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 the summers, Providence residents waded into Mashapaug Pond to get clean – or, more precisely, for spiritual cleansing. "The choir would sing and the Word was preached before the candidate entered the water to have his sins washed away," recalled Ralph Simmons, a member of the Pond Street Baptist Church in the 1930s. The polluted pond is no longer used for baptisms, but Mashapaug Pond remains connected to organized worship, spiritual practice, and faith-based communities. These activities, and the sites where they occur, have changed over the years as places of worship follow their congregations’ movement around the city.
Today, one of the oldest visible sites near the pond is the Congregation of the Sons of Israel and David Cemetery on Reservoir Avenue, dating back to 1856, and now associated with Temple Beth-El. Needing a burial ground where family and friends could come to remember their loved ones, Providence’s small Jewish community purchased property near Mashapaug Pond. At the time, the new cemetery was far removed from the city’s urban core. Now, the cemetery sits wedged between busy roads and shopping sites.
As the neighborhoods near Mashapaug Pond have changed, other religious congregations have come and gone, sometimes leaving no trace. Pond Street Baptist Church, frequented by many African American and Native American families who once lived in West Elmwood, has moved several times before settling in its current location in south Providence.
On the western side of the pond, a small brown-shingled building at the corner of Balch and Calhoun Avenues once housed a mission of the Roger Williams Cranston Street Baptist Church. The mission ministered to the spiritual and humanitarian needs of the West Elmwood community by providing food and clothing as well as special activities for neighborhood children. When the city bulldozed the area to construct the Huntington Expressway Industrial Park, the mission was forced to close.
Some buildings have served multiple congregations over the years. In 1901, the Westminster Congregational Society constructed a small, rubblestone, gothic revival chapel on 126 Adelaide Avenue to serve its worshippers. By 1959, the church had been repurposed by the Friendship United Methodist Church, a Swedish group founded in South Providence. Most recently operated as the Hood Memorial Church (A.M.E), the building now stands vacant, reflecting the continuing changes in neighborhood demographics.
Some congregations have recently moved into the area, converting existing spaces for religious use in order to welcome local residents. In 2009, the Renaissance Church relocated to the Mashapaug Commons shopping center – the former site of the Gorham Manufacturing Company. The church now resides in a storefront that once housed Hollywood Video. The congregation feels strongly about establishing connections with the local community, and the church is regularly used for community meetings, including those organized by the Urban Pond Procession and Alvarez High School students. Across the pond, the New Dimension Church occupies a spacious building at the edge of the Huntington Expressway Industrial Park. For both parishes, large parking lots nearby make it easy for members to drive in from homes throughout the metro area.
Still in use as an active burying ground, the Sons of Israel and David Cemetery is an enduring site of identity for a Jewish community that has grown and moved over time. Temple Beth-El relocated to Providence’s East Side but the congregation tries to stay connected to their cemetery. Each spring, the congregation makes a pilgrimage to the cemetery for a service to remember the dead. Kenneth Orenstein, the chairman of the Cemetery Management Committee and a member of the Beth-El congregation, also arranges clean up days when children and their parents can care for the cemetery and learn about its history by looking at headstones and monuments. These activities make the cemetery a place where generations can come together to understand and honor their shared heritage.
Discussion Questions
As you travel around the area, how are faith-based communities connecting with neighborhoods and the pond? What do faith-based congregations contribute to community life?What does the history of religious sites tell us about the history of Providence?
How has urban growth and change affected the spaces used by faith-based communities?
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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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]]>What did Mashapaug Pond look like five years ago? Fifty years ago? Five hundred years ago? Five hundred million years ago? How was that terrain different from today? The physical appearance of the pond today has slowly evolved through the dual processes of geologic change and human action.
565 million years ago, the land that we now call Rhode Island was part of a volcanic landmass called Avalonia, located near the Earth’s South Pole. Moving northward through continental draft, it collided with what is now North America. Continuing movement slowly drove Rhode Island from the continental interior to its place today on the northeastern coast of the United States.
Meanwhile, glaciers left impressions in the soil and rocks of Rhode Island. As the glaciers melted, many of those impressions filled up with water to become “kettle ponds.” Mashapaug Pond was only one of the kettle ponds in Providence. Underlying the pond is metasedimentary bedrock that formed when sedimentary rocks made of compressed layers of silt were altered by metamorphism (intense heat or pressure) about 360 million years ago. Over the centuries, Providence’s other freshwater kettle ponds were filled and homes and businesses were built on top.
Mashapaug Pond survived and is one of the city’s last remaining ponds. But it probably looks different than it did before humans began mapping the area around Providence. In many cases, the earliest maps of the region, imprecisely drawn by hand, raise more questions than answers.
In 1750, Mashapaug Pond appeared as a strangely-shaped lump on a local atlas. The odds are good that Mashapaug Pond wasn't shaped that differently from today, but rather that the mapmaker didn’t have access to today’s high-tech measurement and imaging equipment. Scientists can be reasonably confident that the general shape of Mashapaug Pond has stayed the same over the past several centuries because there is no evidence in the metasedimentary bedrock that any large earthquakes have changed the pond's contours.
More recently, however, the pond’s shape and northwest shoreline have been dramatically altered. The straightening of the north shore was a result of human intervention over the course of two years, not geologic processes spanning thousands of centuries. In the early 1960s, Providence pushed through the construction of the Huntington Expressway Industrial Park, designed to house new business and thousands of jobs. But the shoreline on which the new industrial park was to be built sloped down to the pond and rested on a bed of unstable silt. To create a firmer base for building, much of the pond was filled in and the shoreline straightened. At the same time as they were filling in the pond, the industrial park’s developers graded the landscape, flattening most of the hills in the area.
Discussion Questions
As you examine other maps – of your neighborhood, of Providence, of Rhode Island, of the U.S. – ask yourself what processes could have created the landscape on the map. Did humans or geologic change have a larger role to play?
What are the similarities and differences between human and geologic changes to landscape?
If you could drain all of the water out of Mashapaug, what do you think you would see? Try drawing what the underwater terrain might have looked like.
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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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