History of the City
"375 YEARS AT A GLANCE"
by Patrick T. Conley and Paul R. Campbell
The Colonial Era: 1636-1765
The land upon which Roger Williams planted his town of Providence was the tribal domain of the Narragansett Indians. Their generous deeds to the early English colonists entitle them to share with Williams and his associates the honor of founding this important settlement.
For its first century Providence was significant much more for the principles upon which it was established than for its political or economic influence. Roger Williams made Providence (which he named for God's guidance and care) a haven for persecuted religious dissenters. His town became the "lively experiment" in religious liberty and church-state separation. This was and is its major claim to fame.
Despite Providence's position at the head of Narragansett Bay, Newport far outdistanced its sister town during the colonial era. Providence's rocky, hilly, heavily wooded hinterland yielded grudgingly to the plow and the axe, whereas pasturage was more spacious and the land more level and fertile in the colony's southerly regions, and these supplied Newport with valuable articles of commerce.
The destruction of the town during King Philip's War was an added hurdle, albeit temporary, to the growth of early Providence. Still another obstacle was posed by the town's tradition of dissent, which was not conducive to the development of sound and orderly government. Providence's independent-minded and strong-willed pioneers often clashed with one another over land titles, politics, and religion. Roger Williams's bout with William Harris and the Arnold Family over the territory along the Pawtuxet River was only the most acrimonious of many such squabbles.
During its first forty years the town was exclusively a fishing and farming village, laid out along one winding dirt road which meandered along the eastern shore of the Providence River and the old Cove. Called "the Towne Street," this thoroughfare (present-day North and South Main streets between Olney and Wickenden) was the main artery of Providence for the duration of the colonial period and beyond.
In the years following the devastation of King Philip's War some industrial and commercial activity began, and settlers moved outward to the town's remote lands bordering upon Connecticut to the west and Massachusetts to the north. Despite this growth, however, the population of the entire municipality was only 1,446 when the first colony-wide census was taken in 1708.
The economic tempo of the town quickened during the second and third decades of the eighteenth century. By the next census, in 1730, the population had nearly tripled (to 3,916), and so many farmers had moved into the "outlands" of Providence that three large towns were set off from the parent community in 1731 (Scituate, Glocester, and Smithfield). Before the colonial period came to a close, an inner ring of three more farm towns (Cranston, Johnston, and North Providence) were carved from Providence's territory. What remained, less than six square miles, huddled around the river and the Cove and was predominately commercial and increasingly cosmopolitan in character.
By the middle of the 1760s-- the eve of the Revolution--Providence had a flourishing maritime trade, a merchant aristocracy, a few important industries, a body of skilled artisans, a newspaper and printing press, a stagecoach line, and several impressive public buildings. Its long period of civic gestation was over, and its 4,000 inhabitants were ready to play a leading role in the political and economic revolutions that lay just ahead.
Revolutionary Providence: 1765-1790
The Mother Country's passage of the Sugar Act in 1764, levying a duty on sugar and molasses imports so essential to Providence distilleries and to the "triangular trade" in rum and slaves, set in motion a wave of local protest which crested in 1776.
As the colonies edged toward the brink of separation with England because of subsequent measures such as the Stamp Act, the Townshend Duties, the Tea Act, and the Coercive Acts, the town of Providence became a leader of the resistance movement. In the 1760s Providence pamphleteers Stephen Hopkins and Silas Downer expounded a federal theory of the British Empire which would divide sovereignty between the colony and the crown, thus preserving local autonomy including the power to tax.
In June 1772 Providence merchants and sailors burnt the customs sloop Gaspee, and in June 1775 they burnt tea in Market Square. Providence citizens led the way in calling for the Continental Congress, in founding a Continental navy, and, on May 4, 1776, in renouncing allegiance to the king.
This rebellious town, according to a 1774 census, had 4,321 inhabitants, with 655 families residing in approximately 370 dwellings. A 1779 list shows 278 shops and stores, some of which contained living quarters. There were at least 118 businesses engaged in commerce, but this primary economic activity was dominated by three mercantile firms: Nicholas Brown and Company, Joseph and William Russell, and Clark and Nightingale.
Though colonial industry had been restricted by the mercantile system, Providence on the eve of revolt harbored six distilleries, two spermaceti candle works, two tanneries, two gristmills, a slaughterhouse, a potash works, and a paper mill. Some two hundred tradesmen and artisans represented more than thirty-five different services and skills.
Fortunately, Providence escaped enemy occupation, a fate that arrested Newport's growth. But as English ships and troops hovered nearby, the town remained constantly on alert. A 1776 survey shows 726 Providence men capable of bearing arms. These able-bodied citizens built fortifications and warning system lest British ships venture up Narragansett Bay. In 1775 they erected a beacon pole on College Hill near the present corner of Meeting and Prospect streets. According to one historical account, persons in Newport, in New London, Norwich, and Pomfret, Connecticut, and in Cambridge, Massachusetts, spotted the light from a trial firing on the night of August 17, 1775. Entrenchment's and breastworks were later constructed on Foxes Hill (a rise of ground on Fox Point, later leveled), at Fields, Sassafras, and Kettle points, and on College Hill.
In December 1776 a three-year occupation of Newport began, forcing many of that town's inhabitants to take refuge in Providence--a reversal of the pattern in 1676 during King Philip's War, and a reversal of the relative importance of Rhode Island's two principal towns.
During the war American troops were quartered in Providence en route to various campaigns, though perhaps a thousand were permanently stationed here as a protective force. French troops moved in and out of Providence from July 1780 to May 1782, and it was from this point, in June 1781, that Rochambeau's army began its fateful march southward to Yorktown.
While Providence residents were fighting in many of the important land and naval battles of the war, inflation and shortages of food and fuel were causing hardship for those who remained at home. Business enterprise, however, was not destroyed. During the three-year blockade of Narragansett Bay, Providence entrepreneurs imported their wares through the ports of New London and New Bedford, and some historians claim that local merchants actually prospered during the war years.
On the debit side, education was disrupted, especially at Brown, where University Hall became a barracks and a troop hospital, and certain religious sects (according to Baptist minister James Manning) experienced a decline, especially the Baptists and the Anglicans.
Despite the dislocations of war, the people of Providence found time for some festivities, including Fourth of July celebrations, private parties, and parades when military dignitaries like Washington or Rochambeau passed through. The greatest celebration was reserved for victory: on April 23, 1783, the entire town turned out to hear "the Proclamation of Congress for a Cessation of Arms." The firing of cannon, the tolling of bells, church services, a fireworks display, a procession, and a state dinner marked the occasion.
With war ended, Providence resumed its pattern of growth. Its citizens and entrepreneurs weathered a postwar depression (1784-86) and then scaled new economic heights. When American ships were barred from the British West Indies in 1784, local merchants replaced this important colonial trading partner with ports in Latin America and the Orient.
From Town to City: 1790-1832
During the early years of the republic, Providence moved into the front rank of the nation's municipalities, first as a bustling port and then as an industrial and financial center. Providence merchants, especially the Browns, experiments in manufacturing. Samuel Slater was their first important protege.
Peter J. Coleman, in a detailed and informative history, traces this remarkable economic transformation of the town and the state. The transition begun by Slater in 1790, was on its way to completion by the fourth decade of the nineteenth century. This period (1790-1830) Coleman accurately calls "the era of experimentation." by the time it drew to a close, economic statistics indicate, the "experiment" was a stunning success. manufacturing had replaced maritime activity as the dynamic element in the economy, and industry had become the principal outlet for venture capital and the primary source of wealth.
Providence's four major areas of manufacturing endeavor--base metals and machinery, cotton textiles, woolen textiles, and jewelry and silverware--were established by 1830, and for the next century they dominated the city's economy. They made Providence the industrial leader of the nation's most industrialized state. Providence owed this primacy to its superior financial resources and banking facilities, its position as the hub of southeastern New England's transportation network, and--especially--to its skilled work force and enterprising business leaders.
But all was not rosy in the early years of the nineteenth century. A major fire on South Main Street in January 1801 destroyed thirty-seven buildings, and the Great Gale of September 1815 left the entire waterfront in shambles. The War of 1812 brought hardship to commerce and apprehension to the residents of a port vulnerable to enemy attack, and a postwar depression (the Panic of 1819) interrupted economic recovery.
Most serious, however, were the town's internal growing pains. In 1820 the population of Providence reached 11,745. By 1830 the number of inhabitants had jumped to 16,832, of whom 1,213 (or 7.2 percent) were black.
During the 1820s, as Providence became more densely populated, as its older houses became less habitable, and as its factories darkened the landscape, tensions increased between the white working class and the black community. The fact that Negroes were stripped of the right to vote in 1822 and were segregated by the Providence School Law of 1828 intensified their resentment.
Most blacks lived in an area called Hard-Scrabble (present-day Moshassuck Square) or minor race riot occurred in Hard-Scrabble in October 1824. Although it resulted in no deaths and only moderate damage, it shocked the citizenry and kindled debate not only on the issues of race but also on those of law and order and governmental reform. The old town meeting system, said some, was no longer adequate for the administration and security of a community harboring nearly 17,000 socially and racially antagonistic residents.
