It might be hard to imagine that Benefit Street hasn’t always been considered a special historic area. Many groups worked for years to protect, preserve, and improve the architecture and historic character of the neighborhood. One woman, Margaret Burnham Kelly Geddes, bridged the gaps between many of these professional, city, and community groups. Starting in 1954, she served on the advisory committee of the Providence Redevelopment Agency. At the same time Margaret was the president of the Providence League of Woman Voters and created a community planning committee within the organization. With her expertise as a professional architect and planner, she was able to educate these other local women on the possible benefits of city planning.

Always finding new ways to get involved in the community, she helped to found the Citizens Committee for Redevelopment in 1955. The purpose of the group was “to help add quality and character to our community, to secure good housing and decent neighborhoods for all our families, and to help adhere to democratic concepts and sound planning in all redevelopment and urban renewal.” These ideas were ahead of their time. Many urban planners at the time thought slum clearance was the only way to improve a community. Geddes and her colleagues and fellow activists knew that it would take more than that.

In 1956 the Providence Redevelopment Agency was reestablished under a law that it still operates under today. Margaret B. Geddes was hired that same year as a planner for the agency—an uncommon role for women at the time. The main project she was hired to work on was the Constitution Hill rehabilitation area, encompassing the area between Benefit Street and the Moshassuck River. This new role and her many existing connections in the preservation community allowed her to make progress toward establishing historic zoning around Benefit Street. With the help of the Providence Redevelopment Agency and Margaret B. Geddes, the Providence Preservation Society was established and still advocates for endangered historic buildings and sites in Providence today.

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Have you ever imagined yourself juggling six children’s needs, housework, and professional career? It may sound like a bit of a challenge; yet, these two women, Sarah (“Sally”) Harkness, a mother of seven, and Jean B. Fletcher, a mother of six, were able to manage their professional lives while fulfilling their duties as mothers and wives. They both were graduates of Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture for Women, originally affiliated with Harvard University and Smith College after 1942. In 1945, the two talented women teamed up with six other architect friends and founded The Architects Collaborative (TAC), a leading architecture firm based in Boston, MA.

Thanks to the “permissive attitude of the office,” Sally and Jean did not have to work full-time. Instead, they worked in shifts--one in the morning and the other in the afternoon--and shared the same babysitter. Yet, their professional and domestic lives inevitably overlapped. Sally said she “learn(ed) [an] awful lot of things from domestic life” especially when she thought about her kids and envisioned an environment surrounding them, a school. The application of their real-life experience to architectural practice must have contributed to TAC’s projects for numerous school buildings including Classical and Central High Schools.

Classical and Central Education Center was the first project to which TAC applied the design of “a really urban school.” In 1963, TAC in collaboration with the local Providence architectural firm Harkness & Geddes won the first prize for the new design. However, it was not until 1970 that the buildings took the shape as we see today. Apart from the main building of Central School, everything that exists today was developed in the 1950s under “The Master Plan for Public School Sites.” The original Classical School building was proudly built in a mixed Italianate and Colonial style in 1878 as the first public high school at the City of Providence. It was a three-storied, massive structure with a basement with a high ceiling. TAC made a radical change to the design of the original masonry Italianate style by introducing raw, grey, concrete Brutalism. In addition, they changed the school's interiors by introducing novel concepts like multifunctional classrooms with movable walls which might have reflected the philosophy of TAC and experience of Sally and Jean's domestic lives.

This drastic alteration is probably the main reason why Classical High School is still subject to frequent negative comments about its appearance. Even the well-known architectural historian William McKenzie Woodward made harsh comments on the buildings in his book PPS/AIAri Guide to Providence Architecture: “The Modernist vision here, intended to challenge, now merely defeats. It’s no wonder Modernism has gotten such a bad reputation in Rhode Island.” Though not everyone agreed with its aesthetic, the majority of the public praised the working ethos and concept. John Ware Lincoln, chairman of the Division of Design at RISD recognized the new building as “exemplary of the new concept of the architect as an environmental planner, working with social and civic sciences, demography, transportation engineering, building technologies, and, in this case, education philosophy.” Both school buildings are celebrated as the first of their kind in Providence but they should also be understood as a rare vestige of the work of pioneering female architects.

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If you walk into the woods of East Greenwich, you would hear the shouts and laughter of children from the forest. Where is the sound coming from? A few more steps later, you would encounter not Hansel and Gretel's House, but surprisingly, a raw-looking concrete, modern building which would not be out of place in an urban setting. Its “straight-forward geometry, executed in warm, red-brown brick framed by textured ‘form board’ concrete” projects a peculiar impression of veiled modernism in nature.

