Staring at the endless concrete in the Huntington Expressway Industrial Park, it seems impossible that this was once a vibrant neighborhood. Laughing children ran across neighbors’ yards, caught up in games of hide and seek. The smell of coffee, oranges, and kerosene filled the air. Fruit trees grew everywhere. On a warm day you could hear cicadas sing, and, at night, the frogs chirped. Everybody knew each other.
A close-knit neighborhood, old West Elmwood referred to the community bounded to the east by Mashapaug Pond, to the north by the railroad tracks at Huntington Avenue, and to the west by Niantic Avenue.
Dennis Maynard grew up in West Elmwood in the 1950s: "As a child living in that area it was like Disneyland. It was just a playground. To this day we always talk about West Elmwood as probably the best place you could grow up. It was a combination of residential, country, a lot of gardens. Not farms, but gardens. Lots of fruit trees. You had the access to the water. Everybody knew each other. Regardless of your race, everybody knew each other. As kids you were in everybody's house."
Today, old West Elmwood is gone.
Providence was one of many American cities drastically altered by so-called “urban renewal” projects in the mid-twentieth century. Supposedly “blighted” and deteriorated neighborhoods were demolished to make way for highways, industrial parks, and other modern urban structures. These changes were supposed to improve cities, but in many cases, they destroyed vibrant communities and negatively altered people’s lives. This is what happened in West Elmwood.
The Providence Redevelopment Agency bulldozed West Elmwood to construct the Huntington Expressway Industrial Park. Studies describing unhealthy and unsafe living conditions in this portion of West Elmwood were used to justify the city’s action.
Knocking down this portion of old West Elmwood forced families to leave both their homes and their community. As a result of implicitly racist practices of banks and lenders, people of color often could not get mortgages to purchase new homes in new suburban developments. “Many neighborhoods, [the government] classified as white,” explained Cliff Montiero, a longtime activist and opponent of urban renewal. “People of color could not get mortgages [to live] in those areas.” For the former residents of West Elmwood, who could not afford to buy a home in desirable neighborhoods outright, that meant they were forced to live in sub-prime housing. ”Many people [in West Elmwood] used to be homeowners. After losing their home ownership in the Mashapaug Pond area, [they] became renters,” Montiero said.
Some West Elmwood homeowners fought to save their homes with the help of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Urban League. Two hundred people signed a petition. People attended city government meetings, speaking out about the injustice of the urban renewal project and the Providence Redevelopment Agency’s misrepresentation of West Elmwood. Arguing that “urban renewal is Negro removal,” they highlighted the implicit racial discrimination in urban renewal projects, which disproportionately negatively affected colored people.
For five years, the people of West Elmwood fought for their neighborhood, but in the end their struggle failed. Most of the houses in old West Elmwood were knocked down. Over five hundred families were forced to leave. "They came in and tore down the houses, bulldozed the hill," recalled neighborhood resident Ed Hooks. Now, West Elmwood survives only in the memories of the people who once lived there.
Discussion Questions
Even though the people of old West Elmwood fought to save their neighborhood, most of old West Elmwood was demolished. Why do you think the people of old West Elmwood lost their fight?If your home or neighborhood were going to be knocked down, what would you want people to remember about it?
Why did many activists and residents feel urban renewal projects were racially discriminatory?
Why do you think projects like the construction of the Huntington Expressway Industrial Park were called “urban renewal”? What does “renewal” mean in this context? Who do you think decided to call projects like the industrial park “renewal” projects?
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]]>In 1980, up to $1.5 million worth of silver flowed from Providence factories into the Narragansett Bay, giving new meaning to the phrase “a waste of money.” Much of this silver originated from the electroplating firms located in the Huntington Expressway Industrial Park on the north shore of Mashapaug Pond.
Discovered in the 1800s, electroplating revolutionized jewelry production by using electricity to apply thin layers of gold or silver to items cast from other, cheaper metals. By 1880, Rhode Island was home to more jewelry businesses than any other state. Providence became known as the costume jewelry capital of the world, its downtown called the jewelry district. A century later, however, the center of the jewelry industry had relocated three miles to the southeast, to the Huntington Expressway Industrial Park next to Mashapaug Pond.