In subsequent years the drive for a city form of government gained momentum because of the town's steady growth. In January 1830 the General Assembly granted Providence a city charter, subject to ratification by a three- fifths vote. When balloting was held the next month, 383 supported the proposed charter and 345 opposed it--a result short of the legislature's 60 percent approval requirement.
Here things stood until September 1831, when another race racer riot erupted, much more serious than that of 1824, beginning with a clash between some rowdy white sailors and blacks living in Olney's Lane. This four-day episode, in which five men died, was the final catalyst for municipal change. A town meeting on October 5, 1831, promptly decided "that it is expedient to adopt a city form of government." The General Assembly agreed. In November the charter was issued and ratified by the town's electorate, 459 to 188. Another stage in the history of Providence had passed.
According to urban historians Howard Chudacoff and Theodore Hirt, race was not the only variable in the disorders of 1824 and 1831. These incidents "fit within a larger context of urban growth and change. Increase in vice and disorganized violence; social breakdown of the old village sense of community; decline of the influence of the church; a rise in intemperance, plus an increasing awareness by middle and upper classes of need for reform"--all signified that the economic and social ferment of the early nineteenth century was undercutting old patterns of political and social authority.
In response, Providence upgraded and expanded its municipal services and streamlined its government. The city charter of 1832 by no means insured peace and harmony (as the Dorr Rebellion would prove), but it was an innovation which heralded a new era in Providence's growth and development.
Providence in Rebellion: 1832-1845
Providence inaugurated its city government with much fanfare and little difficulty. Samuel Bridgham, the first mayor, working with a two-chamber council that held most of the power, expanded city services and levied a tax of $3.17 on each $1,000 of assessed valuation to defray their cost. The total expense of city government during its first full year of operation (1833) was $43,205.
In 1835 the railroad came to Providence, wending its way southward from Boston. Two years later another corporation completed a line from Providence to Stonington. These facilities augmented the turnpikes and the canal that had been constructed in the previous decade.
The new city's most significant institutional development during this period was the expansion and improvement of the public school system. John Howland, Francis Wayland, Samuel Bridgham, and Thomas Wilson Dorr (de facto president of the school committee from 1838 to 1842) made the greatest contributions. When educational specialist Henry Barnard was brought to Rhode Island in 1843 to implement statewide reforms, he observed that "the city of Providence has already gained to itself an extended reputation and made itself a bright example to many other cities."
Public works projects like the Blackstone Canal and the railroads joined with the growth of the factory system to make jobs plentiful in Providence during this busy period. Such employment opportunities attracted not only native-born families from the farms but also workers of foreign birth. In 1820 there were only thirty-nine unnaturalized citizens in Providence; by 1835 there were 1,005 "foreigners not naturalized," nearly all of whom were Irish Catholics. In January 1843 Reverend John Corry informed local historian William Staples that the Providence Catholic community had grown from 150 in 1830 to more than 2,000 in the succeeding twelve years.
This new Celtic element in a predominantly Anglo-Saxon Protestant environment gradually became even more disturbing to the native white majority than the black community had been during the turbulent twenties. In fact, the Irish "problem" developed into a major political issue during the Dorr Rebellion and remained a divisive force for a half-century thereafter.
Though all these factors were important, the major development in the decade following the incorporation of the city was the movement for constitutional reform, for the state still clung to the royal charter of 1663 as its basic law. An 1832 list of Providence freemen enumerated 1,216 eligible voters. In view of the approximately 3,823 white adult males residing in the town at the time of 1830 census, a rough projection indicates that 68 percent were disenfranchised by the prevailing real estate requirement for voting at the time of the 1832 presidential campaign.
The minority of Providence men who could vote were themselves victimized on the state level by a malapportioned General Assembly. In 1830 Providence had one representative in the House for every 4,209 residents. At the opposite end of the scale was Jamestown, with one seat for every 207 inhabitants. Small wonder that the demand for constitutional reform of these inequities was stronger in Providence that elsewhere in the state.
In 1833 the Providence Workingmen's Association, led by carpenter Seth Luther and barber William I. Tillinghast, began the drive for "free suffrage" and reapportionment. Soon they were joined by local patricians such as Thomas Dorr and Joseph K. Angell. This incongruous alliance resulted in the formation of the Constitutional party, a moderate, short-lived, and unsuccessful pressure group.
After the election of 1840, however, zeal for reform intensified. A militant Rhode Island Suffrage Association ignored the existing reactionary government and called a People's Convention, which met in the fall of 1841. Under the guidance of Dorr, a very progressive basic law was drafted and overwhelmingly ratified in a December referendum. In April 1842 Dorr was elected the "People's Governor."
Because the charter regime refused to yield, a confrontation occurred that May at the state arsenal in Providence. When Dorr's forceful effort failed, he fled the state, returning only briefly in late June to Chepachet in a futile attempt to revive the "People's Legislature."
In the aftermath of this bloodless struggle, the victorious forces of law and order drafted and ratified a conservative state constitution designed in part as a bulwark against working-class and immigrant influence. Among its undesirable features small rural towns to check urban-oriented legislation; the absence of a secret ballot, which permitted employers to intimidate their workers and a suffrage article which required naturalized citizens (i.e., Irish Catholics) to own real estate if they wished to vote or hold office, while allowing landless natives to gain the right to vote by merely performing one day's militia duty or paying a one-dollar registry tax. This new basic law (the present state constitution in its original form) was cumbersome and difficult to amend and contained no mechanism for the calling of future conventions.
By 1843 the forces of reaction had triumphed, the turmoil had subsided, Dorr was in jail, and Providence had emerged from yet another crisis more confident and optimistic than ever.
The Age of Modernization: 1845-1860
In the years between the Dorr Rebellion and the Civil War, Providence adjusted to its new status as a city. Several major public works projects were instituted to meet the demands of rapid demographic and economic growth. The most important of these was railroad construction. In 1847 the first train ran over the Providence and Worcester line. This railroad (which is still a major factor in the city's economy) built a massive terminal in 1848, the Union Passenger Depot, to service its operations. This structure, some trackage, and adjacent railroad yards were erected on land reclaimed from the Cove by the P & W, which had undertaken construction in 1846 of an elliptical cove basin, surrounded by an eighty-foot promenade, to prepare its route into the central city.
In the 1850s other railroads sought Providence as a terminus. The Hartford, Providence, and Fishkill line was completed in 1854, connecting the city with the Hudson River. In the following year the Providence, Warren, and Bristol line provided access to the East Bay region. This road was extended to Fall River in 1860.
Internal routes of transportation were also improved. In 1847 the Providence Gas Company was incorporated. Its first project was the lighting of streets. mains were laid first in the principal Downtown thoroughfares, and gradually gas superseded whale oil for highway illumination. In the mid-1850s the city council funded a major road improvement program, which resulted in the widening of existing streets, their extension, and the building of cross streets and bridges. In several highways, tracks were laid so that horses ( called "string teams") could pull freight cars from the docks to the main line of the railroad and back.
Waterborne transport also received a boost when the United States Army Corps of Engineers surveyed the Providence River in 1853 prior to dredging a channel south of Fox Point to a depth of 10 and a width of 100 feet. This improvement allowed the port of Providence to accommodate most of the new and larger vessels used in the coastal trade.
Apart from transportation and public works, another development that loomed large in this era was the establishment of institutions for the care or treatment of the unfortunate. For the mentally ill, the innovative Butler Hospital was opened in a pastoral setting overlooking the Seekonk River in 1847. For wayward children, the Providence Reform School was organized in 1850, housed in spacious Tockwotton Mansion near India Point.
Orphaned and neglected children also became an important social concern. To supplement the work of the Children's Friend Society (established in 1835), the Association for the Benefit of Colored Children (organized in 1838) constructed a facility, called "The Shelter," on Olive Street in 1849. Two years later the Roman Catholic Sisters of Mercy established St. Aloysius Home in their convent on Claverick Street. By 1862 this orphanage--the oldest continuous social welfare agency in the diocese--occupied a spacious, modern building on Prairie Avenue. Providence Catholics also established a local branch of the St. Vincent de Paul Society, a lay organization dedicated to aiding the destitute. The cathedral unit (founded in 1853) was the first of many parish chapters.
To care for the elderly, the Providence Home for Aged Women was organized in 1856. Its present building at Front and East Streets, overlooking the harbor, was opened in 1864. (Elderly men waited ten years longer for their facility.) Finally, when all else failed, there was the Swan Point Cemetery, platted with burial lots and avenues by engineers Atwater and Schubarth, and opened for business in 1847.
These social agencies (Swan Point excluded) were humanitarian responses to the increasingly impersonal nature of an emerging urban-industrial society. They were commendable attempts by civic-minded reformers to deal with the victims of rapid change, growth, and modernization that characterized mid-nineteenth-century Providence.
The only notable departure from contemporary humanitarian sentiment was the incidence of nativism in the 1850s. Prejudice towards Irish Catholic immigrants, fanned by the Providence Journal, used as its vehicle the American, or "Know-Nothing," party, a secret organization that swept city and state elections in the mid-fifties. Its candidate, James Y. Smith, captured the mayoralty in 1855. some of the party's more zealous adherents even planned a raid on St. Xavier's Convent, home of the "female Jesuits" (the Sisters of Mercy.)