The building is East Greenwich High School. The school was originally Kent Academy but later became East Greenwich Academy--a private Methodist boarding school. The building was transformed into a public school in 1942-1943 when its stockholders handed it over to the town of East Greenwich because of plummeting enrollment in the wake of the Great Depression and World War II. It was moved to the current location in 1967 from 100 Cedar Avenue in the course of a major transformation by The Architects Collaborative (TAC), a leading architecture firm at the time based in Boston, MA. Most if not all of the original buildings at the site were demolished in the 1960s for the construction of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church.

TAC, as its name indicates, consisted of eight talented architects including Walter Gropius--a founder of the famous Bauhaus school of architecture in Germany. In addition to having Gropius on staff, the firm had the unique privilege of having two women architects as founding members, Sarah (“Sally”) P. Harkness and Jean B. Fletcher. Neither female architects nor architectural collaboratives are unusual these days. However, TAC's team-based approach was distinctively progressive considering the fact that individualism was the prevailing ideology in the profession at the time. Its inclusion of women and the fact that they were part of the leadership attest to the firm's forward-looking nature.

Despite East Greenwich High school's manufactured materials such as concrete and brick, the building “complements the landscape’s carefully preserved random quality” and successfully achieved an ideal integration of natural and manmade form. After a series of renovations in 1967, 2004, 2010, and 2012, the building is finally filled with the energy and dynamism of children again.

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In 1893, the talented and ambitious young Frances Evelyn Henley, refused to make a career in teaching, as suggested by her parents. Instead she chose to enroll at the Rhode Island School of Design, not in the decorative art department as one might have expected of a woman but in architecture. She did not know what kind of life this profession entailed. All she knew was that she enjoyed mathematics, geometry, philosophy and the art of drawing.

Being a pioneer of her gender in the field of architecture, Henley encountered the general societal preconceptions that architecture was a field of practice more suitable for a man and that a woman working with men “would disrupt their organization.” With the help of Eliza G. Metcalf Radeke, the director of RISD at that time, she was employed as a draftsman by Howard Hilton (1867-1907), a member of the American Institute of Architects. After a couple of years working for Hilton, Henley had to abandon her position due to health problems. When recovered, she embarked on a free-lance style activity in 1904.

Most of Henley’s professional life was bound to Wilcox Building. Other prominent architects of Providence linked with Henley’s career conducted their architectural businesses in this building. Franklin J. Sawtelle (1846-1911) had his office in room # 34 for many years. Henley moved her business there in 1910, right next to Sawtelle’s office, in room # 33. Following Sawtelle’s unexpected death, she took over the Wheeler School project that she co-authored. Two years later she began to work with Arthur L. Almy, in Grosvenor building, found on the same street. Henley (and Almy) moved back into Wilcox Building in 1915. After Almy’s death in 1924, she inherited his business with the condition that she would remain unmarried. Henley continued to work in her office up until 1936, when she decided to move to Cranston, with her partner, Nellie Evelyn Livermore. Livermore worked for Henley as a stenographer/assistant and they lived together up until 1952 when they decided to split due to health problems.

Built in 1875 by Edwin O. Howland in Victorian Gothic style, the construction served as an office building. It was one of the city’s most expensive commercial buildings erected at the end of the 19th century using polychromatic stones at the upper floors and superb cast iron store fronts. The interior of the building suffered great changes after a fire in 1975, but the exterior is preserved as much as in the original condition. It is enough memory preserved in this building to tell the story of the first female architect in Providence, about her ambition and her achievements in being fully recognized professionally by the society.

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Frances Henley’s involvement in the construction of Wheeler School in Providence can be interpreted as a means of positioning herself in the collective memory of the city by linking her name with the values of education. Both Henley and Mary Colman Wheeler, the founder of the eponymous school, had artistic backgrounds, which made the association of the two women natural and interesting.

The idea to found a school for women exclusively came from Miss Wheeler’s practice of instructing girls in the art of painting. However, she turned to a more classical format of a holistic system of teaching. Wheeler founded her private school in 1889, after a rich experience in France and Germany. She was trained as an artist and studied in Paris for six years, before she returned to Providence in 1882. Henley, who graduated cum laude from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1897 was also interested in sharing the principles of architecture and interior design with young women. She disseminated her ideas about residential architecture not as a teacher, but as a professional, who was invited to give public speeches to the Clubs and association that she was also a member of.

