Easton’s Beach is a beach of many names. You may also have heard it called First Beach or Newport Beach. But whatever its name is, the beach can be found on the strip of land on Easton’s Bay that connects the peninsula named Easton’s Point in…

As part of a nationwide “City Beautiful” movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Providence’s civic leaders envisioned the creation of numerous parks through the city as a means to provide refuge and beauty for its citizens as…

Home to RI's economic development agency, Commerce RI, along with several other businesses, the ALCO complex once housed a major innovator in the history of transportation. The Rhode Island Locomotive Works constructed this building in 1865,…

Imagine this building as the central location for industry and modernity in 19th-century Providence. Picture a tangle of railroad tracks and constant motion, with engineers and manufacturers working hard to support (arguably) the most important…

Created as Exchange Place in the 19th century, Kennedy Plaza stands out in a neighborhood defined by change. It’s served same role for over a century: the city’s central transportation hub. Today, as many as 69,000 people move through the site…

After World War II, Providence's fortunes were shifting. Textile jobs had moved south. Industry was leaving. Jewelry manufacturing went offshore. Between 1950 and 1980, the population of the city declined by a third. These western neighborhoods were…

A tall man in a long, dark coat and a broad-brimmed hat walked the 2,000 feet across Stone Bridge from the Portsmouth shore to the Tiverton side, where a toll keeper waited to collect his fare. The man passed the money to the keeper, William…

Imagine the Fox Point waterfront in the 1940s. Cargo ships lined up to get into crowded docks. Longshoremen bustled along the busy quays. Crowds waited to welcome packet ships bringing new immigrants and news from Cape Verde.Many of the longshoremen…

It was September 21, 1938. Strong winds ripped across the landscape of Starvegoat Island, tearing up bushes, destroying trees, and obliterating the summer cottages and dormitories perched precariously on the edge of Narragansett Bay. The…