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.
]]>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.
]]>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."
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>Prior to the 19th Century, hundreds of acres of water covered most of the area below the current Rhode Island State House--the Great Salt Cove,--which was large enough to admit sailing ships, and had a swath of salt marshes to its west. In the 1700s, warehouses along North Main Street were accessible by boat, and the Weybosset Bridge at the entrance to the Cove could open to allow larger vessels to pass.
As downtown Providence faced increasing development, portions of the Cove and surrounding wetlands were filled, creating tidier, man-made shorelines. The 1800s also brought a significant infrastructure challenge to American cities: the influx of railroad lines and terminals. The Providence City Council granted railroad companies the use of a depot site on fill alongside the Cove, on the condition that they would pay to build a public park around the rest of the Cove. The companies complied, creating an elliptical cove nearly a mile around and surrounded by walkways and shade trees, with the rail depot to the southeast and the State Prison on the northwestern shore.
The Cove park provided an important green space in downtown. In 1886, the Public Park Association referred to the Cove lands as "a ventilator of the city and a resort for the people," whose "cooling influence is very great."
While indeed a source of shade and cool breezes, the cove was heavily polluted with waste from mills and slaughterhouses upstream. As Providence didn't have a sewage treatment system until the 20th century, the rivers served as sewers, with human waste accumulating in the Cove and creating very unpleasant odors at low tide. (As one writer colorfully put it, the Cove was "made the receptacle of the excreta of a large part of the city.") By 1881, the Cove had been essentially cut off to foot traffic from most of downtown by busy railroad tracks, making it a much less desirable destination for casual strollers, and had become a congregating spot for "disreputable persons."
A long and tumultuous debate about whether to fill the Cove and cover it over with railroad tracks ended when the city sold the Cove Basin, cove lands, and promenade to the railroads. It was filled in 1891 and 1892, with tracks built on the extensive fill.
This portion of downtown remained dry land until the Providence Renaissance of the late 1990s; the circular tidal basin at Waterplace Park was created more than a hundred years after the original was filled, an homage to Providence's Great Salt Cove.
]]>The area between Broadway and Fountain Streets in La Salle Square--currently a large surface parking lot surrounded by a black, wrought-iron fence--has hosted not only the parked vehicles of Providence Bruins fans and suburban commuters, but also several notable city institutions, including the Central Police Station and a Catholic boys' school, after which, the square is named.
In 1868, Providence's Bishop Francis P. McFarland, who had been seeking land for a Catholic school, wrote a letter to a superior reporting that "I could not obtain the property that I was talking about to you when you were here. But I did obtain a lot which is bigger, better and more centrally located. The house is worth more than the first one. It has an empty lot next to it and will cost $18,000. Its location is favorable, on the corner of Broadway and Fountain Street, two of the best streets in the city." The Catholic Diocese of Rhode Island purchased the house and lot from Albert and Jesse Eddy, and broke ground for the school building in 1870.
The resulting school, La Salle Academy, had six classrooms and an assembly hall. The open space beside and behind the school was used for sports and outdoor dining. The wood frame building next door (which one contemporary described as "old and dingy") served as housing for the Christian Brothers. The school day ran from 7:30-4:30, with a break from 11:00-1:00 for lunch, and two recesses for students to play outside, allowing teachers to "ventilate the classrooms." The classrooms themselves were bright, with sun streaming in through the sizeable windows, and students sitting on long benches in the blackboard-lined rooms.
When the school became overcrowded in the 1920s, a new building was constructed in the academy's current location in Elmhurst. The original school buildings were eventually torn down, replaced by the looming Providence Central Police and Fire Headquarters. The buff-colored Central Police building, constructed in 1940, was boxy, L-shaped, with decorative art deco details. Inside, it housed offices, waiting areas, holding cells, and bays for fire trucks. After the police and fire departments moved to a new, combined Public Safety Complex at 325 Washington Street, the structure was razed, despite fierce opposition from a number of sources, including the Providence Preservation Society and several neighborhood associations, all of whom insisted that the building was historically significant and structurally sound.