To accommodate the increasing number of students, Miss Wheeler decided to build a new structure, commissioning Franklin J. Sawtelle (1846-1911), a renowned architect in Providence, in 1910 to make the project for a new building on Hope Street. Sawtelle died unexpectedly just one year later, while in the middle of the design of the school. As a result, Henley took over the entire project. She added an elevator to the main building of the school in 1913, and she signed the project alone.

Later she was asked to design a playground dedicated to hockey and athletic activities that would become part of Wheeler School, in Rumford, a project originally known as “Wheeler School Farm.” The project, even though apparently minor, shows her ability to appropriate the natural terrain in a successful landscape design, as the lot is still being used today for athletic scopes. Moreover, it shows Henley’s personal and professional knowledge of the sportive technical equipment, as she was herself teaching women how to play basketball. She remained the consulting architect for the school for about 25 years.

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How to become respected and how to keep your femininity when doing a male's job? This was quite a burden for Rhode Island's first female architect, starting 1897 when she graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design. Henley was probably one of the few women designers to request equal social rights with men in her profession. As a lifetime member of the Providence Plantations Club, she succeeded to make herself even more visible in the public sphere of Rhode Island through 'women power.'

The women who gathered under this society were businesswomen, as well as women interested in the social and economic life and political life, at a moment just before they were granted the official right to vote by the US Constitution in 1920. The club was a success, starting with about 150 members and it reached more than 1300 members, just one year after its inception. As the only female architect of the society, Henley got involved in promoting the Club in terms of its visuals and interior design.

Since the commencement of the club in 1916, which gathered in different locations, the members envisioned a building to host the meetings and tea parties, including rooms for rent for women who came from different corners of the state. The lot on Abbott Park finally came into the possession of the association in 1923 and Henley was named in the Building Committee for the construction of the new building. The chosen project was built following the design project of the Boston-based firm Andrews, Jones, Biscoe and Whitmore in August 1926.

Henley was commissioned with the interior design for several parts of both buildings that were planned for hosting the variety of functions necessary for the new space: the dressing room of the swimming pool, found at the basement level of the building, the dormitories placed on the 5th floor, and an apartment for Marion Louise Simon Misch, one of the important members of the club, on the 4th floor. Misch’s apartment contained a “music room.” Mrs. Misch was not the only member of the society that Henley designed a cozy, fancy place for. Clara B. Earterbrooks, who occupied the position of chairman of the Finance Committee, and was also part of the Building Committee of the Providence Plantations Club, sought out Henley's services to design her little house in Hortonville, Massachusetts.

Henley was aware of the tremendous advantage of connections that this society had to offer. Linking her name with the design of the building where this society was gathered, a place of multiple connections and possibilities, provided Henley with a portal to attract clientele. Being part of this society which grew to more than 2500 members was an efficient way to present her creations and to make her visible as the only independent female architect in the public sphere of the state. The club's space was also an opportunity for Henley to teach young women interested in the profession of architecture how to overcome the societal prejudices. With the decline of the society, the building was sold to Morris Gaebe and Edward Triangolo in December 1962 and made part of the Johnson & Wales University campus.

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Upon entering the nineteenth-century stable that is now 48 Crestwood Road during the Great Depression, a visitor to the old Waterhouse estate ‘on the hill’ which lies between Warwick and East Greenwich would have found a gloomy, cavernous space. They might have seen a young girl playing on a tire swing that hung from a beam on the first floor, or perhaps they would have seen her father watching vigilantly out of one of the building’s few windows. His bargain with the landowner? To keep an eye on the comings and goings of workmen in lieu of paying the rent that he could not afford to pay.

What a surprise that visitor would have had when returning to the same property just over thirty years later… Upstairs: a light-filled and airy modern home replete with fashionable furnishings imported from Copenhagen, geometrical light shades, pale birch woodwork, crisp white walls and an abstract painting, all arranged around a black, cantilevered hearth of reinforced concrete set into white masonry. Downstairs: a barely begun drafting room soon to be fitted out with bespoke cabinets and bookshelves. Outside: a sprawling garden of one and a quarter acres with magnificent views of Greenwich Bay, also in the process of being tamed…

The authors of these changes were Elizabeth Greenleaf Pattee and J. Carol Fulkerson. Pattee was an architect and landscape architect by profession and a keen traveller, photographer and conservationist by avocation who purchased the property in 1955. By that point the stable had already been converted into a habitable dwelling by its previous owners, but a lot of work remained to be done in order to bring the house and its grounds up to Pattee’s exacting standards. These emphasised a comprehensive understanding of design which integrated approaches to architecture, landscape architecture, ecology and interior decoration ‘for [the purpose of healthy] living’.

