Providence 375 Essay Series

The Visual Symphony Of Providence

by William McKenzie Woodward, Architectural Historian

The panoramic vista from the cupola atop the tower on Benefit Street's Old State House offers the viewer a remarkable opportunity to perceive and begin to understand the unique wonder of Providence's built heritage. To the east, China Trade mansions, boxy houses of 18th-century burghers, vigorous Victorian villas, and tenement dwellings of 20th-century immigrants ascend the steep slope of College Hill. To the south, solid masonry schools, libraries, churches, galleries, and a large courthouse form an institutional corridor punctuated by cupolas and steeples before the expanse of Narragansett Bay in the distance. In a topographical bowl to the southwest, the stores and offices of Downtown Providence spread west from a dense concentration of tall towers. To the northwest, the glittering marble State House proudly holds Smith Hill, while beyond it lie rivers lined with factories below the surrounding hills filled with workers' housing. But aside from the rich variety of this architectural feast, what unites this into the distinct place that is Providence?

Benefit Street before restoration.

Benefit Street after restoration.

The most distinctive characteristic of Providence's architecture is its consistently high quality of design and construction. The city is home to important architectural landmarks such as the John Brown House (1786-1788), the Arcade (1828), the State House (1895-1901), and the Industrial Trust Company Building (1928), each of which deservedly enjoys a reputation of national, if not international significance. Impressive qualities of design and construction are not limited just to high-end buildings in Providence, however, and can be found equally in less architecturally assertive examples. Consider, for instance, the handsomely detailed Nicholson File Company (1864) on Acorn Street, the resonant row of thirteen identical Andrew Dickhaut Cottages on Bath Street (1883), the stacked-porch triple-deckers (1900-1928) that line Oakland Avenue, the narrow George C. Arnold Building (1923) at the corner of Mathewson and Washington Streets, and the Googie-style Specialty Cleansers (1957) on Smith Street. Grand and elaborate or small and simple, each of them presents considered attention to the basic elements of architecture: massing, proportion, and detail. Perhaps even more importantly, for architecture must also be functional, all represent highly appropriate responses to the wants and needs of those who created them.

In addition to fine design quality, Providence buildings share a remarkable consistency of scale. Most buildings in Providence are scaled to human proportions; that is, we can physically relate them to ourselves. Some buildings, like the Stephen Hopkins House (1707, 1743) on Benefit Street, are intimate because of their almost diminutive scale, while others, like the State House, are calculated to impress through increased scale. Throughout the city, however, we can intuitively sense and establish physical relationships between ourselves and the built environment. Significantly, those relationships extend beyond the buildings themselves to the way they are placed on the land, including the intervals at which they occur, the spaces between them, and the walks and roads that link them. Benefit Street is narrow and slightly curving across its one-mile length, and most of the houses that line it are relatively small in scale and located close to the street and to one another--it is an intimate spatial experience. On Blackstone Boulevard, on the other hand, the undulating roadbed is broad, with each direction of traffic separated from the other by a wide landscaped esplanade, and the large houses that line it are set well back from the street and apart from one another. The two streets are vastly different in proportion but each has a scale that we can understand and to which we can physically relate--unlike, for example, a commercial strip lined with large, highly visible parking lots in front of big-box retail outlets or an eight-lane high-speed interstate highway.

