We’ve all done some selective remembering — convincing ourselves a time in our life or an experience was all sunshine and rainbows and forgetting the storm clouds. Painting an idealized picture of the past helps us escape from the reality of the present. I often find myself yearning for what I remember as my flawless high school years. My thoughts gloss over the sleepless nights and college admissions anxiety, fixating instead on the comfort of my home and the camaraderie of my sports teams. While this nostalgic tendency seems harmless on the individual level, the same romanticization of certain ideas of the past has been weaponized on a political level here in Providence.
From 1950 to 1975, Providence saw an intense period of urban renewal. The federal government funded projects that increased the city’s car accessibility by building large highways and increasing urban surface parking. As a part of this, the Providence Preservation Society and Providence Redevelopment Agency contributed to the destruction of parts of College Hill and Fox Point that were once home to vibrant immigrant communities to make way for I-195. Emboldened by the threat to historic architecture, the founders of the PPS pushed to maintain houses they deemed valuable. They purchased and renovated many dilapidated properties, displacing the residents who lived there and making way for a new vision of a pristine College Hill.
To save Providence’s most historic downtown buildings from demolition during I-195 construction, the PPS moved them to College Hill and surrounding neighborhoods. They were moved in part to lots made vacant by the demolition of working class housing largely inhabited by Cape Verdean residents, including 300 families, 172 homes and 32 businesses. A new historic district was created around transplanted and restored buildings on Benefit Street, raising property values and pricing out former residents.
By calling this “preservation,” the PPS used language of stewardship to conceal the reality of dispossession. The history deemed worth preserving was that of the wealthy and powerful, and those erased had no voice in the decision. The estates that were rescued once housed founding fathers, American revolutionaries or the original settlers of Providence, and the immigrant housing that welcomed the longshoremen or mill workers who made their home in Providence was demolished.
The appeal of nostalgia behind historical preservation weighs into what our society values — what history feels sacred and worth defending, versus who gets written out. When we collectively remember certain buildings as symbols of identity and heritage, we inflate their importance. That inflated importance creates stakes that have real impacts. Once a structure is deemed historic, it becomes worth protecting — worth, in Providence's history, physically relocating across the city. If relocating that building requires clearing the lots of working-class immigrant housing, that trade begins to feel justified. The people living there simply had not been assigned the same historical weight as the buildings replacing their homes. This is nostalgia used as a technology of power — quietly ranking whose past matters, calling that ranking natural and timeless and using it to justify the displacement of those with no voice in the decision.
The urban renewal movement wreaked havoc on cities across the country and carved a class of historic buildings out of our current environment. We can’t let history fade away — we must establish protections to maintain physical testaments to our past. Yet, these histories and priorities need to be established through egalitarian means. We must ensure diverse, representative leadership so that marginalized voices are represented in the decisions that shape their communities.
Current conservative rhetoric like Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan operates under an identical logic — invoking a rosy past that was only golden for a certain demographic to pave the way for a future built for that same privileged demographic. Then, to easily craft a simple narrative for why our country isn’t how we remember it during our daydreams of yesteryear, these same political figures assign blame to politically marginalized targets, attacking immigrants or transgender people. Selective amnesia allows for this grievance without accountability.
The weaponization of nostalgia keeps power in the hands of those who have always held it — the history of the few supersedes that of the diminished many. This is antithetical to core American beliefs of equal opportunity and equal protection: Collective nostalgia inherently functions as an agent of inequality and betrays the ideals of inclusion.
The streets surrounding our campus evoke the idealized aesthetics of the Revolutionary War and colonial America. This handpicked history purports itself as if it has always belonged here. Pristinely painted clapboard siding and implacable brick seem to stand unabashedly, as if their right to be there is self-evident. The erased histories of immigrant housing and working class neighborhoods lay beneath our feet. This nostalgic image of College Hill — one painted onto a canvas the PPS and selective nostalgia helped clear — sits as a shrine to the “winners” of this history.
There is nothing wrong with appreciating aspects of the past and wanting to preserve history. The danger begins when memory is used as sole justification for policy. These rose-colored glasses allow our human tendencies to obfuscate the true past, systematically reinforcing the hierarchies that selective memory was built to protect. We owe it to the erased, in Fox Point, on College Hill and everywhere else where memory has been wielded as a weapon, to ask who gets to define history before the bulldozers arrive — not after.
Tommy Leggat-Barr ’28 can be reached at thomas_leggat-barr@brown.edu. Please send responses to this column to letters@browndailyherald.com and other opinions to opinions@browndailyherald.com.
