Walking down Westminster Street earlier this month with Providence Journal columnist David Brussat and Ward 1 City Councilman David Segal, I passed a modern furniture and home décor store, a brand-new outpost of the Los Angeles-based retailer American Apparel, an upscale boutique promising "hot shoes for cool people" and the construction site for One Ten, one of several high-rise condominium towers currently planned for downtown Providence.
None of this was here 15 years ago. Back then, Rhode Island architect Bill Warner was still putting the final touches on plans to pull up the bridge over the river that runs along the bottom of College Hill and which today is straddled by the looming Providence Place Mall. In fact, according to Brussat, the plan to uncover the river was an afterthought of an entirely different plan conceived in 1978 to help revitalize downtown.
"The fact that the river was opened up was really quite marvelous, because basically it was an aesthetic piggy-back on a transportation project," Brussat said.
The federal government paid over 80 percent of the cost of moving the bridge, leaving the state to come up with the rest. But aesthetic aspects of the project, such as the cobbled river walks and pedestrian bridges, were funded entirely by the federal government - and Providence acquired, at no cost, the most visible element in an urban revitalization process that drew national attention over the next decade.
Providence's so-called "Renaissance" came in the wake of a prolonged economic depression in the city that lasted for much of the 20th century. Mills and cotton plants left Providence for the South in first part of the 1900s, and residents migrated to the suburbs.
"There was just nothing going on in downtown Providence," Brussat said. "Whereas a lot of other cities that had more diversified economies basically ripped up their downtowns - and had enough money to - Providence didn't have enough money even to (match the federal government with funds for special nationwide urban revitalization programs)."
Brussat continued, "(Providence) had gone through the Depression (and) World War II years with no maintenance - a lot of it looked like crap. It just hadn't been up-kept."
Still, he said, "there are few places that I know of this size that have this type of fabric." Much of downtown Providence is included on the National Register of Historic Places, and the city offers one of the most generous tax credits in the nation for development in historic buildings.
In 1959, the city hired consultants to come up with an extensive plan for downtown development. The program, called "Providence 1970," included plans to tear down City Hall, the train station and numerous other buildings, in addition to putting aluminum facades on the classical buildings that help make downtown Providence what it is today.
Though the former Providence Journal building on Westminster Street was, in fact, covered in aluminum until 1984, and Westminster itself was converted to a pedestrian mall for several decades, most of the plans of "Providence 1970" were fortunately never realized.
"There was no money to demolish anything, (and) there was no money to put anything up once you'd demolished it," Segal said.
Traffic exiting off Interstate 95 merged straight from the highway to Memorial Boulevard, culminating in an intersection known at the time as Suicide Circle.
"It had, like, seven streets heading into it," Brussat said.
"There are a lot of traffic patterns (in Providence) that are noticeably insane in a lot of spots," Segal said. He mentioned as a possible cause the city's former traffic engineer, a "favored secretary" of former Mayor Vincent "Buddy" Cianci.
"He decided one day to make her traffic engineer without any credentials - I don't think she went to college at all," Segal said, adding that she is "probably responsible for the deaths of dozens of people over the last 20 years." The city has since hired a traffic engineer with proper credentials, he said.
"Buddy was a good politician," Brussat said. "When the federal government wanted to offer him $140 million he used to say, 'Am I going to stand in the way of this, or am I not going to stand in the way of this?'"
Brussat, like many, acknowledges that Cianci was "partly good" for the city because "he was a very good salesman for the things that he wanted to do."
"But even those things that he wanted to do, he would put up so many subterranean road blocks - he was always, 'You gotta hire this person as the landscaper, you gotta do this, or you gotta do that - you gotta give money to my campaign,'" Brussat said. He called the pace at which Buff Chace's early downtown developments proceeded as "glacial" because of Cianci's machinations.
"Buddy's influence was simply to preside over a structure that made things very difficult to happen. Instead of one-stop shopping you'd have to go into various fiefdoms and you'd have to hire someone who understood the fiefdom, and by one stratagem or another you'd have to promise to hire this guy to do the electricity," Brussat said.
Machinations or not, downtown Providence is experiencing a development boom. Brussat credited developers for taking risks in the first place that made today's market possible.
Segal was quick to point out the tremendous rewards that developments like Chace's could bring in the future.
"So maybe he's forward-thinking, but it is a huge risk," Brussat said. "Everyone says, 'When's the real estate bubble going to break?' - well, maybe it's not going to break, maybe it's just going to stagnate. But if it does burst, all this is just dead weight."