Fortunately, this virulent and militant strain of nativism subsided as quickly as it had reared its evil head. By 1860 bigotry again became subtle rather than overt as Providence and the nation braced to face yet another challenge--the specter of disunion.
Providence and Civil War: 1860-1868
Providence, like every city in America, felt the impact of the Civil War, but this was a war that many in Providence sought to avoid. Yankee businessmen, especially those producing cotton textiles, had economic ties with the South which war would(and did) disrupt. As some critics remarked, there seemed to be an unholy alliance between the "lords of the loom" and the lords of the lash," as the slave holders were called. In addition, many foreign-born Irishmen, resentful that they needed land to vote while blacks were subjected to no such discrimination, had little sympathy for freeing those who could become their rivals for jobs on the lower rungs of the economic ladder.
Consequently, when the Republican party nominated Seth Padelford for governor in 1860--a man whose antislavery views were extreme--a split occurred in party ranks. Supporters of other Republican aspirants and Republican moderates of the Lincoln variety joined with Democrats (who were softer on slavery) to nominate and elect a fusion candidate on the "Conservative" ticket. Their choice, twenty-nine-year-old William Sprague, was heir to a vast cotton textile empire and a martial man who had attained the rank of colonel in the Providence Marine Corps of Artillery. Sprague outpolled Padelford 12,278 to 10,740, carrying Providence 3,578 to 2,761--victory celebrated as a rebuke to abolitionism by the citizens of faraway Savannah, Georgia, who fired a 100-gun salute in Sprague's honor.
But if Providence and Sprague were soft on slavery, they were strong on Union. After the Confederate attack of April 12, 1861, on Fort Sumter, the local citizenry rallied behind their once-conciliatory governor and rushed to the defense of Washington. President Lincoln issued his call for volunteers on April 15. Just three days later, the "Flying Artillery" left Providence for the front, and on April 20 Colonel Ambrose Burnside and Sprague himself led 530 men of the First Regiment, Rhode Island Detached Militia, from Exchange Place to their fateful encounter with the rebels at Bull Run. More than half of Burnside's regiment hailed from Providence.
During the war there were eight calls for troops, with Rhode Island exceeding its requisition in all but one. Though the state's total quota was only 18,898, it furnished 23,236 fighting men, of whom 1,685 died of wounds or disease and 16 earned the Medal of Honor. Providence, with 29 percent of Rhode Island's population in 1860, supplied nearly half its fighting men.
The city's contribution to the Union victory went beyond mere military manpower. Some historians have claimed that the productive element in the outcome of the Civil War. Here again Providence was prominent. Its woolen mills, especially Atlantic and Wanskuck, supplied federal troops with thousands of uniforms, overcoats, and blankets, fashioned on sewing machines made by Brown and Sharpe, while metals factories such as Providence Tool, Nicholson and Brownell, and the Burnside Rifle Company provided guns, sabers, and musket parts. Builders Iron Foundry (established in 1822 and still operating in West Warwick) manufactured large numbers of cannon; the Providence Steam Engine Company of South Main Street (established 1821) built the engines for two Union sloops of war, the Algonquin and the Contoocook; and Congdon and Carpenter (established 1792) supplied the military with such hardware as iron bars, bands, hoops, and horseshoes from its factory at 3 Steeple Street (now the city's oldest surviving industrial building).
On the home front, the Civil War decade was a time of continued growth and modernization for Providence. The city's most important and dynamic mayor, Thomas A. Doyle, began a nineteen-year reign in 1864. He promptly reorganized the police department into an efficient, modern force and converted the Market House into a municipal office building.
City health and sanitation programs, under the capable direction of Dr. Edwin M. Snow, were models for other municipalities to emulate. Elsewhere in the field of medicine, the urgings of Dr. Usher Parsons combined with the philanthropy of Thomas Poynton Ives to establish Rhode Island Hospital, giving Providence a first-class medical facility at last.
In education, business and commercial schools such Scholfield's and Bryant and Stratton flourished as they provided a growing white-collar work force with the office skills needed to administer the affairs of the city's burgeoning industries. And in the public schools a momentous event, inspired by the outcome of the war, occurred in 1866: racial segregation was abolished both in the city and throughout the state.
It was during the Civil War decade that urban mass transit came to Providence. Its vehicle was the horsecar, a mode of travel over the streets of the city that combined the old (actual horsepower) and the new (iron rails). The horsecar lines, extending from the Union Depot in Market Square over the surface of every major thoroughfare, were essential factors in the growth and settlement of the city's "streetcar suburbs"--the outlying neighborhoods of Providence that were reclaimed from the surrounding towns of Cranston, North Providence, and Johnston beginning in 1868. Closer to the city's core, splendid mansions, built by the city's business magnates, sprang up on the East Side and in the West End along Elmwood Avenue, Westminster Street, and Broadway.
With the war a partial stimulus, industrial Providence began to scale its greatest heights, pulled from above by its wealthy Yankee entrepreneurs and investors, pushed from below by a growing immigrant work force that now began to include migrants from Germany, Sweden, England, and French Canada. Together the titans and the toilers labored to make Providence an industrial giant among the cities of the nation. As the cataclysmic sixties rushed to their conclusion, the city rushed onward towards its Golden Age.
Providence's Golden Age: 1868-1899
The last three decades of nineteenth-century America have been labeled the Gilded Age, an epithet coined by novelists Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner to describe and decry the low state of manners and morals which allegedly characterized the era. Beneath the gilt of boom and prosperity was a base of crass materialism and moral decay, or so these critics claimed. Whatever validity that intellectually elitist assessment may have had for the nation at large, however, for Providence the age was not Gilded but truly Golden.
If industrialization, urbanization, and cultural pluralism were the waves of the future, then Providence rode the crest of those waves into the twentieth century. From 1868 to 1899, in a series of eight annexations from the surrounding towns of Cranston, Johnston, and North Providence, the city tripled its physical size. These additions, together with an influx of immigrants, raised the number of inhabitants from 54,595 in 1865 to 175,597 by 1900 and placed Providence twentieth among the cities of the country in population despite its still diminutive area.
While the native-born trickled into the city from surrounding rural towns in search of jobs and excitement, the influx of immigrants was more like a flood. The Irish migration continued to be sizable, but it formed a smaller percentage of the whole as the nineteenth century marched on. Those of German stock, who began to arrive in the 1850s, numbered 3,493 by 1895; French Canadians, recruited to augment a work force depleted by the Civil War, totaled 3,451. The 1895 census also disclosed that Providence contained 2,793 persons of Swedish parentage, 1,312 of Portuguese stock, and 4,655 whose parents were born in Italy, as well as small numbers of Jews, Poles, and Cape Verdeans.
One surprising ethnic group, consistently overlooked because their use of the English language and their Protestant religion produced rapid assimilation, were the British Americans. These immigrants, who were often skilled workers, had an enormous impact upon late-census of 1895 counted 11,124 Providence residents with both parents born in England, 2,550 of Welsh or Scottish stock, and another 2,963 from British Canada. Only their socio-religious and political rivals, the Catholic Irish, were more numerous. In all, over 60 percent of Providence's total population were of foreign stock by century's end.
The magnet that attracted these diverse peoples to Providence was jobs. This was the age of the Industrial Revolution, for the city and the country alike. By 1900 economically diverse industrial centers, and its board of trade boasted (perhaps without exaggeration) that the city contained the world's largest tool factory (Brown and Sharpe), file factory (Nicholson File), engine factory (Corliss Steam Engine Company), screw factory (American Screw), and silverware factory (Gorham). These were exuberantly proclaimed as Providence's Five Industrial Wonders of the World. In addition, the city ranked first nationally in the manufacture of jewelry and in the production of woolen and worsted goods, and it contained the home offices of the famed Knight brothers' cotton textile empire. Small wonder that the federal census of 1900 listed 44,978 Providence inhabitants as industrial wage earners.
As business grew bigger, workers began to organize to protect their rights and welfare. The decade of the 1880s marked the birth of the modern organized labor movement in Providence. The Knights of Labor, the largest industrial union of the era, came to the city in 1882, and a district assembly of the Knights was established in 1885. The skilled workers--led by the carpenters, the bricklayers and masons, and the tailors--formed the Providence-based Rhode Island Central Labor Union in March 1884.
To accommodate this phenomenal physical, demographic, and economic growth, the city government expanded its services and facilities, primarily through the initiative of Mayor Thomas Doyle. New and more spacious schools were built on both the elementary and secondary levels; the police and fire departments were enlarged and the direction of Superintendent Edwin Snow and his worthy successor, Dr. Charles V. Chapin; administrative departments were reorganized; an ornate and elaborate City Hall was erected; the Cove Basin was filled; Foxes Hill on Fox Point was leveled and the surrounding area cleared of dilapidated housing in a major urban renewal were built; a sewage system and treatment plant were put into operation; more streets and highways were laid, most notably two broad, tree-lined thoroughfares--Elmwood Avenue (1891-92) and Blackstone Boulevard (1892-1904); dredging and other harbor improvements were undertaken; older bridges were rebuilt and two ones constructed--the Red Bridge (1870-73; replaced, 1895) and the Point Street Bridge (1872).