Looking at its current arrangement of warehouses and parking lots, it may be hard to imagine the industrial park as a space that almost 500 families called home. Children played games in the road, buzzed around on homemade scooters, and snuck peaches and plums from their neighbors’ trees. Former resident Ed Hooks recalls the paper route that took him through a grid of streets, some paved and some not, whose names are now only found on historical maps. As a child, Ed swam in Mashapaug Pond, played with frogs, and caught crawfish in the brook that flowed toward Niantic Avenue. Some neighbors, he remembers, preferred the brook’s snapping turtles, and used them for soup.
When the Providence Redevelopment Authority bought this 117-acre parcel in 1961, it displaced those residents and adapted the land for commercial use. New sewer lines and broader, flatter roadways made the space an attractive location for factories involved in electrotyping and electroplating – casting and coating objects in metal. These operations involved dangerous ammonias, cyanides, and toxic heavy metals that flowed, like the silver, into Providence’s waterways.
Today, the quiet expanse of the Huntington Expressway Industrial Park betrays its current economic and environmental challenges. In 2010, the complex had only 33 tenants. However unremarkable it may appear, though, the industrial park continues to have an important impact on the local environment. Its wide paved roads, flat-roofed buildings, and sparse vegetation create a “heat island” with higher daytime air temperatures than other areas of Providence. The absence of trees also contributes to stormwater runoff. As rainwater hits asphalt surfaces, it mixes with road salt, animal waste, fertilizers, car fluids, and other pollutants. Without pervious surfaces or plants to filter this toxic water, it flows unobstructed until it reaches a storm drain or larger body of water. This pollutes the park’s immediate neighbor, Mashapaug Pond, and the broader watershed, which includes the ponds in Roger Williams Park and Narragansett Bay. The cost of cleaning these toxic chemicals from the watershed greatly exceeds $1.5 million in silver.
Happily, several organizations are actively working to reduce the amount of pollutants flowing through Mashapaug Pond’s watershed by educating citizens and commercial tenants about stormwater runoff, repaving hard surfaces with crushed stone or permeable concrete, planting trees and other native plants, and redirecting water into rain barrels and rain gardens. Several of these initiatives are planned for the Huntington Expressway Industrial Park.
Discussion Questions
Besides financial losses, what different “costs” have there been to doing business in the Huntington Expressway Industrial Park?
What steps could be taken to inform the businesses currently located in the industrial park about their impact on Rhode Island’s waterways?
Where are places that jewelry is manufactured today?
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]]>Native peoples had already lived on the land near Mashapaug Pond for many centuries when Roger Williams arrived in Providence in 1636. The pond’s very name comes from two Algonquin words: ‘massa’ and ‘pug’, meaning ‘large standing water’. In Pre-Contact time the pond provided local Narragansett, with a wealth of resources. Families built weetooash, or temporary dome-shaped homes, on the shores of the pond for summertime usage as they fished in the pond and gathered plants and herbs from its sandy banks. Nearby, gardens of squash, corn, melons, and sunflowers flourished. Along with daily lifeways such as hunting, fishing, gathering the Narragansett enjoyed the pond for community celebrations that included storytelling, dancing and drumming.
Although native families were displaced from around the pond as Providence’s Euroamerican community expanded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some of them managed to retain their connection to the land. Tall Oak Weeden, who shares both Pequot and Wampanoag ancestry, recalls visiting family members who lived near the pond. In the early twentieth century, his great-grandfather had moved from Connecticut to Providence, settling in the ethnically diverse community of West Elmwood. Beautiful cherry trees and small gardens once filled the neighborhood, and in their free time, his family members enjoyed fishing and ice skating at the pond. The Pond Street Baptist Church served as an important space for the Native American community to come together. To Tall Oak Weeden, “It was like the Indian town reconstituted itself in a sense, from the original Indian town that was there that the settlers felt needed to be moved.”
By the 1960s, new development, such as the Huntington Expressway Industrial Park, again forced Native American families away from the pond. The Pond Street Baptist Church relocated, and the neighborhood of West Elmwood, where African American, Native American, and Euroamerican families had lived side by side, was bulldozed. Contamination of the local environment, through Gorham’s pollution and storm water runoff, also had a direct impact on Native American families’ ability to interact with the pond.
