When I move, I can’t wait to continue exploring the rest of Providence. As someone who grew up in a midsize city, I find the place totally fascinating. About 40,000 fewer people live in Providence proper than in Kitchener, Ontario (my hometown), but Providence is also about 3 times denser.It has a county population of 626,667, compared to Waterloo Region’s 507,096, and a metro area of 1,630,956, compared to Kitchener’s relatively measly 477,160. As Jane Jacobs points out in her economic works, large metro areas are often the result of multifaceted economic booms, which would suggest that the defining difference in the character of Providence and Kitchener lies in Providence’s history as a hub of industry and commerce.
As a result, Providence is a city of neighbourhoods more like Toronto than Kitchener, really. There are thriving commercial strips in almost every neighbourhood in the city — not just the downtown. Besides Federal Hill, you can find great places to live, work, eat, shop or just hang out in College Hill, Wayland Square, Fox Point, the Jewelry District, the West End, and so on. Probably because the city is so old, many of them have the classic Jane Jacobs mixed-use, short-block, dense-population, old-building combination that makes for a vibrant neighbourhood. That said, the downtown does suffer from many of the bizarre planning phenomena of post-war North America that Jacobs denounces — particularly over-rationalized traffic planning. (What’s with all the one-ways and weird turn lanes? Maybe it works better for locals…)
Below are photos of some of the standout places I’ve seen so far in Providence outside of Federal Hill, but there is one thing I want to mention first, that I didn’t get a chance to snap a picture of, and I can’t find anywhere online. In the West End (a.k.a. the Armory District, after the Cranston Street Armory), you can find a variety of fruit vendors with crates of mangos and such tilted against the hoods of their trucks. As a Canadian, this sort of street life is totally foreign to me! It’s basically regulated out of existence in every city I know well here. Even in Toronto, a city that could unequivocally support such vendors, it’s outlawed. (What’s more, in Toronto, the only street food allowed is city-regulated hot dog stands, stifling yet another opportunity for low-overhead entrepreneurship. Some changes have been made recently, but the hoops vendors have to jump through are still ludicrous.)
Downtown: Waterplace Park, part of Providence’s new Venetian-style Riverwalk, with the Rhode Island State House behind. Once covered by the “world’s widest bridge,” Providence’s rivers were uncovered in 1994 and converted into a well-used public space. It hosts the annual festival Waterfire, featuring a hundred bonfires that sit on the river, street food, dance classes and a great variety of other attractions.
Downtown: The enormous Providence Place Mall, built as part of an effort to revive the downtown area in 1999 — not unlike the topic of my thesis, the Market Square Shopping Centre in Kitchener, or many other P3 downtown malls in midsize cities around Ontario. In 2007, a group of artists were caught living in a deserted part of the Providence Place parking garage by authorities. They had secretly created a fully-furnished loft inside a 750 Sq. Ft. area blocked off by cinderblocks. They lived there for 3 years, on and off.
Downtown: The surprisingly vertical skyline of Downtown Providence.
Downtown: The canal and bridges between Downtown and College Hill.
Downtown: A gondola emerges from under a bridge.
Downtown: The gondola drifts past the old industries of the Jewelry District.
College Hill: Two brass musicians practice near the water.
College Hill: Pavilion on the Providence River Greenway (a waterside walkway at the bottom of the “hill” part of College Hill).
College Hill: Inside the Cable Car, a combined cinema and cafe.
College Hill: A decorative window to the projection booth at the Cable Car.
College Hill: Benefit St., with mature trees and cracked sidewalks typical of the neighbourhood. Benefit is best known for its concentration of historic homes. In fact, many of those homes were not built on the sites where they sit now; they were moved to Benefit by developers much later to create a concentrated “historic” district. On one hand, these relocations saved otherwise unprotected buildings, but on the other hand, the completeness of the historical aesthetic makes it feel a bit Mickey Mouse.
College Hill: The back entrance to the Nightingale-Brown House, home to the Public Humanities program I’ll be attending this Fall. My dad and I stayed in the adjacent Carriage House while we searched for an apartment.
College Hill: A storage area inside the Carriage House.
College Hill: Light from the window touches one of the beds in our room at the Carriage House.
Fox Point: Public art on a lamp post in Fox Point.
Fox Point: Cafe Zog, part of a quaint stretch of commercial on Wickenden St. Dad and I performed many drive-by Google Map searches using their wi-fi. But we also had breakfast there several times, promise!
Fox Point: Brickway on Wickenden, almost across the street from Zog.
Jewelry District: Rick’s Roadhouse, a delicious barbecue place with vegetarian options.
Jewelry District: The patio at Rick’s Roadhouse.
Jewelry District: Two empty flights of whiskey at Rick’s Roadhouse. Dad and I split a “Whiskeys of the World” set and a selection of Kentucky Bourbons. They also serve a mean Dark ‘n’ Stormy here, which is still somewhat difficult to find in Ontario.
Jewelry District: This stretch has several other decent looking restaurants and bars that I hope to check out sometime. It also has several attractive factory buildings, one of them slated to become a museum about the Providence harbour. The district takes its name from the booming stage jewelry industry that once occupied this part of town.