Providence's scale is intimately linked with another defining characteristic, the relationship between the built environment and the topography--both land and water--that the city occupies. While Native Americans occupied today's Providence seasonally, English colonists located a permanent settlement, surrounded by hills at the top of Narragansett Bay, at a riverside setting on the east edge of the Great Salt Cove, at the confluence of the Moshassuck and Woonasquatucket Rivers. The bay, not the rivers, achieved preeminence first, as the colony's connection with the rest of the world; while nothing remains of the physical development that housed maritime activity in Providence's first two centuries, the wealth created thereby financed construction of buildings on the lower slopes of College Hill. The shift to an industrial economy harnessed the rivers in the valleys that thread through the settlement's hills, and the industry along these corridors was linked to rail-line proximity and water used in processing goods, not as a source of power. The railroads' goal, of course, was not only providing access--delivery of both raw goods and finished products--to these mills but also linking the country's commercial centers. Providence's commercial center, what became today's Downtown, began as a small cluster of buildings isolated on a low-lying spit of land on the south side of the Great Salt Cove and rapidly expanded to become the economic workhorse that supported a constantly expanding industrial hinterland. Downtown's development demanded an ongoing topographical transformation: filling the Cove and narrowing and covering the rivers to allow for construction of ever-larger buildings and accommodation of the railroad through the heart of the city. In the late 20th century, however, Providence reclaimed its riverine waterfront by uncovering the Moshassuck, Woonasquatucket, and Providence Rivers and re-creating a new Cove Basin, Waterplace, immediately north of the historic Downtown. This significant--and in many ways unprecedented--development reinforces an overarching characteristic of Providence's built environment, the ongoing dialogue between past, present, and future.

The Sullivan Dorr House.

Providence's continuity across the centuries creates a palpable sense of immediacy and authenticity. Engaging architectural orchestration plays out across the city. Lining the ample width of Broadway, towered and turreted large-scale 19th-century houses of diffuse stylistic origins alternate with one-story brick corner stores, the pressed-metal-façade Columbus Theatre (1926), and two late 19th-century churches, St Vartanantz, originally St James (1890), and St Mary's (1864-1891). The multiple-family houses, punctuated by churches, that march down the hill on Atwells Avenue from Mount Pleasant Avenue to Valley Street create a rhythmic cadence and nicely frame distant views of Federal Hill and the compact Downtown. Traversing densely built, alternating clusters of large late 19th-century houses and small-scale early 20th century commercial buildings along Smith Street, a traveler heading east immediately experiences from the curve at Ruggles Street a dramatic view of the State House--not dead on but at a slight angle, which vastly enhances its dynamic domed composition. On North Main Street, where Thomas Street to the east transitions into Steeple Street to the west, the architectural melodies and harmonies reach full orchestral proportion. The ample Georgian First Baptist Church (1774) staunchly occupies a full block between North Main and Benefit Streets. To its north, the Providence Art Club's tightly serried Federal-era houses (1785-1791), domestic cadet versions of the church, and the half-timbered Arts-and-Crafts-era Fleur-de-Lys Studios (1885-86) line the north side of Thomas Street. To the church's south, the richly textured surfaces of the Rhode Island School of Design Building (1892-93) and Carr House (1885) create counterpoint on the south side of Waterman Street. Just up the hill from the church, at the intersection of Angell and Benefit Streets, the red-brick Gamaliel Dwight (1879) and Thomas Jenckes (1856) Houses forcefully close the Thomas Street view to the east. On the west side of North Main Street, the mid-20th-century Providence Washington Insurance Company Building (1947), now part of the RISD complex, plays an updated riff on the Georgian tune begun by the church and the Thomas Street houses. A variant chord occurs to the north on North Main Street through the striking juxtaposition of the cast-iron-façade Elizabeth Building (1874-76); the brick Joseph and William Russell House (1772), raised from street level for the insertion of a commercial storefront; and the stone-trimmed-brick Italianate Wayland Building (1874), with its jazzy Art Deco storefront. These unedited and often casually planned juxtaposition of forms and styles created and arranged over long stretches of time could never be created artificially.

Providence is just one of many architecturally and visually compelling cities around the world. Those cities, that many of us travel significant distances to experience, all have their own strongly identifiable character, each different from the others--who would confuse or conflate Providence with Istanbul, San Gimignano, Charleston, or San Francisco? Architecturally and urbanistically, Providence possesses exceptional local character whose quality, scale, setting, and continuity convince us that we are part of and linked to a remarkable and distinctive urban place unlike any other.