The private sector also furnished new services to a city in the throes of modernization. The horsecars of the Union Street Railway Company facilitated the settlement of the outlying neighborhoods. The Providence Telephone Company (incorporated in 1879) brought a new mode of communication to the city's residents, and the Rhode Island Electric Lighting company (incorporated in 1882) furnished a new form of power. By 1894, through the efforts of banker and utilities magnate Marsden Perry, the street railway system was completely electrified.
Other privately financed projects with a public purpose included the construction of a cable tramway line over College Hill (1890); the building of union Station (1896-98) by the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad; the erection of the luxurious Narragansett Hotel (1878) by a syndicate Providence Opera House (1871); and the construction of the Infantry Building on South Main Street, containing a large civic auditorium (1879-80).
To relieve the tensions generated by such hectic growth and the frustrations caused by long hours of labor in drab and dingy factories, recreation and sports came to the rescue. Roger Williams Park, donated to the city by the will of Betsey Williams in 1871, became a lively, well-developed " playground of the people" by century's end; summer amusement centers within the city limits, such as Park Gardens and San Souci Gardens, flourished briefly; and for eight glorious seasons Providence was one of eight cities in America to host a professional major league baseball team. That illustrious nine, the Providence Grays, playing its games at Messer Park near Olneyville, won two National League championships and was three times runner-up during its brief but exciting existence.
Providence also had name entertainers, such as the American Band of David Wallis Reeves; an internationally known singing troupe called the Troubadours, starring Sissieretta Jones, better known as " Black Patti"; and an Irish-American family of aspiring vaudevillians called The Four Cohans.
Nor was culture dormant, as the Gilded Age stereotype of Twain and Warner would lead us to believe. In 1877 a group of Providence women founded a nationally renowned industrial design institute--the Rhode Island School of Design--as its centennial project. Two decades later many of these same women broke the sex barrier at Brown and in1897 established Pembroke College as a department of that prestigious university. In addition, the defunct state normal school was reopened in Providence in 1871, and it was furnished with an impressive modern building at Francis and Gaspee streets in 1898.
Politics were as prominent and as turbulent as ever. Thomas Doyle was the era's most productive mayor; Democrat Edwin D. McGuinness, the city's first Irish Catholic chief executive, was the most reform-minded and consumer- oriented. "Mr. Inside," Nelson W. Aldrich, a former Providence city councilman, became the dominant member of the United States Senate and won the awesome title of "General Manager of the United States." Against this powerful Brayton-Aldrich machine were arrayed not only reform Democrats such as McGuinness and Charles E. Gorman but also 'mugwump' or good-government Republicans such as the Providence Journal's cultured editor Alfred M. Williams.
Providence finished the nineteenth century with a rush. Having experienced its Golden Age, the city looked to the future with undiminished vigor and optimism. Its captains of industry and their legions of immigrant workers had made it an industrial giant and a culturally diverse mosaic of momentum would be Providence's great challenge of the new century.
The Age of Optimism: 1900-1929
Providence moved into the twentieth century with a full head of steam. First in woolen production, third in the manufacture of machinery and machine tools (behind Philadelphia and Cincinnati), and the jewelry capital of the nation-- it seemed to be a city with a boundless future. The Providence Board of Trade and its successor, the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce, proudly trumpeted Providence as " the Gateway of Southern New England, " "the City of Fascination," "the Metropolis of Southern New England," and "the Centre of Northern Industries" and even prepared a promotional film on the city for national distribution.
The early decades of the century, however, were marked not by an endless upward spiral but by an economic reversal of gears, except for the brief reprieve that World War 1's demand for goods gave to the city's economy. Underneath the boosterism and civic pride, Providence was an aging, physically saturated municipality.
By the mid-twenties textiles, especially cottons, declined in the face of a strong Southern challenge. Providence and its older textile mills could not compete with the non-union labor, low energy costs, reduced transportation charges, tax incentives, and modern facilities available to the cotton industry in Southern cities and towns. Local manufacturers of textile machinery also felt the impact of the exodus to Dixie. Even before the Great Crash of 1929 Providence's unemployment figures began their fretful rise, and the MIT experts who conducted the Metropolitan Providence Industrial Survey from 1926 to 1928 noted that the city had "no extensive areas...for industrial development."
The local economy's bright spot was jewelry manufacturing, whose continued growth took up some of the slack created by the textile industry's slow death. But here the low wages and unskilled jobs were more a boon to the manufacturers than to those immigrants who were paid on a piecework basis for their long hours in unhealthy sweatshops.
Those immigrants gave Providence a League of Nations look . The older ethnics were augmented by a massive influx of southern Italians, who established "Little Italy's" in Federal Hill, Silver Lake, and the North End. Portuguese migration reached its peak as Continentals joined Azoreans and Cape Verdeans in populating Fox Point. The Fabre Line, which in 1911 made Providence its American terminus, facilitated the migration of both Italians and Portuguese to the city. Other new ethnics in smaller numbers also chose Providence as their New World destination. Jews settled heavily in South Providence, in Smith Hill, and around Randall Square; Polish took up residence in Olneyville, the Valley industrial area, and the lower North End; Greeks, Lithuanians, and Armenians made their first home on Smith Hill, the most ethnically diverse of all the city's neighborhoods; and some Syrians and Lebanese settled amidst old Irish and new Italians on Federal Hill, where they established St. George's Maronite Church in 1911.
But Providence was not a melting pot despite its many ethnics, for each group (at least for a generation or two) retained its own cultural identity. Perhaps it could be said that the city was more like a mosaic of diverse peoples- -or even a stew, with everybody in one pot contributing to the whole, but with each ingredient maintaining its own flavor and identity.
During this period politics, especially the ethnic variety, became the city's great passion. Unbelievably, Yankee Republicans still controlled Providence, not by numbers or brainpower but by the intervention of a rural-dominated General Assembly in local affairs, and especially by a well-designed constitutional system which limited the vote in city council elections to those who paid a property tax. A 1925 study indicated that of the Providence electorate who voted for mayor, nearly 60 percent--principally ethnics at the lower socio- economic levels--were ineligible to cast a ballot for their councilmen.
The importance of that voting restriction becomes evident when one realizes that prior to 1941 the city had a strong council-weak mayor form of government. From 1900 onward the ceremonial chief executive was nearly always a Democrat, but the two-chamber council, controlled by Yankee Republicans, in turn controlled city finances and most of the patronage. Small wonder that Democrats battled ceaselessly to remove the property-tax requirement. When they finally succeeded in 1928 (via the Twentieth Amendment to the state constitution), the council came permanently under Democratic political machine.
Providence's impact on state government was hampered by a malapportioned senate that gave control to rural Republican towns. In 1925, at its all-time population peak of 267,918, Providence was entitled to one senator in the General Assembly, while West Greenwich, population 407, also had a senator of its own. In 1928 Providence pressure helped pass the Nineteenth Amendment to the state constitution, allowing the city one senator for each 25,000 electors (not people), but it took the United States Supreme Court decisions of the 1960s to give Providence the clout in the state senate that its population warranted.
During this era Providence gained its modern skyline. To the Banigan Building (1896) were added the Union Trust (1902), the Turk's Head (1913), the twin-towered Hospital Trust (1919), the Biltmore (1922), and the imposing Industrial Trust Building (1928)--still the city's tallest skyscraper.
Other aspects of physical growth included the development of the outlying neighborhood, especially the East Side, beyond Hope Street to the Seekonk. While Roger Williams Park became more beautiful and more frequented by the city's inhabitants, such additional green spots were created as Pleasant Valley Parkway (1909), Hopkins Park (1909), Neutaconkanut Park (1903), and Triggs Memorial Park (1928), which was developed into a municipal golf course and named in honor of the park superintendent who acquired in honor of the park superintendent who acquired it for the city. The state-run Metropolitan Park commission added such facilities to Providence's growing system as Merino Flats, Mashapaug Pond Reservation, and the short-lived Edgewood Beach.
A notable administrative innovation was the organization of the City Plan Commission in 1914, forty-one years after such action had been recommended by city engineer Charles E. Paine. Under the leadership of Henry A. Barker, Theodore Francis Green, Mayor Joseph H. Gainer (1913-27) and architect and historian John Hutchins Cady, the group proposed several bold plans for Providence, including the relocation of the railroad station and the removal of the elevated tracks, or "Chinese Wall," that separated Downtown from the State House. Unfortunately, most of its recommendations, extending even to education, public health, and industrial development, went unheeded. So also did the 1926 Whitten Thorofare Plan, an imaginative proposal to relieve traffic congestion throughout the metropolitan area. On the positive side, Providence enacted its first comprehensive zoning ordinance on the commission's recommendation in 1923.
In the realm of transportation, the impact of the auto was overwhelming. The horseless carriage evolved from a curiosity, a luxury, and a plaything of the wealthy in 1900 to an affordable, ubiquitous necessity by 1929, in large measure due to Henry Ford's productive genius. To accommodate this change, endless building, paving, and widening of streets occurred, increasing both jobs and taxes.
