1901, using the same glass and steel construction technique.

After the iron works closed, the building briefly housed a nightclub and other sundry businesses in a portion of the cavernous space; at some point the windows were covered over with asbestos tiles, which remained in place until right before the building was demolished in early 2012. As of 2019, the building site is a surface parking lot, with a sign advertising a "mixed-use development opportunity."

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Built in 1828, Dexter Asylum was a "poor farm," an institution housing the indigent, elderly, and chronically unemployed. Poor farms were common before the introduction of Social Security and welfare benefits in the United States, considered a progressive method for dealing with poverty. Their residents followed strict rules and worked for communal benefit, usually in farming, cooking, and other "industrious" endeavors.

The parcel on which the Asylum sat was formerly owned by Ebenezer Knight Dexter. Upon his death, Dexter bequeathed his land to the City of Providence, stipulating that a poor farm must be built upon it within 5 years and that it could not be sold or used for any other purpose.

Dexter's will also described the stone wall that was to surround the property: "a good permanent stone wall, at least three feet thick at the bottom, and at least eight feet high, and to be placed upon a foundation made of small stones, and as thick as the bottom of the wall and sunk two feet deep in the ground." This massive wall ended up taking eight years and more than $12,000 to construct; a report at an 1840 Town Meeting noted that the completed wall was 6,220 ½ feet long and contained 7840 cords of stone!

The Dexter Asylum's residents worked extensive vegetable fields and cared for pigs and a herd of dairy cows; they lived in a large building, strictly segregated by sex. Residents were essentially inmates, indentured for periods of six to twelve months, and could not leave the property without a ticket of permission. Their schedules and activities were determined by a committee and meticulously enforced. Bells signaled work times, meal times, and wake and sleep times. Residents could be put into solitary confinement for up to two days for swearing, and up to a week for refusing to work. Morning and evening meals centered around white bread, with the midday supper consisting of, for example, "stewed beans or peas and pork, brown bread, boiled rice and molasses."

By the early 1900s, the poor farm model was falling out of favor. The city began seeking to sell the Asylum around 1919, but due to the specific wording of Dexter's will, had to jump through decades of legal hoops to clear the land for sale. During the course of the legal proceedings, the main barn and another building burned; an Asylum employee later admitted to setting the fires.

The Dexter Asylum was sold to Brown University in 1957 for $1,000,777. The last inmate moved out that year, and a massive sale dispersed the Asylum's fixtures and furnishings. The land now houses Brown's athletic complex, with a baseball stadium's neat green grass where rows of corn and pasture once stood.

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Like many parts of Providence, the athletic fields beside Hope High School are built on fill, but unlike buildings along the old waterfront or over marshy ponds, these fields are built over a former man-made reservoir that served an important role in the city's water system.

When European colonists first began settling in Providence, their primary source of drinking water was wells dug deep in private yards, but the city's booming population in the 19th century began to both tax and pollute the city's well water supply. A report from the 1853 Committee on the Proposed Water Works maintained that a new water source was necessary as "into the sand, underlying the city, are deposited quantities of excrementitious matter, which, were it not susceptible of demonstration, would appear almost incredible. With our present population there is deposited on this sand about one hundred tons of excrementitious matter every twenty-four hours."

This argument was presumably compelling, for a municipal water system was introduced in 1872. It drew water from the Pawtuxet River and delivered it as-is into businesses and homes. (A sand-based filtration system was introduced in 1906.) In order to distribute water to neighborhoods at higher elevations, the system employed a series of holding reservoirs and high-powered pumping stations.

The pumping house at the Hope Reservoir, built in 1873, had two Corliss pumping engines, marble floors, walnut woodwork, and a dramatic tower with a cupola. The adjoining reservoir held 76,000,000 gallons of water on 15.6 acres of land; at 162.5 feet above sea level, it was well-positioned to deliver water to residents at higher elevations.

During Providence's rapid population growth in the early 20th century, water supply from the Pawtuxet River became inadequate, with water being drawn from backup storage tanks and other supplies during droughts. In the mid-1920s, construction began on the Scituate Reservoir, a massive reservoir that is still in use today.

The Hope Reservoir sat unused for some years; city officials decided in 1928 to use it for a school, with much-needed athletic fields, and drained it the next year, but the site remained vacant. (A 1931 news article described wayward East Side youth clambering down the reservoir's steep walls to skate and play hockey on the smooth ice at the bottom.) In 1936, Hope High School was finally constructed; its playing fields stretch across the former reservoir's footprint.

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At 43 Camp Street, passers-by see a school playground, shaded by a stand of pine trees and surrounded by a chain link fence. During recess, children's excited shouts reach the sidewalk. The adjoining playing field is flat and grassy, belying the fact that, in decades past, the block was filled with houses, one of which contained a shop with a steady stream of customers: fashionable women with gloves and handbags seeking the renowned hair styling services of one Mrs. Beulah Boyd Jackson.

