This area was almost totally Irish when I and my compatriots from Austria and Romania began our life in Providence in the early 1880’s on Robinson St. After 1900, Russian Jews fleeing pogroms came to South Providence. Most arrived with little in the way of possessions – perhaps treasured candlesticks, a prayer book and some clothes stuffed into a box.

There was work at jewelry factories like Ludwig’s or Lederer’s. Others of us peddled - walking the streets with a pack on our backs until we were able to save enough money to buy a horse and wagon. The pay at the factories was $3 per week, but rent was only $4 per month. Few people in the neighborhood owned a single-family house.

My family lived in a four room flat in a new three tenement we bought on Willard Ave: the other two flats were rented out. We were lucky to have gaslights and a bathtub in the bathroom. My neighbors, who were not so fortunate, went to the nearby bathhouse. There were, of course, very poor people living in our neighborhood. They received help from Jewish volunteer aid agencies, such as the Montefiore Ladies Association and the South Providence Ladies Aid Societies.

My home was a stopping point for many immigrants until they could find a job and a place to live. We often had “guests” staying with us, sometimes for a month or more. They were newly arrived immigrants – either our relatives or ‘landsleit’ (Yiddish), who were people from our town in Europe who had no family to take them in. Their arrival meant doubling up on bedrooms or giving up the parlor to a family. Even with the crowding, no one was turned away. We helped them find work and get settled.

We also had health insurance through beneficial associations. For a small sum weekly, you could join a beneficial or assisting society which offered a form of insurance. Some offered sick benefits like the Miriam Association while some had death benefits to pay some funeral expenses.

It was difficult to find kosher food in the neighborhood before the turn of the century, but by the 1920s we could buy kosher meat around the corner from my house. Although many of us went to separate synagogues to pray in the familiar tongues of our native lands, we had one social center where celebrations and meetings took place - Bazar’s Hall. Bazar’s even hosted a branch of the Providence Public Library where the Yiddish books were extremely popular.

Education was of utmost importance and we children actually attended two schools. First we attended the nearby public elementary school, and after our regular school day, we went to the Talmud Torah (Hebrew School) on Chester Avenue. It had a dual purpose as spelled out in its charter: “For Hebrew Education and to keep children off the streets after school hours...”. High School is where we first met people from outside of our neighborhood.

This was our life. Up until World War II, South Providence was a vibrant Jewish community. After the War, people began to move to other parts of the city, and to the suburbs. Urban renewal – hospitals, schools, and parking lots – have since taken over my neighborhood, which now only exists in photos and memories.

Author Geraldine "Jerry" Foster shares her family's personal experiences of life in the heart of Jewish South Providence from the early 1900s to today.

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Equality was the vision driving Elizabeth Carter Brooks’ (1867-1951) work as an educator, social activist, and architect. She wove these seemingly separate paths into a long life of advocacy for African Americans of New Bedford and beyond in a time when African Americans faced many obstacles and overt racism in both the South and the North in the United States.

In 1901, Elizabeth became the first African American woman hired as a public-school teacher in New Bedford. She taught at the William H. Taylor School for over 25 years. When she retired the New Bedford’s Superintendent of Schools noted that “her work was characterized by a sympathetic understanding of children...Thousands of children in New Bedford will remember Miss Carter and her kindly influence over them for many years to come.”

As a social activist, Elizabeth organized local, regional, and national groups that supported African American achievement. In 1896, nearly 200 clubs across the country combined to establish the National Association of Colored Women Clubs (NACWC). Elizabeth was elected vice president of NACWC in 1906 and served as the group’s fourth president from 1908-1912. During her administration, Elizabeth set up a scholarship, started a newspaper, and strengthened the NACWC. She was the first Association president to travel across the country meeting with local and regional organizations. African American women’s clubs like the NACWC, and the local chapter of the Martha Briggs Educational Club, are rooted in a long history of activism against racism and sexism including anti-lynching and voting rights campaigns. They promoted education and training as the means to lift up and advance women of color. The NACWC and its affiliated clubs continue the work set out in their original mission.

Elizabeth joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) soon after it was formed and later headed the NAACP’s regional and local New Bedford branches. Elizabeth used her educational expertise and activism to organize the Elizabeth Carter Brooks Jr. Girls Club. Meeting on Friday afternoons, the young women studied African American history, explored current events and advocacy, worked with senior community members, and promoted kindness and good deeds.