The New Haven Railroad of J.P. Morgan and Charles S. Mellen opened the century by establishing a monopoly over local rail, steamboat, steetcar, and interurban transit. In its heyday the New Haven was strong enough to bloc a potential rival--the Grand Trunk Railroad--from making Providence the Atlantic terminus of a railroad network that could tap the trade of Canada. The secure when the prime promoter of the project, Grand Trunk's President Charles M. Hays, went to the bottom with the Titanic in 1912. Mellen was later indicted by a federal grand jury (but not convicted for his role in pressuring the Grand Trunk to halt its road construction into Providence. In 1914 the federal government caught up with the runaway New Haven, forcing it to relinquish control of Rhode Island's urban and interurban lines.
For waterborne traffic, major harbor improvements were undertaken just prior to World War I, including the construction of a modern state pier at the foot of Public Street (1913) 3,000-foot quay (now 4,750 feet) at Field's Point (1916).
Though the local economy in the 1920s began to show signs of illness for which there seemed no available cure, those whose sickness was physical were provided with ample modern treatment centers. Rhode Island Hospital, the granddaddy of health care facilities, continually expanded and improved, building its Jane Brown wing in 1922 and training school for nurses in 1927. A Catholic diocesan hospital, St. Joseph's on Broad Street (established in 1892), developed a reputation for competent health care and underwent extensive modernization in 1929-30. Roger Williams General Hospital (established in 1878 as a homeopathic facility moved to newer and much larger quarters on Chalkstone Avenue in 1925 and built a school of nursing soon after. Just north of Roger Williams, Lying-In Hospital (established in 1884) built a large facility for the care and treatment of women and infants. It moved to this site (its third home) in 1926, the same year in which a small Jewish-sponsored hospital, called Miriam, opened at 31 Parade Street in the city's West End.
The city kept pace with these private institutions by opening a public hospital on Eaton Street in 1910 for the treatment of communicable diseases. An internationally famous epidemiologist, Dr. Charles V. Chapin, ran both the city's hospital and its widely acclaimed public health program.
For diversion the people of Providence in this era turned to sports and shows. Minor league baseball teams--always dubbed the Grays--were formed occasionally and even won championships. Most notable were the International League titleists of 1914, which included Babe Ruth, and the Eastern League champs of 1926, which featured as player-coach Hall of Famer Rube Marquard. In professional football Providence boasted its Steam Roller eleven, the National Football League kingpins in 1928. In college football Brown fielded several nationally ranked teams, including the famous Iron Men of 1926 and the 1915 squad that played in the very first Rose Bowl on January 1, 1916.
In the 1920s a cross-town athletic rivalry developed between venerable Brown and the new Catholic men's college founded by Bishop Matthew Harkins. On June 7, 1924, the Bruins and Providence College played the longest collegiate baseball game on record, a twenty-inning contest in which future Pawtucket mayor Charlie Reynolds went the route in the Friars' 1 to 0 victory. Four years later, as a foreshadowing of glories to come, PC's basketball team earned the top ranking among New England colleges with a record of 17 and 3.
A great crowd pleaser was bicycle racing, which reached its peak audience and popularity at the North Main Street Cycledrome. Champion wheelman Vincent "Poosha" Madonna was a local celebrity in the twenties, especially among Italian-Americans, while Providence Jews had as their idol a scrappy and durable boxer named Maurice Billingkoff, who did battle as "Young Montreal." Billingkoff's later fights were staged in a new indoor arena, the Rhode Island Auditorium, which opened at 1111 North Main Street in 1925.
In this era Providence was a great show town, and vaudeville, burlesque, summer stock, and movies rivaled sports for the attention of the populace. The major entertainment houses--all built during this time--were the elegant, all- purpose Albee (1919) on Westminster Street; Fay's Theater (1912), a popular vaudeville spot on Union Street; the Strand (1915) on Washington Street; the Majestic (1917) at Washington and Empire; and Loew's State Theater (1928), a splendidly appointed movie house built at the corner of Weybosset and Richmond streets. In addition to these, there were a half-dozen smaller, less glamorous entertainment houses in the central city.
The Downtown, which by night attracted large numbers of theatergoers, lured even greater numbers of people by day, who came to shop in its impressive array of retail stores. Diamond's, Cherry and Webb, the Boston Store, Gladding's, and the Outlet became household words. And what Providence couple of the era never met under the Shepard's clock?
Of these six big department stores, Shepard's and the Outlet were the giants, and their spirited rivalry spilled over from retailing to radio. On June 2, 1922, Shepard's inaugurated Providence's first radio station (WEAN); three months later, on the embryo of what would become an Outlet broadcasting empire.
In general, these were buoyant, optimistic decades in Providence. Even the call to war in 1917 evoked a cheerful, patriotic response. A Providence boy, George M. Cohan, wrote and sang the unofficial theme song of the American Expeditionary Force-o-a jaunty inspirational tune called "Over There," which later won a gold medal from Congress for its author.
But as all good things must end, so also must overly optimistic perceptions come to grips with reality. For Providence that reality was the economic depression which burst upon the nation in late October 1929. As the stock market plummeted to unparalleled depths, so also did Providence's optimism in its potential for a continuously prosperous future. The bubble had burst; a new era was at hand.
Depression, Devastation, and War: 1929-1945
Providence was already a wobbly fighter when the nationwide depression delivered its Sunday punch. The city though staggered, held on only to absorb another blow--the great hurricane of 1938. Then, not a moment too soon, its economy was saved by the bell of war. These were bad times for Providence. The 1930s proved to be the city's dreadful decade.
Providence began to feel the severity of the economic collapse within six months of the Great Crash, yet local protests against the system were calm and restrained when compared with popular reactions in other industrial centers. The city's foremost socialist, James Reid, an Olneyville dentist, was unsuccessful in his attempt to incite the working class to stage a strenuous protest. Radicalism had limited appeal in heavily-Catholic Providence because of the church's vigorous support of pro labor legislation. Bishop William Hickey (1921-33) and the Providence Visitor , the official newspaper of the diocese, strongly and consistently supported economic and social reforms to benefit the lower classes. Other factors deterring radicalism were the city's effective welfare program, directed by Mayor James E. Dunne and Edward P. Reidy, Providence's highly-regarded director of public aid, and the large public works program the city undertook to combat unemployment.
At first, voluntary agencies such as the newly formed Providence Emergency Unemployment Committee (PEUC), the diocese of Providence, and the Salvation Army were enlisted to provide relief to the economically distressed. In the fall of 1930 the PEUC sponsored apple vendors on the streets of Providence in emulation of New York City's "buy-an-apple-and-help-the- unemployed" campaign. To spur sales, the Providence Journal obligingly published recipes for making apple pie, apple sauce, and other apple delights. But the gravity of the situation was such that apples proved insufficient.
By February 1931 at least a quarter of the city's normal work force was unemployed. A reporter for the Providence Visitor who accompanied a St. Vincent de Paul volunteer on her rounds noted that some people were pawning watches and wedding rings to buy food, while others admitted that they had not eaten in three or four days. As Norma Daoust, the historian of Depression-era Providence has stated, this city "was a true test of Hoover's theory that private agencies could cope with the problem." That theory was proven grossly inadequate.
In the fall of 1931, at the recommendation of Dunne and Reidy, the city borrowed $300,000 in anticipation of taxes for a system of work relief. This procedure was followed by Providence for the duration of the Depression, supplemented first by loans from the state and then by federal New Deal programs. Five new junior high schools, Mount Pleasant High School, a new Hope High School building, Windmill Street School, the Federal Building Annex (now the Pastore Building), road construction projects such as the widening of Elmwood Avenue, improvements to parks and playgrounds, the enlargement of the municipal pier, the building of a central police and fire station at LaSalle Square (1940), and the construction of the Point Street Viaduct (1940) were among the many public works projects undertaken in Providence during the era in an attempt to combat unemployment. The federal PWA or its successor, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), helped however, the number of jobless remained high until the economy fully recovered during World War II.
By all odds the most memorable single event of the era was the hurricane of September 21, 1938. This storm, with its awesome tidal wave, brought death and devastation to Providence. It inundated parts of Downtown with seven feet of water, damaged buildings and their contents, destroyed hundreds of autos, felled thousands of trees and power lines with its 120-mile-an-hour winds, demolished the wharves of the inner harbor, and washed away many coastal landmarks. Surging waters and falling walls, trees, and chimneys took the lives of 311 Rhode Islanders, 4 of whom drowned in the center of Downtown Providence.
The local sports scene was relatively quiet except for the exploits of the Providence-based hockey team known as the Rhode Island Reds. This franchise, which came to Providence in 1926 to perform in the new Rhode Island Auditorium, won its first Canadian-American Hockey League championship in 1930 and repeated this feat in 1932, 1934, and 1938.
Local movie houses were packed as people sought to escape the harsh reality of the Depression in the fantasy world of film. One event from which the populace derived some literal cheer was the lifting of Prohibition in December 1933 . Providence voted 60,696 to 6,808 for repeal.
During the 1930s a storm of another kind embroiled the city. This furor was the handiwork not of nature but of politicians. In the municipal election of 1930, the first held after the removal of the property qualification for voting in contests for city council, Democrats gained firm control of the Board of Aldermen (8-5) and the Common Council (21-18). Henceforth armed with the patronage and the power of the purse, the Irish-led Democratic party was able to forge an effective political organization. The parceling out of jobs and contracts during the Depression helped Democrats win the allegiance of Italians, French Canadians, Jews, and blacks--four groups that had generally supported the local Republican party. But the GOP did not surrender without some final shots.