A building official working for the City of Providence, however, deemed the building a safety hazard (the state fire marshal found 27 code violations), and the new owners began demolition less than a week later. The city allowed the developer to create a surface parking lot on the site while planning for a new building. (In 2019, twelve years after the building's demolition, it remains a parking lot, although discussions about possible development opportunities continue.)
]]>Franciscan Park, known to most as the Bell Street Dog Park, is a lively spot on a sunny day. Paths loop around the grassy expanse and dogs roam under shade trees or trot along a dirt track overlooking Route 6.
This parcel of land was once the opulent home of James Eddy, an engraver who built his fortune as an art dealer, and his wife Eliza Jackson Eddy. Their estate included multiple outbuildings, a large brick chapel for public worship, sprawling grounds, and curving walkways, all perched on a steep hill at the western edge of fashionable Broadway. Terraces cut into the hill and dramatic stairs descended to neighborhoods below. The house itself was palatial, with more than 20 rooms, numerous fireplaces, ornate woodwork in mahogany and walnut, and oak floors. A grand hall on the ground floor stretched the length of the house and opened up onto a round back veranda.
After James Eddy's death at the age of 82, his daughter Amy and her husband sold the three-story mansion and four-acre plot to the Catholic Diocese of Rhode Island, to be used as a convent, school, and nursery. Under the Franciscan nuns' direction, the complex became a lively place, with classes, recreation, and religious education, as well as one of the nation's first Montessori schools, all serving predominantly Italian immigrants from the neighborhood. During the Great Depression, the nuns distributed food and clothing to needy families, and handed out bagged meals to the homeless from a shed on the property every day at noon.
After years of declining enrollment, the Franciscans' nursery closed in 1972. The nuns moved out of the building in 1977, and the Diocese put the buildings and land up for sale. A developer eyed the site for a 120-unit apartment complex for the elderly, but his plan was denied by the city's zoning board. In March of 1979, the mansion was heavily damaged by a fire and was later torn down.
In 1995, then-mayor Buddy Cianci announced at a Providence Preservation Society meeting that the city would purchase the site and turn it into a park. Franciscan Park opened in 1999, named after the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary and their influential stay there.
]]>In the 18th century, Silver Lake was a quiet, rural area, part of the town of Johnston, with most residents living on farms. The character of the neighborhood changed significantly after the extension of the Plainfield Street trolley line in 1882; additional lines were added over the next two decades, making the area much more accessible to workers from nearby industrial areas. The neighborhood developed its current dense character as an influx of new residents flooded in from neighboring Olneyville, mostly settling in multifamily homes built on grids of streets parceled out from old farmland. In 1898, the city of Providence annexed portions of the neighborhood; the remainder of Silver Lake became part of Providence in 1919.
Unbeknownst to many modern residents, the neighborhood of Silver Lake was, indeed, named after a lake (although we can't verify its historic silver-ness). The lake's basin was near the foot of Neutaconkanut Hill and was a popular site for outdoor recreation.
One older resident, in a 1934 letter to the editor, reminisced about a "smooth body of water with blue blue waves dancing, where we used to boat and fish and swim, where they cut ice in winter," and lamented its conversion into "a dump of old automobile bodies and the offscouring of the edge of a big city. Sometimes they even bury the city garbage there when the incinerator gets choked."
The Plain Farm that occupied the area, including the lake, was platted out for development in the 1850s. An early development plan imagined a garden-style suburb, with streets curving gracefully around the water. Looking carefully at a modern map, one can see ghosts of the initial plan, with Sibyl Street and Mercy Street still arcing around a no-longer-present shoreline.
However, the plan never came to fruition, as the neighborhood developed, newer, dense housing stock for the flood of workers and Italian immigrants emerged. The lake was dredged, and later filled in. The former lakebed was turned into a shopping center and extensive parking lot; for many years, it was home to an Almacs supermarket. As of 2019, it is home to the Americana Expo Center, which holds a lively weekend flea market, with cars and vans parked across the surface of the former Silver Lake, families strolling its now-paved surface.
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