As a child, Elizabeth enjoyed cheering up elderly people. She noted how they “all seem to feel that I understand them.” Yet she saw a lack of loving care for the city’s elders. With the endorsement of the Women's Loyal Union, she raised enough money and support in 1897 to create New Bedford's first organized home serving elderly women of color. Eleven years later, she designed the Home for the Aged’s permanent location at 396 Middle Street. A stately establishment, the Home provided a comfortable life for the city’s aged residents until the 1990s.

Through her educational, architectural, and organizing skills, Elizabeth Carter Brooks’ activism enriched the lives of New Bedford’s students, elderly, and people of color. To honor her legacy, the New Bedford Public Schools dedicated a school building in her name. Elizabeth’s activism and accomplishments are still remembered in the city and the country. Her work lives on in the women still fighting for equality today.

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The Bell School was built in 1841 as a school for District No. 14, on the west side of the river. There was evidently some jealousy aroused in the other school districts when the residents of the Head of Westport decided to build so magnificent a building to be used as a mere schoolhouse. The Bell School was one of nineteen one-room schools that once dotted the Westport landscape in the nineteenth century. However, these once-admired buildings became the focus of a decades-long debate about education and an unsustainable district system. By 1900, the Westport School Committee described the overall conditions of Westport schools as “Deplorable! Unhealthful! Worn out! Dismal! Repulsive!” Nothing illustrates the plight of children in the 1800s more dramatically than the daily hardships that they faced at school. Although each one-room school differed somewhat from the exterior, they were all equally primitive inside and presented the students with some serious challenges to their wellbeing. In the winter, children risked being sprayed with hot soot from malfunctioning woodstoves. They risked contracting life-threatening diseases through the prevalent use of the common drinking cup and appallingly unkempt outhouses. They faced serious bullying and class disruption as anywhere from fifteen to fifty pupils ranging in age from five to twenty years crowded into a single room. Many children were sentenced to a life of impaired eyesight from the lack of adequate lighting in the schools. It is astounding that within these difficult conditions, children managed to read the literary classics, learn complex bookkeeping skills, take in the practical arts (music, drawing, agriculture), and learn how to plant gardens. Despite the poor conditions inside the buildings, the one-room schoolhouse has left a lasting architectural legacy, such as the Greek Revival Bell School and the temple-like Wolf Pit School. Many of the buildings that were once one-room schools still survive, but have been significantly altered. The struggle to provide an effective public education system is ongoing and many of the concerns voiced in the nineteenth century are still relevant today. In 1972, the Westport Library Association gave the Bell School to the Westport Historical Society, and so the building continues to dispense knowledge—even if in a different manner.

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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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An increasing Irish-Catholic immigrant population occupying Providence in the 1840s necessitated the need of both a parish and school. Saint Patrick’s Church was established in 1841 and, within two years, the school followed. Opened on November 1, 1843, as a Sunday School, the original building was constructed behind the church and fully furnished at a cost of five hundred dollars. Soon after construction, the structure went through several changes. In 1845, the building was moved from Smith Street to Davis Street and enlarged to two rooms “capable of containing 300 children each, with yards and outhouses, separate for boys and girls.” In 1848, St. Patrick’s became a day school for 35 boys with tuition at $1 per quarter, followed a few years later by a school for girls run by Sisters of Mercy. By 1871, the original building was replaced with a new structure to meet the demands of the continually growing community. Built on Davis Street in Providence, this new building, larger than the original to meet expected attendance demands, was a brick structure with eight classrooms and a large hall for school assemblies and parish activities. It served as a Grammar School until 1923 when it became Saint Patrick’s High School. While the school maintained its presence on Davis Street, another change was coming to Saint Patrick’s. Reverend Martin F. Reddy decided that the school needed to once more go back to Smith Street and continue to serve the needs and education of the children. Believing that a modern building, larger and more suitable to the needs of the community and children, was needed, Reverend Reddy moved forward with his plans. After purchasing Jones Lot on Smith Street, the new structure served as an elementary school upon completion in 1928 and continued to educate the children of Smith Hill until the first major significant change in the mid-twentieth century. In the 1960s, Smith Hill underwent a rapid transformation. Urban redevelopment, the completion of Route 95, and declining populations in the area resulted in diminishing parishioners to Saint Patrick’s Church. Along with these changes, high operating costs, and lack of enrollment the building closed its doors in 1971. Then, one year later, the school found itself in full operation once again. In collaboration with the Word of God Community, it reopened as Saint Patrick’s Word of God School. As part of the Charismatic Renewal Movement, the Word of God Community held weekly prayer meetings within the community. Students attended day classes, while parents enrolled in an eight-week “Life in the Spirit” seminar to understand the Christian way of life. With these methods in place, Saint Patrick’s reopened, continuing to teach school children over the next thirty years. In 2003, Saint Patrick’s School experienced another potential closing because of financial problems and declining enrollment. Despite passionate pleas and generous donations, the elementary school closed in 2008 in favor of a Catholic high school. On August 24, 2009, Saint Patrick’s School was changed to Saint Patrick’s Academy, focusing on a high school curriculum with a religious based faith. Today, the school thrives as it prepares students for college. St. Patrick’s Academy is selective, only accepting 25 freshman every year. Once students are accepted and enrolled, they are provided support as they pursue college. Through the Explore Club, St. Patrick’s students work with Providence College to determine their long-term goals, while parents receive assistance with FAFSA forms. Its graduating class averages fifteen students, all college bound towards promising futures.