In 1930 the Republican-controlled General Assembly had amended the city's legislative charter, reducing the number of ward councilmen from four to three and increasing the number of wards from ten to thirteen. These changes were a bold but unsuccessful effort to gerrymander the council to allow the Republicans to maintain themselves in power. Optimistically, in the same session the assembly passed a statute providing for council selection of the city treasurer, city auditor, harbor master, and director of public aid--all officers that had been popularly elected. When this move failed to prevent Democratic victory in the 1930 elections, the state legislature in April 1931 created the Board of Public Safety, a state agency to run the Providence police and fire departments, with control not only over policy but over patronage as well. When state-level Democrats staged their nationally famous Bloodless Revolution of January governmental coup was a law abolishing this blatant infringement upon municipal home rule.
The national recession of 1937 (sparked by Roosevelt's cutback in federal spending), coupled with the scandalous battle between Democratic governor Robert Quinn and Walter O'Hara, president of Narragansett Race Track, brought defeat for nearly all Democratic candidates in 1938, including popular Mayor Dunne, who was an upset victim of Republican and Good Government candidate John F. Collins. In 1940, however, the Democratic tide rolled in with the election as mayor of state Democratic chairman Dennis J. Roberts. He was privileged to preside under a new city charter drafted by a commission chaired by Charles P. Sisson, approved by the voters in November 1939, and ratified by the General Assembly in 1940. That document gave the mayor increased appointive and administrative power and made the city council unicameral, with two councilmen from each of thirteen wards. For the next thirty- four years the Irish-led Democratic party dominated Providence politics.
Scarcely had the city's political wars subsided than the global conflict disrupted life in Providence. In the three-and-a-half years following Pearl Harbor, many of Providence's sons and daughters fought and several hundred died in the great struggle against Japan and Germany. Those left behind produced such materials of war as boot heels made by U.S. Rubber, trench knives fashioned by Imperial, gauges crafted by Federal Products, parachutes made by the American Rayon Company, and "Liberty" ships and combat-cargo vessels constructed in the Walsh-Kaiser Shipyard at Field's Point.
In August 1945 the war ground to an end, but so did the war-born economic boom. Walsh-Kaiser, which employed over 21,000 workers in 1944, employed fewer than 4,800 when Japan surrendered and a skeleton crew of 350 as 1945 drew to close. Returning servicemen swelled the ranks of the unemployed, who numbered 35,000 statewide at year's end. For local textile mills the war was the last hurrah. Providence had come through difficult times, but from the vantage point of 1945, prosperity was not around the corner (to use Hoover's phrase); it was somewhere down a hilly and uncharted road.
The Era of Transition: 1945-1972
The first report of the reorganized City Plan Commission, issued in 1945, correctly predicted the fate of Providence for the following three decades: "Urban areas are changing in character from one thickly populated central city," observed the commission, "to a group of satellite cities around a central city." The physical saturation of the older metropolises and the ravages of age upon them, coupled with the advent of the auto, was making the exodus to suburbia a national phenomenon. Nowhere was the trend more prominent than in Providence. In the census of 1950 the city had a population of 248,674; by 1970 that figure had dwindled to 179,11i6--the largest proportionate out-migration (28 percent) of any major city in the United States. South Providence, West Elmwood, and West River were the heavy losers as the city's Irish-American population fell below that of Italo-Americans in the midst of this hegira to the suburbs. This demographic decline of itself was not a calamity, however, because Providence, very small in land area compared with other cities, was one of the country's most densely populated municipalities.
The new freeways and expressways that contributed to this decline also facilitated movement in and around (and especially out of) the central city, relieved street congestion, and drove an opening wedge through tightly packed and often substandard residential districts. Industrial parks at West River and Mashapaug Pond eventually replaced run-down housing with modern plants; urban renewal projects such as the Classical-Central complex and Lippitt Hill eradicated a few slum areas and, in the case of Randall Square and Weybosset Hill, turned eyesores into showplaces.
The expansion of health care institutions, churches, government, and colleges (especially Brown) into their surrounding neighborhoods while often beneficial, also took its toll on residential housing stock and reduced the city's tax base by placing more of its land on the exempt rolls.
John Hutchins Cady, Providence's foremost architectural historian and the former chairman of its City Plan Commission, observed in the early 1950s that "Providence was entering a period of transition." It was primarily that and not, essentially, an era of decline. One might also call it a period of gestation--a time of labor necessary to bring forth new life.
The moves of the mayors of the era to mitigate the effects of out-migration were impressive. A litany of those efforts reads as follows: a reorganization of the City Plan Commission (1944); the first master plan for the redevelopment of residential areas (1946); the adoption of a master plan for thoroughfares (1946); the establishment of the Providence Redevelopment Agency(1948); a complete revision of the zoning laws (1951); a minimum housing standards code (1956); the College Hill study (1959); the final Downtown revitalization report (1960); the master plan of 1964, under which the city still operates; the master plan for traffic circulation (1966);l the establishment of the Department of Planning and Urban Development (1967); and the creation of the Civic Center Authority (1969). These remedies were augmented by a series of five-year capital improvement programs, by the private effort launched by the Providence Preservation Society (1956),and by the work of the Rhode Island Historical Preservation Commission (1968), led by Antoinette Downing. Clearly the city fathers did not passively accept their fate.
Nonetheless, the city suffered losses. Of the big five industries of the Gilded Age, Corliss was long gone, but in the immediate postwar years the other four remained. Then American Screw departed for Willimantic (19490), Nicholson File for Indian (1959), and Brown and Sharpe for North Kingstown (1964. Only Gorham remained, in addition, the local textile industry--both cottons and woolens--collapsed. Many smaller manufacturing firms also departed to occupy modern, spacious suburban plants. On the positive side, development at the city's two new industrial parks--West River and Mashapaug, proceeded slowly but steadily, and a number of commercial buildings were erected in neighborhood business areas.
Important Downtown construction was light and sporadic, consisting of People's Savings Bank (1948) on Kennedy Plaza; the Providence Washington Insurance Company headquarters (1949) opposite the First Baptist Church; W.T. Grant's department store on Westminster Street (1949); a major addition to the Providence Public Library (1954); and the fourth Howard Building (1957-59). Then after a decade-long hiatus, the Old Stone Bank tower at 40 Westminster Street was erected, Providence's first skyscraper built in over forty years. It became the corporate headquarters of Royal Little's Textron, the state's first and largest conglomerate.
During this era, however, there were more departures than debuts in Providence's Downtown. By the late 1960s retail department stores reeled under the competition from suburban malls, and the center city's movie houses succumbed to competition from drive-ins and suburban cinemas. Not only the smaller, less finely appointed shows, or "scratch houses," folded (except for the prurient Paris, "Providence's gayest spot"); so too did the major theaters. Fay's closed in 1951, to be eventually replaced by the Biltmore Parking Garage, and the Metropolitan, on the site of the present Beneficent House, ended its varied operations in 1954. The elegant Albee, later demolished for a parking lot \, sputtered and then expired in 1970. The Majestic, purchased by the Trinity Repertory company in 1970, was converted to a playhouse. By 1972 only Loew's and the Strand remained, with the latter resorting to X-rated movies to pay its bills.
One substitute for the movies was the new medium of television. The first station--WJAR-TV, Channel 10--began its operation on July 10, 1949, with an NBC and ABC affiliation. A second--WPRO-TV (later WPRI), Channel 12-- commenced its telecasts on March 27, 1955, as a member of the CBs network. A state educational station, Channel 36, based at Rhode Island College, began programming on June 5, 1967. On radio disc jockeys Chuck Stevens and Carl Henry were the rage in the fifties, and Salty Brine and talk-show host Jack Comley became household words during the following decade.
For team sports entertainment, the only professional show in town was the American Hockey League's Rhode Island Reds, whose home ice was the Auditorium. But from 1959 onward it was the Providence College basketball Friars of Joe Mullaney and Dave Gavitt that captivated local sports fans.
Boxing was also big. Rocky Marciano of nearby Brockton fought here twenty-eight times en route to the world heavy weight championship; Providence's "Chubby" Gomes won the world junior lightweight title, and fellow Fox Pointer George Araujo attained the rank of number one lightweight contender. South Providence's Wild Willie Greene, a free-swinging middleweight and Burt Reynolds look-alike, also attracted national attention for his fistic prowess.
In the interscholastic league LaSalle Academy's teams dominated play on both the city and state levels for most of the era, while in the sandlots baseball peaked in the early fifties and then rapidly declined along with many of the city's neighborhoods. By the sixties a new sandlot craze, Providence's most noted softball team, Local 57 of Gano Street, was a frequent contender for the national fast-pitch championship.
In the area of mass transportation, the New Haven Railroad and its ill- fated successor, the Penn Central, fell on economic hard times, forcing them to curtail both freight and passenger service to the city. On the rails, only the Providence-Worcester road remained sound. The urban transit system passed from the United Electric Railway (UER) to the United Transit company (UTC) in 1952, but neither firm could profitably withstand the challenge of the two-auto family or the exodus to suburbia. On July 1, 1966, a governmentally-subsidized agency, the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority, was forced to assume operations from the inefficient and nearly bankrupt UTC. By that time only gas and diesel buses constituted the mass transit fleet. The last electric trolley had run over the rails of the city on My 14, 1948, and the final trackless trolley left service on June 24, 1955.