Mashapaug Pond continues to be an important site of memory for the Indigenous community including the Narragansett, Wampanoag and other local tribes of the southern New England region. The Rhode Island Indian Council and the Tomaquag Indian Memorial Museum serve as important spaces for community life and cultural preservation keeping these memories alive through programs, exhibits, books and other cultural education opportunities. As such, memories of the community’s connections to Mashapaug Pond are preserved. The name of the pond, and nearby street names such as Niantic, Algonquin, and Narragansett, serve as testimony to the deep connections that Native Americans have to the region.
In September of 1936, the editorial in Narragansett Dawn, a monthly publication by and for the Native American community of Rhode Island, ended with the statement: “Rhode Island Knows Now - THE NARRAGANSETT STILL EXISTS!” Although weetooash no longer dot the shores of pond and the lush gardens are gone from the vacant lots in West Elmwood, the Narragansett presence still exists near Mashapaug Pond as well.
Discussion Questions
Why do you think people chose to live around Mashapaug Pond? Why do you think people today choose to live there?Imagine the area as an early indigenous settlement before Providence was founded in 1636. What images, sounds and smells come to mind?
How did the establishment of the industrial park affect the indigenous community in ways different from others living around the pond? Why do you think this is?
What are contemporary efforts by Native people living in Providence to preserve their culture?
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]]>Walking down Resevoir Avenue today, the sweet fragrance of Popeye's Chicken and Biscuits mixes with the aroma of traffic. Strolling through Reservoir Triangle and the surrounding neighborhoods, the scent of Cambodian and Spanish food wafts out of kitchen windows. Buckets filled with garden soil, sprouting chili peppers, lemongrass, cucumbers, and squash serve as makeshift gardens of fresh produce.
Every community has its own food culture, history, and traditions – its own foodways. Over the past half-century, the foodways in the neighborhoods surrounding Mashapaug Pond have changed dramatically, reflecting the community’s shifting demographics and the influx of new ethnic groups. Nonetheless, foodways continue to be an important part of life in these close-knit neighborhoods.
In the 1950s, the Hide-Away Diner occupied the site where Popeye’s now stands near the southeast corner of the pond. Built from an old Pullman railroad car, the twenty-four hour diner was a popular local haunt. As the noontime sun sparkled off of Mashapaug Pond, workers at the Gorham Manufacturing Company slipped out to spend their lunch breaks at the diner. Sounds of sizzling hamburgers, clanging pinball machines and chatting workers filled the cozy restaurant. Nearby, children beamed over mountains of ice cream swirling with flavored syrups, seltzer, strawberries, and bananas – the signature “Bumper” dish of the The Hut, a popular ice cream parlor.
But on the opposite side of the pond, in the neighborhood of West Elmwood – now the Huntington Expressway Industrial Park – paved streets gave way to dirt roads. Backyards bustled with chickens, cows, goats and ducks. Neighbors walked door-to-door selling surplus garden vegetables. Vendors sold fish and crabs out of trucks. Kids collected turtles and crawfish from bubbling brooks, picked huckleberries and wild strawberries to make rich jams and jellies, and pilfered ripe peaches, apples, and plums from neighborhood trees. Chewing on sassafras roots dug from the shores of Mashapaug Pond, the taste of root beer filled their mouths.
Demolition crews have long since torn down Reservoir Triangle’s diners and ice cream shops. The fruit trees and lush gardens of West Elmwood have been flattened to make way for the industrial park. Today, area residents have different shopping and dining haunts.
At Sunny’s Market on the pond’s southeast shore, for example, residents and visitors can find food products from countries around the world, reflecting the neighborhood’s growing immigrant population. Delicacies favored in neighborhood homes range from Cambodian style fish poached in coconut milk to Arepa, a Dominican cornmeal cake served as a dessert.
“Walking down the street, I can smell Asian food, Cambodian food, Spanish food…I love the smell of food,” said Sokeo Ros, a Cambodian resident of the Reservoir Triangle neighborhood. Ros appreciates the rich diversity of foodways shared by his neighbors today.
Discussion Questions
In the 1950s, how were the foodways of people living on the northwest shore of the pond in the West Elmwood neighborhood different from the foodways of people living on the southeast shore of the pond? How might you explain these differences?How are the foodways of today different than in the 1950s? What else do you think changed between then and today? How might foodways reflect other characteristics of our society – our values and beliefs?
How might development have impacted Mashapaug foodways? How might immigration have impacted Mashapaug foodways? Pollution?
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