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Johnson & Wales University is a world renowned leader in experiential education, with degree programs in arts and sciences, business, culinary arts, education, hospitality, engineering and design, and more. Fittingly, the Providence campus is located in the heart of the 19th and 20th century retail hub of downtown. Though Johnson & Wales has over 16,000 students and several campuses around the country today, the school had very humble beginnings in Providence.

If the walls of University Hall could talk, they might tell you about the time they met George Washington (although don’t believe them if they tell you he slept here). The first building constructed on Brown’s campus, University Hall, has played host to wounded soldiers during the Revolutionary War as well as our nation’s first president, during his visit to Rhode Island in 1790. The Providence Gazette reported that despite Washington’s habit of not going out in the evening, he made his way from his lodging at the Golden Ball Inn to University Hall to accept the invitation of Brown University undergraduates. In a patriotic display, students outfitted each of the Hall’s windows with candles aglow.

Renowned for “The Brown Curriculum,” an innovative approach to undergraduate education instituted in 1970, Brown University’s philosophy states that students, who are free to design their own curriculum, are “the architects of their own course of study.” Founded in 1764 by Baptists as the College of Rhode Island, the school moved to Providence in 1770. The institution changed its name to “Brown University” in 1804 after a generous donation by Nicholas Brown, prominent Providence businessman and alumnus of the school.

With over 250 years of history under its belt, Brown University understandably boasts many styles of architecture. One of the most noticeable structures on campus is the Carrie Tower (1904). Paul Bajnotti commissioned the tower to honor the memory of his wife, Caroline Mathilde Brown, grandaughter of Nicholas Brown, Brown University’s namesake.

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When schoolteacher Josephine Field Wilbor returned to her hometown of Little Compton in 1910, she found one room schoolhouses with outhouse lavatories, classrooms without heat or electricity, and students of all ages crammed into the same space. Educated at one of the nation’s first “normal” schools for teachers (now Rhode Island College), Wilbor made it her life mission to improve public education in Little Compton.

The problems Wilbor encountered ran deeper than upgrade of the town’s school buildings. Previous reformers like Sarah Brownell met resistance from residents reluctant to spend money on improving the schools or change the existing system, even for health reasons. When Brownell closed the Union School on the Common in 1891 because of uninhabitable conditions, parents demanded that it be reopened.

Long-time resident Carlton Brownell recalled the conditions of the district #2 schoolhouse in 1925: “I don’t remember when they first decided we shouldn’t drink out of the dipper in the bucket anymore. They provided paper cups and they were like little envelopes, they were ridiculous. So everyone would hold ‘em and put their whole hand right in the water. So there’s your great effort at sanitation. … It was primitive.”

Increasing numbers of students also placed strain on the system. After dropping below one-thousand residents in the 1880s, Little Compton’s population, fed by Azorean and Portuguese immigrants, boomed by the time Wilbor returned to town. The cramped, run-down, and unsanitary schools were ill-equipped to provide a modern education to the town’s growing number of children.

After assuming her position as director of Union School, Wilbor campaigned to organize the schools by grade level, citing the difficulties of teaching a multitude of education levels in the same place. In response to teachers’ claims that it was difficult to teach and learn in non-graded, one-room schoolhouses, many residents echoed the sentiment, So what? Countless Little Compton children had gone through the same system and had made out just fine.