This was the era of urban expressway and interstate highway construction, from the opening of the first leg of the Olneyville (Roberts) Expressway in 1952 to the completion of routes I-95 and I-195 through Providence by the mid-1960s. The Providence River Bridge (1956), Washington Bridge (1968), and the new Red Bridge over the Seekonk (1969) were the era's major spans.
The city's role as a center for health services and higher education continued to expand. The 353-bed Veterans' Hospital was opened in 1949; Miriam Hospital moved from cramped, obsolete quarters on Parade Street into a new facility (which it soon enlarged) on Summit Street, over-looking North Main in 1952. Two older hospitals, Rhode Island and St. Joseph's, continued to grow and modernize. In 1955 Rhode Island Hospital opened a new ten-story main building, and ten years later, St. Joseph's completed an eight-story addition which it dedicated to Bishop William E. Stang, one of the Hospital's founders.
Developments in higher education were equally dramatic. Ever- burgeoning Brown dedicated its Bio-Medical Building in 1969, the forerunner of its medical school; Rhode Island College of Education relocated to Mount Pleasant in 1958 and became Rhode Island College, offering degrees in the sciences and liberal arts two years later; the University of Rhode Island gradually developed its college of continuing education in a building on the old RICE campus at Gaspee and Promenade Streets: and Johnson and Wales gained college status, acquired the Plantations Club building on Abbott Park Place in 1962, and embarked upon a period of rapid growth.
Conversely, other colleges sought more spacious suburban campuses. Providence-Barrington Bible College (established in 1900) left Capitol Hill in the early 1960s, shortening its name to fit its new site. Roger Williams (established in 1948) grew from a two-year college based at Providence YMCA to a four-year institution and then moved to Bristol in 1969. Two years later Bryant departed its sprawling East Side campus for a beautiful site in Smithfield. A state junior college (RIJC( was opened in September 1964 and took up residence in the former Brown and Sharpe complex on Promenade Street, but in 1972 it, too, left Providence, opening its new Knight campus in Warwick. On the secondary level, the city completed a new Classical-Central educational complex in 1968, dedicated to former school superintendent James L. Hanley, who served as top administrator of the Providence School Department for twenty-seven years (1937-64).
One of the major building programs undertaken by the city in the 1940s and 1950s was public housing. These low-income "projects" included Chad Brown (1942; 312 units), Roger Williams (1943; 744 units), Valley View, a city- owned facility (1949;l 256 units), Admiral Terrace (1951; 278 units), Codding Court (1951; 119 units), Hartford Park (1953; 748 units), and Manton Heights (1953; 330 units). From the 1960s onward the emphasis shifted to facilities for the elderly, with Sunset Manor (1960), Dexter Manor (1962) and Bradford House (1966; now Sister Dominica Manor) being the earliest examples of this increasingly important housing development.
The era's two wars--in Korea (1950-53) and Vietnam (1964-73)--exerted little impact on the city compared with the all-out efforts of 1917-18 and 1941-45. There were no parades and no heroes' welcomes for the veterans of these bitter "police actions." In fact, the latter stages of the Vietnam conflict witnessed organized local protests against our continued involvement in Southeast Asia.
The major battles on the home front occurred during a series of "long hot summers" from 1965 through 1970, when war dissent and civil rights protest produced repeated outbreaks of violence and vandalism, especially on the city's South Side. Fortunately, Providence was spared the fatalities and the extreme violence and property damage that afflicted many other American cities. The hard-rock and pot craze also produced several disturbances, the most notable being a near-riot following the Sly and the Family Stone concert at Rhode Island Auditorium on October 19, 1969, in which twenty-five persons were hurt and fifty more arrested.
In contrast, politics was generally placid during this era of Democratic ascendancy, as a strong Irish-led party organization kept the peace. Favorite son John O. Pastore of Federal Hill went from the governorship (1945-50) to become one of the most powerful and influential United States senators, while Dennis J. Roberts rose from the mayoralty (1941-51) to the governorship (1951- 59) to the position of "insider" during the Kennedy administration. Roberts' former secretary, Walter H. Reynolds, served ably but blandly as chief executive from 1951 to 1965. During the latter years of his tenure several young Democrats aspired to succeed him, provoking the first major party struggle in more than three decades. Reynolds beat back the 1962 primary challenge of Frank Rao, Jr., and abdicated in 1964, supporting Edward Burke to succeed him. Fifth Ward Councilman Joe Doorley and his political sidekick Larry McGarry of Ward 10 had other ideas. In a spirited three-way 1964 Democratic primary, Doorley defeated Rao and Burke and went on to gain the throne. McGarry, who had been fired from his high-level public works job by City Chairman and Public Works Director Charlie McElroy for opposing the Roberts- Reynolds faction, got his revenge. In the Doorley regime he took both of the posts that McElroy had held tenaciously for more than two decades. To the victors always went the spoils in the absence of a municipal merit system in Providence.
The city's increasing black population (15,875 in 1970) gained belated recognition in November 1969, when endorsed Democratic candidate Philip F. Addison, Jr., was chosen in a special Third Ward election as the first black to sit on the Providence City Council. During all of these Democratic Triumphs and travails, the local Republican party (except for Wards 1 and 2) was sometimes feeble and sometimes moribund.
As the seventies dawned, the future of Providence appeared to be taking shape. Service industries were increasing, while manufacturing and retail trade were dramatically down. Institutional growth was strong, and the characteristics of the population--more elderly, more low-income people, more minorities, and far fewer middle-class whites--posed a grave threat to the city's tax base.
To the perceptive person, the future of Providence seemed to be as the financial, educational, health services, transportation, governmental, and cultural matrix of the Rhode Island city-state. If Providence was to fulfill this role, however, its intact neighborhoods would have to be stabilized and it would have to receive massive federal and state aid. Wearied by its cataclysmic transition, the city looked for help and for leadership to regain its former vigor and optimism.
Providence Regained: 1973-1982
In the past few years Providence has been the subject of several newspaper and magazine articles that echo one persistent theme. The July 1979 issue of Town & Country, a high-society magazine, contained a twelve- page article entitled "Providence Regained<" describing the city's renaissance in glowing terms. The Brown Alumni Monthly, not given to superlatives when dealing with the "townies," followed with a piece called "Divine Providence," about a city "born again." a newspaper article in the influential New York Times (April 7, 1980) described Providence as "blossoming" and "an island of urbanity unusual for a city of its size." The same conclusion had been reached by the Buffalo Courier-Express in a front-page essay of August 22, 1979. Chester E. Smolski of Rhode Island College, an expert in urban studies sometimes critical of Providence and its government, nonetheless dubbed it "New England's Best- Kept Secret" and " a vital business center." The Christian Science Monitor agreed. In an extended feature essay it glowingly described Providence as a "sparkling embodiment of urban revival." And unlike the acclaim voiced during Providence's earlier age of optimism, these accolades were not self-praise or political hyperbole but the assessment of impartial observers.
Such a positive picture is due to the developments of the past decade. From the beginning of 1973 onward, despite occasional reversals such as the folding of Shepard's (1974), the temporary shutdown of the Biltmore (1975), the departure of Uniroyal (1975), the exodus of Davol (1977), the impact of the Blizzard of "78, the severe fiscal crisis of 1981, and the closing of the Outlet (1982), the city has been on an upward course.
The January 17, 1973, dedication of the Civic Center, called by the Journal "Doorley's Dream," began the revival. Just four months later Rhode Island Hospital opened a $28 million Ambulatory Patient Center, its largest facility to date. Before year's end the Trinity Square Repertory Company made its debut in the completely renovated Majestic Theater, renamed the Lederer. In the following June the state's largest office building, Rhode Island Hospital Trust Tower, was completed. Clearly the city was gaining economic momentum.
In the political year 1974 other major changes occurred. Democratic Mayor Joe Doorley and his party chairman Larry McGarry began to feud, and the found himself unendorsed in his bid for reelection. In the city's most bitter primary ever, Doorley won a four-way race for the nomination, only to see McGarry throw his support to a young, aggressive Italo-American Republican in the general election. That move and the candidacies of two independents with Democratic followings proved to be the undoing of Doorley and the city's Democratic organization. In a tight race (26,832 to 26,123), Vincent A. Cianci, Jr., prevailed to become Providence's youngest mayor and the first of Italian- American ancestry. The energetic Cianci, knowing he had to perform to survive in Democratic city, accelerated the tempo of revival.
From 1975 until 1982, when Providence celebrated 150 years of city government, $606 million of Community Development money, plus funds from other federal, state, and city sources, had been pumped into Downtown and the neighborhoods. To this had been added many more millions from the private sector. The results of this public-private partnership have been dramatic.