This was a philosophy that Pattee developed over many years as a result of her educational background. She began her career as an architectural draftswoman, having obtained a BS degree in architecture from MIT in 1916, before shifting her focus to landscape architecture, which she studied at the Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture for Women from 1916 to 1918. Here, she would have learned about botany, planting and surveying. Ecology and conservation issues would have been present in her training too, but it was not until the 1950s that these came to the forefront of her work as an educator and advocate for good design practice.

One topic of concern to Pattee and the nascent conservation movement in Rhode Island in general at this time was the sustainable development of the local shoreline. For Pattee, this necessitated a reconciliation of the functional needs of people and the requirements of the natural environment. In recent times, this has been realised in the planning of the nearby Buttonwoods Beach. Today, these principles are so often taken for granted that it is easy to miss the novelty of the way in which Pattee's home reconfigured the relationship between house, user and landscape in order to reflect the integrity of all three.

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The house was named for Jean-Baptiste-Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau (1725-1807), the French General who fought alongside George Washington in several critical endeavors—including the siege of Yorktown and the Battle of the Chesapeake—in the American Revolutionary War.

De Vimeur landed in Newport, Rhode Island in 1780, and had under his command several thousand French troops with whom he was to assist the Continental Army, under General George Washington. The French chateau that now stands at 84 Prospect Street was dubbed the Rochambeau House in honor of de Vimeur’s outstanding achievements during the war, and it is rumoured that at times, he was in command of more men than Washington, himself. The Comte, however, never actually resided in the house, as it was not constructed until 1929, more than a century after his death.

Nowhere inside the house is there any mention of the Comte's legacy, though there is a marble plaque in the building’s main foyer commemorating the life of another remarkable individual: Mary Elizabeth Evans Sharpe, of Providence, Rhode Island. Sharpe was the wife of a Providence-based industrialist, Henry Dexter Sharpe Sr., who later became the twelfth Chancellor of Brown University. The Sharpes commissioned the Boston-based architectural firm of Parker, Thomas, and Rice to design their dream home, and after its completion in 1929, Mary Sharpe lived there until her death in 1985 (Mr. Sharpe having passed away in 1954). After her passing, her only son, Henry D. Sharpe Jr., donated the house to Brown University in his mother’s honor, knowing how she and his father had for so many years worked with and loved the University community, and how she wanted to see her home remain in the care of the family's alma mater.

Mrs. Sharpe was an avid gardener and self-taught landscape architect, and over the decades during which she lived at 84 Prospect St., ensured that the house was always surrounded by beautifully-tended gardens and greenery; in the spirit of her love for garden and landscape design, the University still maintains the gardens on the grounds, today. Just outside the front door, on each side of the entrance to her home, stand two beautiful examples of Mrs. Sharpe's favorite tree: the Japanese cherry blossom, whose delicate boughs still embrace visitors and welcome her guests into the house today.

The house was given the name "Rochambeau" as a commemoration of the Comte's stay in Providence during the Revolutionary War, where he and his troops were actually sheltered at Brown (then known as The College in the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations) before a march through Connecticut to connect with General Washington. De Vimeur remained in the newly-born United States for only a few years after the war, and upon his return to France, he became a key supporter of the French Revolution. That it, while his stay here in our humble Rhode Island was a brief one, his legacies have left an indelible mark upon our community and our history.

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In 1978, three women engaged in a conversation about the role women professionals could play in changing women’s lives. Within 16 months, they had started a business: the Women’s Development Corporation. Katrin Adam, Susan Aitcheson, and Joan Forrester Sprague were coordinators of the Third Session of the Women’s School of Planning and Architecture (WSPA), held in August 1978 at Roger Williams College (today Roger Williams University) in Bristol, RI, a program focused on design by and for women. They soon met and invited Alma Felix Green to join them, a former employee of the Providence mayor’s office with ties to the local community. The WDC exists today as one of the largest nonprofit housing developments in Rhode Island, developing scattered-site, low-income housing, with an emphasis on community investment and a participatory design process. Over nearly 40 years, they have provided housing for between 9,000 and 10,000 people.

In the early years, the WDC focused its efforts on Providence’s Elmwood, then “a multi-ethnic neighborhood in which more than half of the residents are single, widowed, or divorced women… [with] the state’s highest percentage of families receiving welfare payments.” At the outset, the organization also sought to help support and empower community women professionally, in addition to providing housing opportunities. They organized workshops to teach women how to go into business—how to get help from the Small Business Administration, plan a business, sell services to the government, and so forth—as well as training women to be eligible for employment as carpenters’ and painters’ apprentices in the construction industry. The WDC provided transportation and child care for these programs, as required. This emphasis on self-empowerment was and is critical to the mission of the WDC, originally serving a client group of marginalized women by offering “a chance for stable housing within a support system network that encourages independence and self-sufficiency.” Today, they also build alliances with elderly, disabled, veteran, and homeless communities.

