The Smith Hill Library was built in 1932 as part of a Providence Public Library campaign beginning in the mid-1920s to create branch libraries throughout the city. Designer Albert Harkness was a renowned Providence architect of the time who also did the Providence Music Mansion (88 Meeting Street) and the East Side Friends’ Meeting House (99 Morris Avenue), all in the Colonial Revival style.

This building has typical hallmarks of its period: Harkness designed this building to follow to the floor plan specified at the time for all Providence library branches, and the Colonial Revival style of this one-and-a-half-storied building is typical of 1930s institutional design. But the library has many exterior decorative elements that make it interesting: the corner bricks form Colonial-style quoins; mortared stone was chosen rather than concrete for the foundation; and the pattern of the brickwork is a complex and striking version of “monk bond.” Upon entering the building, the projecting central entrance pavilion lends grandeur while a modern curved double stairway, with elegant aluminum rails leads visitors to the main library level with shelves, window seats, and paneling of mahogany woodwork.

In 2008, financial hardship forced the Providence Public Library to announce intended closures for many branch libraries. In response, library patrons citywide came together to form a new organization, the Providence Community Library (PCL), to support the branch libraries. On July 1, 2009, all nine branch libraries became property of the City of Providence and leased to the PCL.

The Smith Hill Library has its long history of community outreach, responding to the needs of its users. It held well-attended citizenship classes in the late 1920s, even before moving to its current location. Today, a century later, it continues this tradition: a typical day’s schedule includes children’s drawing and art classes, financial and business workshops, homework help with local college students, reading groups, and GED courses. The Smith Hill Library describes itself as a “safe and lively meeting place and learning center for people of all ages.”

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A fixture of the capital city, the Providence Public Library (PPL) has continuously served the downtown community for over a century. Founded in 1875, the PPL opened at its present Washington Street location in 1900. It added the Empire Street expansion in 1954. While its original Italian Renaissance-inspired design evokes comparisons to Boston’s Public Library, visitors congratulated the architects for valuing function over form. The first librarian, William Foster, stressed the Library’s important community service role by establishing community “contacts” to best serve the city. A revolutionary concept at the time, the result has been a tradition still in practice as the PPL continues to foster partnerships (or “contacts”) with a myriad of community groups on innovative initiatives.

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In the mood for a seance? If you were a member of the cultural elite in 19th-century Providence, all signs would have pointed to yes. East Side artists and intellectuals attended seances held in private homes, which also played host to literary salons that engaged with the hot topics of the day. These topics included Spiritualism, which had given rise to the mania for seances, and Transcendentalism, the philosophical movement that advocated for the inherent goodness of man and nature. Today we associate Transcendentalism most readily with Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson in Massachusetts, but Rhode Island had its share of luminaries involved in the movement, including Margaret Fuller and Sarah Helen Whitman. Margaret Fuller, journalist, educator, and advocate for women’s rights, briefly took up residence as a teacher in Providence’s Greene Street School. Whitman, born and bred in the city, associated in Fuller’s circle and was a well-known poet. Fuller, Whitman, and many other artists and writers would often gather in what quickly became a 19th-century cultural hub of Providence: the Athenaeum on Benefit Street.

 This Greek Revival-style library generated more than just abstract ideas and elevated conversation: love blossomed here between two writers. Having spotted her first in a rose garden and where he fell madly in love, Edgar Allen Poe courted Sarah Helen Whitman in the Athenaeum in 1845. Their courtship was short-lived, however: Whitman called off their engagement in 1848 when Poe’s sobriety came into question.

 In the next century, Providence inspired the work of another creative writer, H.P. Lovecraft, who set his novel “The Shunned House” (1924) in a colonial house down the street from the Athenaeum, at 135 Benefit Street.

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This site, the former Whitridge Hall, served as the launching pad for a memorable show business career. In the 1950s, a summer theater troupe called this building home. The troupe hired an 18-year-old actor named Charles Nelson Reilly, who made his professional debut here as the detective in a play called “Broken Dishes.” Reilly became a show business star who regularly appeared on TV in the 1960s and 70s, but he never forgot his acting debut at Whitridge Hall.

In the 1870s, a group of Tiverton residents chartered Whitridge Hall “for the purposes of religious, charitable and literary culture, and the promotion of liberal religious thought.” According to an anonymous writer in 1884, “The hall is of unusual beauty and capacity for the purpose for which it is intended and used, viz., lectures, concerts, social parties, &c., and has a fine piano.”

The hall drew its name from philanthropist Thomas Whitridge, who grew up in the William Whitridge Estate, a 1770s house that still stands on Stone Church Road in Tiverton.

Whitridge’s father served as town doctor, and three of his brothers followed their father into medicine. Thomas moved to Baltimore, where he built a fleet of ships and became one of the nation’s largest importers of coffee, amassing the fortune that he used to endow Whitridge Hall in his hometown.

Three denominations used the hall’s Bowen Chapel for services. Episcopalians and Catholics used it as temporary space while building nearby churches, and Unitarians regularly held services here into the early 1900s.

Two famous New Englanders delivered sermons here: Julia Ward Howe and Edward Everett Hale. Howe, on a visit to Washington, D.C., woke on a gray November morning in 1861 and quickly scratched out the words that were forming in her head, and earned instant fame as the lyricist for the Civil War standard, “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

Hale, a prominent Unitarian minister and theologian, is best known today for his 1863 short story, “The Man Without a Country,” whose protagonist is sentenced to lifetime exile aboard U.S. naval vessels for shouting, "Damn the United States! I wish I may never hear of the United States again!" during the treason trial of Aaron Burr. Hale’s story was adapted to film several times, most recently as a 1973 made-for-TV movie. Hale’s Matunuck, Rhode Island, home is now a museum.

The town’s first public library blossomed inside Whitridge Hall, growing in just 20 years from a few donated books in 1881 to 4,000 volumes. Local service groups such as the Grange and the nascent Tiverton Historical Society met often in Whitridge Hall, and the building briefly became a dance hall in the 1960s.

Eventually, many of the groups and churches Whitridge Hall once hosted found space of their own. The library moved to a fieldstone building on Highland Avenue bequeathed by a former school teacher, Lydia Essex; and the Historical Society moved its headquarters to the 1730s Chase-Cory House, freeing Whitridge Hall for conversion into the apartment house you see today.

The pulse of Tiverton beat through this building for nearly 90 years, and the town still struggles to replace its function as a center for the community.

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