Future Little Compton school superintendent, Benjamin S. Tubman, summed up this sentiment in a 1928 article in the Providence Journal: “One never heard them extolling the superiority of their grandfather’s venerable oxcart over the family automobile as a means of traveling.”

Wilbor won a minor victory with partial grading of the schools, and from 1918 to 1921, Little Compton had its own high school on the second floor of town hall. In 1921, Wilbor ran for town treasurer and tax collector and became the first woman in Rhode Island to hold an elective position other than school committee member. Through these positions, she advocated for increased school spending.

But Wilbor had even bigger fish to fry: a modern central school building for all grade levels. She rallied the support of the school committee and the Rhode Island Commissioner of Education. A heated battle ensued between education reformers and residents who claimed a new school would break the town.

In the midst of this battle, at the age of 48, Josephine Wilbor succumbed to pneumonia, her strength broken under the pressure of her work, according to her obituary. The fight for education reform did not end with Wilbor’s death. Buoyed by increasing support from Little Compton residents, construction began in 1928 on the Common, and doors opened to students in fall of 1929.

In a salute to Wilbor’s tireless dedication, officials named the new facility Josephine F. Wilbur School. Although Wilbor’s name was apparently misspelled, her school continues to serve the educational needs of Little Compton’s children.

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BAM! While Chef Emeril Lagasse’s catchphrase may not have started at Johnson & Wales University’s College of Culinary Arts, Lagasse did graduate in 1978 from J&W and go on to become a professional chef and television host. The Portuguese and French-Canadian restauranteur was born in nearby Fall River, Massachusetts, but launched his career in New Orleans, where he mastered his signature Creole and Cajun cuisine. The culinary arts program had only recently started when Emeril attended. While the university was founded in 1914 as a business school, what is now known as the College of Culinary Arts opened in 1973 and became more formally established in 1992. The Culinary Arts Museum at Johnson & Wales University is a teaching museum that preserves and interprets culinary and hospitality heritage. Connected to the university, the museum features work and materials by and for students attending the College of Culinary Arts while also operating exhibits for regular museum visitors. In 1979, Johnson & Wales accepted industrialist Paul Fritzsche’s donation of 7,500 rare historical cookbooks, followed a decade later by a donation from educator and restaurateur Louis Szathmary of 64,000 items, including books, artifacts, menus, silver, matchbooks, pots, pans, appliances, artwork, correspondence, autographs, antiques, and advertisements spanning five hundred years. These two collections led the university to create the Culinary Archives & Museum in 1989 to highlight culinary history and culture. More recently, Zack Hanle of Bon Appetit magazine donated over 4,000 menus from around the world, and the museum has also accepted donations from Earle MacAusland of Gourmet Magazine, New York Times columnist and cookbook author Jean Hewitt, McCalls editor Mary Norton, and author and chef Julia Child, who received an honorary doctorate degree from the university in 1995. The renamed Culinary Arts Museum tells stories about food trends, traditions, and innovations, including the significant impact of the College of Culinary Arts on the Rhode Island food scene. The College of Culinary Arts has served as a catalyst for the culinary arts in the state, especially in Providence. Johnson & Wales alumni have established numerous restaurants in Rhode Island and significantly shape local food culture and the culinary arts. As Emeril would say, “Feel the love.”

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Today, needlepoint samplers that were done by students – many of them age 10 and under – at Mary Balch’s School can fetch over $100,000 at Sotheby’s auctions; they fill Pinterest pages and have had starring roles on PBS’ Antiques Roadshow. At its heyday, the school – founded by Mary’s mother, Sarah, in the 1780s after the family left Newport when the city was under siege during the Revolution – had over 100 students, many of them boarders, and was one of New England’s best known and respected needlework schools through to its closing in the 1840s. One of the factors that distinguish the work done at Balch’s school, in addition to its technical sophistication, is its subject matter: Balch’s students were unique during this period in their depiction of architecture, including buildings designed by John Holden Greene.

What purpose did these needlepoint artworks serve? At the time, young girls would receive the most basic tutoring in reading and arithmetic before being placed (if they were from families with means) in schools that taught “female accomplishments”: music, watercolor painting, comportment and sewing. Sewing was an important skill as married women were expected to sew clothes and linens for her family. Needlepoint work laid the foundation for this work, but it also showed off the accomplishments of a young girl to prospective suitors – the best work was often framed and hung in the parlor.

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