Beulah Boyd's Camp Street beauty parlor was situated in the front of her house in the predominantly African-American Mount Hope neighborhood. It was one of the first beauty parlors in the state to serve an African-American clientele, with customers traveling from the farthest reaches of Rhode Island to have "Miss Boyd" style and set their hair. (Over the years, she also operated the same shop from locations on Lippitt Street, Prospect Street, North Main Street, and another location further down Camp Street.) Former customers described Beulah's fine sense of humor and reminisced about eating and talking while waiting for hair appointments.

The beauty parlor was a family affair: Beulah ran it with her sister, Margaret Boyd Mayo, while their sons often played in the adjoining house. Beulah and Margaret were born on a Virginia farm, two of six children. After their mother's early death they were sent to live with relatives; Beulah came to live with an older married brother in Providence, and Margaret later joined her. The two lived with or nearby each other for their entire lives. Beulah's husband Raymond Jackson was a machinist at the time of their marriage in the 1930s; after the factory where he worked closed, he trained as a hairdresser as well, joining Beulah and Margaret in their beauty parlor where he styled hair until his death in 1951.

From 1940 until 1955, Beulah Boyd's beauty parlor was listed in the Negro Travelers' Green Book, an annual publication designed to guide African-American road trippers to safe and friendly establishments during the Jim Crow era. The beauty parlor was one of the only listings in Providence, alongside a few tourist homes (similar to modern Air BnBs), a tavern, and a tire shop in Silver Lake.

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Wanskuck Park, a 25-acre park with walking trails, wooded areas, and old foundations, lies along the edge of the Wanskuck Historic District, in the northernmost part of Providence. Before it was parkland, this site was the estate of Jesse H. Metcalf (1860-1942) and his second wife Louisa Dexter Sharpe Metcalf (1866-1959). Jesse Metcalf's father was a textile manufacturer who owned the Wanskuck Company, a profitable woolen company, and his mother, Helen Adelia Rowe Metcalf, was one of the co-founders of the Rhode Island School of Design.

Jesse H. Metcalf took over his father's role in the Wanskuck Company; he was also president of Rhode Island Hospital, a United States Senator, and a partial owner of the Providence Journal. He and his wife Louisa were notorious philanthropists, donating from their sizeable fortune to various schools, community groups, and institutions throughout Rhode Island. Jesse Metcalf served as the chairman of the Metropolitan Park Commission of Rhode Island from 1909 to 1924, and after his death, Louisa donated their estate to the City of Providence to be used as a public park, along with $30,000 to develop and maintain it.

The Metcalf home and its barn were torn down in 1949, as requested in Louisa Metcalf's will, and the house's foundation was filled to create a level rise. Some smaller features of the estate remain, including the elaborate wrought-iron gate, mature trees, the drive leading up to the former site of the house, and a stone wall running along Woodward Road. A stable was demolished in 1979, after neighborhood residents opposed a proposal to turn it into a cultural center, citing traffic concerns; the 1 ½ storey former caretaker's cottage still stands, overlooking the park.

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The large plot of land bordered by Smith Street, Wyndham Avenue, and Pleasant Valley Parkway has been built up heavily over the past 45 years, the rolling green lawns and forested glades replaced with siding-sheathed condominiums and a sprawling senior living community. The density of the remaining trees, a swath behind a stone wall bordering Smith Street, belies their relative youth, and the site provides an intriguing window into how open space itself can change over time.

In the mid-19th century, the Elmhurst neighborhood was a rural area, with roads such as Chalkstone Avenue and Smith Street connecting far-flung farms. The area was a popular retreat for wealthy families wanting a peaceful respite from the bustling city, such as Dr. William Grosvenor, who built a house on this site in 1849. Grosvenor's estate included a distinctive Gothic Revival building on nearly 30 acres of land, surrounded by tall elm trees that cast their shade across the lawns and drives. He called the place "Elmhurst," a name which was later adopted by the surrounding neighborhood.

In 1872, the Diocese of Providence purchased Dr. Grosvenor's estate, whereupon the buildings became the home of the Elmhurst Academy of the Sacred Heart, a Catholic school educating young women from elementary through high school. Residential development in surrounding Elmhurst boomed when public transportation reached the neighborhood in the late 19th century, but the grounds of the convent and academy remained a quiet, green space.

The school remained in this location until 1961, at which point, with the buildings in need of extensive (and expensive) repairs, it relocated to Glen Farm in Portsmouth, RI. A newspaper article about the final graduation ceremony held on the Providence campus noted teary-eyed students posing for photos on "the soft green campus lawn in the shade of old brick and stucco buildings."

The property changed hands several times before Providence College purchased it in 1966, planning to turn it into athletic fields or parking. After the college began demolishing the buildings, a "roaring fire" completed the work, engulfing the structure in flames so high and bright that they were visible from downtown Providence. Providence College eventually sold the property in 1975; a portion of the land was then developed into 49 stylish, two-unit condominiums with "a host of luxury extras" in a complex called Elmhurst Arboretum, stretching along Wyndham Ave where the chapel bells once rang. The formerly open, eastern portion of the parcel was turned into a senior living and care community in 1996, with rambling yellow buildings along a curved drive, and tidy lawns replacing the wilder open portions of Grosvenor's estate.

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