The WDC addresses a number of social issues in their developments. First, they seek to tackle the stigma of low-income housing that leads many communities to resist such development initiatives. They rehabilitate triple-decker houses, transforming existing buildings into multiple apartments in scattered-site plans that blend into the neighborhood. The WDC manages the properties themselves to ensure that the housing will be taken care of, maintaining a good reputation for low-income housing. Second, according to Aitcheson, they “thought it was very important to try to be sure that the housing is responding to the people who live in it… So we spent quite a bit of time in participatory design process where families could tell us about where they live and why they live and how they live.” Taking direct input, they designed spaces intended for single mothers: a standard plan of three- and four-bedroom apartments has more, smaller bedrooms to allow for greater privacy alongside a shared open space, visible from the kitchen, to facilitate group play. Substantial storage spaces significantly ease quality of life, while parking directly in front of the unit and small, fenced-in backyards with lighting address security.

Finally, since opening their doors in 1979 the WDC has held a commitment to building environmentally conscious, energy efficient homes. In the 1990s, when it had become the largest producer of low-income housing in the state, the organization expanded this emphasis on environmental conservation to historical preservation. They joined forces with the Providence Preservation Society to address affordable housing and the preservation of endangered historic homes in the inner city. The high costs of preservation standards can make it prohibitive to maintain buildings in low-income neighborhoods, resulting in the destruction of turn-of-the-century structures. The WDC bought, renovated, and managed historical houses as low-income rental properties, protecting the buildings as well as the neighborhood itself, preventing gentrification and displacement.

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From August 13–26, 1978, 78 women from 17 states as well as Canada gathered at Roger Williams College (today Roger Williams University) in Bristol, RI, to discuss the integration of values and identities they held both as women and as designers. The Women’s School of Planning and Architecture (WSPA, pronounced “wis-pa”) met for its Third Session organized around the relationships women have—personally and professionally—to their home and work environments, historically, cross-culturally, and based on differences in race and socio-economic class.

Conceived by seven women in 1974, the WSPA was “a ‘school’ of our own where we could learn from each other—all of us teachers and students, exchanging questions, challenging convention, inventing new areas of inquiry and research, and sharing knowledge in a supportive atmosphere where women’s accomplishments would be visible, their skills respected, and their differences valued.” The WSPA held four sessions between 1975 and 1979, each organized in August and lasting two weeks with approximately 60 women in attendance, as well as a symposium in 1981 with well over two hundred women in attendance. Each session was held in a different state, to help make it easier for women all across the country to be able to attend. Women were invited to bring children between the ages of 3 and 12, and child care was provided to enable women to participate fully in the session. While there were instructors and students, the spirit of the program was cooperative and non-hierarchical, and courses were often team-taught.

This radical approach to education was mirrored in WSPA’s programming: the course covered energy-conscious design, feminist analysis of the built environment, and the politics of architecture and planning, particularly as related to social housing projects. The group explored their local surroundings, visiting colonial homes and mansions in Newport, and went on walking tours of Newport and Bristol to gain a sense of the daily life of women in the area. They visited the Junius Eddy House in Little Compton (1975), the first solar air-heated house in the state. Women presented on their own environments in slide presentations of dwellings and workplaces, with a particular focus on “Women’s Anonymous Architecture of the West Coast” to balance their location in the Northeast. They held seminars on the “ecology of sex roles,” examining personal perceptions and biases about the built environment based on traditional sex roles, and on China, looking at women’s daily life as experienced in four weeks of travel in China in 1977 at the invitation of the Architectural Society of China. Workshops covered low technology energy conservation, working in the private and public sectors, the feminist curricula in academia, as well as planning for the future of WSPA.

The middle weekend was a break-out session, which could be attended separate from the rest of the program (as 31 women did), with workshops on energy conservation, women’s professional organizations and networking, the challenges of neighborhood revitalization, and a presentation by the newly initiated Women’s Policy and Program Division of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which also ran a workshop on Community Block Grants. Throughout, conversations centered on how, as women architects, they could do what they wanted to professionally with the lifestyle they desired, and how they could help other women in the process. The participants were not building a school, per se, but a space in which to network, workshop, and think collaboratively—a means of connection that allowed them to support each other in fostering creative growth.

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