In the central city, historic buildings have been restored; Westminster Mall was reconstructed; the Union Station received a face-lift; the Biltmore reopened, more splendid than ever' the Biltmore reopened, more splendid than ever; a new state judicial complex was built; the South Main Street commercial strip was revitalized; City Hall has been substantially restored; the Ocean State Theater for the Performing Arts evolved from the run-down Loew's Theater; Market Square and LaSalle Square were refurbished: a federal office building is under construction; ground has been broken for an auto-restricted zone in Kennedy Plaza; the construction of two major office buildings (Gilbane-Fleet and Dimeo- Old Stone) is in progress; several smaller but substantial structures have been completed, including Gateway and Empire Plaza; and an old industrial complex has been transformed into a modern marketplace and office center called Davol Square.
In the neighborhoods, fifteen community centers have been opened, more than twenty parks established or restored, thousands of home improvements completed, and several commercial strips substantially refurbished, the most notable of which is Atwells Avenue on Federal Hill. By 1980 property values were rising in every neighborhood of the city, and the municipal Department of Planning and Urban Development designated more than 80 percent of the residential land in Providence as "stable." Only South Providence and sections of Elmwood, the West End, and Mount Hope seemed resistant to improvement, and in Upper South Providence the planned expansion of Rhode Island Hospital and the proposed relocation of Women of Infants Hospital offered hope for the infusion of more than $50 million of investment capital into that desolate area.
At the port, directed by Eugene Neary, gross revenues climbed above the $1 million mark, a new marine terminal opened, and the introduction of containerized shipping in 1979 offered great prospects for continued growth.
At Roger Williams Park, the improvement was even more dramatic. Superintendent James Diamond and Cianci obtained over $8 million in federal funds for park improvements. Since 1975 the city has refurbished the Temple to Music, the Museum of Natural History, the Dalrymple Boathouse, the Betsey Williams Cottage, the Casino, and the bandstand. The zoo, which in the early 1970s was in danger of being closed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has been modernized and expanded. Today it is rated by the Humane Society of the United States as "the best in New England" and a Class 1 zoo nationally. A decade ago few musical or arts events were held in Roger Williams Park. In 1982 the city expected to hold some 500 events there, which will attract about half a million people.
By 1982 Providence could boast of a full range of educational and cultural activities. Not only was it home to highly regarded Brown University; it was also the seat of four other colleges and housed the extension divisions of two others. In addition, it possessed a fine philharmonic orchestra, a nationally renowned art museum (RISD), a dynamic preservation society (PPS), a prestigious winning repertory theater (Trinity), an opera company, a chamber music orchestra and one of the oldest community theater groups in the nation (the Barker Players). Not bad for a city computed by the 1980 federal census as only the ninety-eighth largest in the country!
Nonetheless, Providence is far from flawless. For starters, blighted areas remain: the tax base has not quite stabilized; organized crime is potent; litter and graffiti are too much in evidence; energy costs are high; industrial wastes pollute the waterways; much of the private housing stock is old; much of newspaper town; it lacks a professional sports team; its politics are chaotic; job opportunities within the city are limited; and many residents still harbor a negative attitude about Providence.
A statistical profile of the city, as it nears the 350th anniversary of its founding, reveals the following characteristics: Demographically, its population of 156,804 is down markedly from 1970, when it stood at 179,116, and from its all-time peak of 26i7,918, reached in the state census of 1925. Of its present inhabitants, a little over 30,000, or one in five, would be classified by the confusing term "minority," though that ratio is much higher within the younger age groups. Blacks number approximately 18,000; Hispanics, over 9,000, and the figure is increasing steadily; and the newest immigrants, Southeast Asian refugees (especially Hmong), exceed 4,000 and are also growing in numbers.
Among other ethnics, Italian-Americans--the largest group at least 1960 --are clearly dominant, and the stability of their neighborhoods, thanks in part to Community Development efforts, thanks in part to community Development efforts, should preserve their numerical ascendancy for should preserve their numerical ascendancy for years to come. A new category in the 1980 federal census--ancestry--reveals that 103,296 city residents were of single ancestry. The percentage breakdown of this group shows Italians at 29.6, French Canadians at 4.8 For those of mixed heritage, Irish-Italian marital unions were the most common, despite the battles of these two groups in the political arena.
Their favorable demographic position has enabled the Providence Italian community to produce several political potentates in the past generation. Most notable is Joseph Bevilacqua of Silver Lake, a commanding and forceful leader who rose from state representative to Speaker of House to chief justice of the state supreme court by 1976. Another distinguished product of Providence politics is Anthony A. Giannini, presiding justice of the superior court since 1979, who began his career as executive secretary to Governor John A. Notte, J. (1961-63), also a city native. And the city and state Democratic party chairmen in 1982 were Providence Italians from the tumultuous Fourth Ward of which one pundit has said, "If Machiavelli were reincarnated, he would come back as a Ward Four politician."
The city's economic profile in the aftermath of the 1980 census revealed one startling fact: for the first time in a century and a half, manufacturing employment was not the leading category of business activity. Of those 102,000 workers covered by employment security, manufacturing employment was not the leading category of business activity. Of those 102,000 workers covered by employment security, manufacturing accounted for 31.3 percent of the jobs, while positions in service industries totaled 34.3 percent. Other important sectors were wholesale and retail trade (16.2 percent )and financial, insurance, and real estate firms (11.8 percent).
In the area of manufacturing, jewelry and silverware employed 45.7 percent of the work force, while fabricated metals (10.2 percent) and printing (10.2 percent) were second and third. Once dominant, textiles was a distant seventh at 3.2 percent. The largest industrial firms were Gorham, Speidel, Federal Products, and Imperial Knife.
Of the service industries, two were clearly ascendant. Health service, led by Rhode Island Hospital, the city's largest employer, accounted for 38.3 percent of the jobs in that sector of the economy. Education was a substantial runner-up with 20.7 percent of the service industry's work force. The city's median family income in 1980 was $14,948.
These economic statistics show that Providence was becoming more of a governmental, health services, educational, and financial center than ever before. Much of the funding and leadership for this evolution came from the banks themselves. By the end of 1982, Fleet National had assets of approximately $4 billion; Old Stone and Hospital Trust exceeded $2 billion in resources; and Citizens Band had passed the $ billion mark. Both Fleet and Old Stone had more office buildings under construction as this book went to press.
In this era Providence lost its last professional sports team when the Rhode Island Reds folded in 1977. The fortunes of the "fabulous" basketball Friars also dimmed, but that was as nothing compared to the tragedy Providence College suffered on December 13, 1977. On that evening a disastrous fire, begun in a Christmas display, rushed through the upper story of Aquinas Hall, a women's dormitory. The disaster eventually took ten lives, the highest toll claimed by any fire in the city's history.
All of these events and developments, the good and the tragic were covered by the Providence Journal-Bulletin, the city's only daily newspaper of general circulation since the demise of the News-Tribune and its successors in 1937-38. The influence of the Journal and its radio affiliates WEAN and WPJB- FM on Providence thought and opinion is perhaps greater now than at any previous time.
On the governmental side of city life, Mayor Cianci secured reelection in 1978 despite a determined challenge from Frank Darigan by decisively carrying the city's three heavily Italian Democratic wards (Wards 4, 7, and 13). Darigan, intelligent and highly principled, lost votes because of his seeming aloofness, but his greatest liability was the fact that his potential Irish constituency had departed from the city's South Side to Cranston, Warwick, and beyond years before his mayoral bid. Darigan took another crack at Cianci in 1982 and fell short for the same reason. In that hectic campaign, Cianci, running as an independent, narrowly beat Democrat Darigan while Republican Frederick Lippitt, an East Side Brahmin descended from two former governors, finished a distant third.
Meanwhile , two other South Providence Irishmen, Joe Walsh and Matt Smith, traveled a different road in their quest for political power. The personable and efficient Walsh went with his Irish neighbors to Warwick, where he captured that mayoralty as a possible springboard to higher office. Smith moved to the stable and politically safe Reservoir section of Providence, ran for the state House of Representatives, and used his speakership. a Walsh-Smith alliance could produce the states next Democratic dynasty.
In Providence city government, Cianci's second administration (1979-83) prompted more physical growth, but it also produced a major fiscal crisis. Mainly a catalyst for change and a promoter during his early years of office, Cianci and his chief aides paid too little attention to the administrative side of government. This neglect, coupled with a sever national inflation and two politically inspired no-tax-increase budgets, placed the city in a grave fiscal crisis in 1981. The deluge came in the form of an $11.43 tax rate increase plus a supplementary tax for the 1980-81 fiscal year. Providence bond ratings plummeted, and taxpayers cried for the mayor's scalp. By mid-1982, however, a financial review commission, a vigilant City Council, a more fiscally responsible Cianci, the transfer of garbage collection and street-sweeping to private contractors, the sale of surplus city property, the state take-over of the sewer system, and, especially the added tax money paid by the city's property owners combined to put Providence back on course.
In January 1983 the city was scheduled to implement fully a home-rule charter approved by the voters in 1980. That promising document increases the administrative powers of the mayor and fiscal powers of a revamped fifteen- member council, reforms personnel procedures, and encourages greater citizen participation in the governmental process.
These innovations in business, culture, and government, coupled with revitalization projects in the neighborhoods and Downtown, sparked a new civic spirit as the eighties got underway--an optimism and a pride best captured by the local booster who coined this current slogan: "Providence, you're looking good!"