Posted at Mar 14/2007 09:20PM:
Bochay: ---- Posted at Mar 12/2007 12:31AM:
Bochay:

City Walk Providence: Southside, Westside, Olneyville, Valley, Manton

Bochay Drum March 11, 2007

1. “Upper South Providence” The east side of Broad Street, across from Grace Cemetery. These few blocks on Broad street seem to the casual observer to be neglected, “blighted”, with abandoned buildings; the massive black Victorian with the sign that reads “Our Place—Djila’s Nightclub”, the old Domino’s Pizza that has been reconstructed since someone drove a car through it, the red and brown 1950’s façade of the “General Armature”, the “abandoned castle” (in the words of a former roommate” that a landscaping company uses to store its equipment, and the giant rubble filled lot that paranoid anti-gentrification gentrifiers say will soon be a Starbuck’s café.

2. Avenues Cranston and Westminster

I actually went by bicycle up to Cranston avenue, and turned back northeast on it, circling the playing field of Central Highschool. My destination was the Hudson fur and leather supplier dumpster, where instead of fur and leather, I found three trashbags full of little kids toys. Some of them were singing and talking their little batteries out, so I rescued a few to take back to my laboratory for recombinant experiments. In the bushes I hid the aluminum clipboard case, a few small plastic traffic police, the toy laptop computer, the noisemaking superman belt, the singing choochoo train, the Darth Vader mask with the microphone in it, and the “wiggles” (an Australian childrens cartoon, my sources say) toy electric guitar. The “wiggles” was a coincidental associative clue to the probable origin of the trashbags full of toys. The housing project “Wiggin Village” is right next door, a meandering thick block or two between Westminster and Cranston Avenues of squat brown and white apartment clusters, hedges, fences, parking lots and cul de sacs. The edge of Wiggin Village on the corner of Bridgham and Cranston has a business called “Wigginmat”.

3. The Woonasquatucket River 1: Atlantic Mills

I left my bicycle behind Atlantic Mills, a fantastic dual turreted fortress of archaic industry. The river is folded in between jumbled and stacked mill buildings that angle their walls to follow the cleaning and cooling powers of the tiny, brown, Woonasquatucket river. Rusty metal, old furniture, gutted appliances and old tires are clumped about on the cracked and pitted parking lots of Atlantic Mills, behind the Price Rite.

4. ONA, Rising Sun Mills, Puente, who owns Valley Street?

I stopped at a sidewalk sale on one of the streets that angles uphill into Mount Pleasant, I was not too impressed by the overpriced speakers and boxes of junk, but was pleased that someone was out selling stuff… I continued downhill, past the building where the Olneyville Neighborhood Association has been meeting for the past 70 years, and down into the recently developed Rising Sun Mills area. This is a large scale renovation project by the Struever Brothers, Eccles and Rouse, a Baltimore based contracting and construction group that is “Transforming America’s Cities, Neighborhood by Neighborhood”. To many of the people who live and work in the neighborhood, including representatives of the Olneyville Neighborhood Association, this amounts to an attempt to colonize the neighborhood. They say “Lofts Do Not a Neighborhood Make”. As I approached, on the right was a development targeted at artists, little metal and glass boxes stuck on to the big old brick boxes of the original mill, a courtyard with walls of an exposed and unfinished mix of brick, cement and stone blocks, giving it a post-war look remniscent of long established artists squats in Europe (example: Tacheles in Berlin), and a poster in the local Providence screenprinting style advertising “Nest” homes, with mixes of live work spaces for small groups of cohabitors—presumably targeted to younger folks. Rising Sun Mills proper is an enormous set of winged buildings with a big parking lot between itself and the Woonasquatucket behind it, a steep embankment up to Mount Pleasant covered with trees and trash on the other side of the river. Everything has been washed or covered with new cement or painted steel here, on the front roof of Rising Sun, it’s own name is spelled out in enormous letters that light up at night. The Icon Café was closed on this Sunday afternoon, there were wine bottles in the windows and a sign proclaiming that it was listed as the “Best New Café” by the Rhode Island Monthly, which is published by the same company that puts out the Eastside Monthly. By some inexplicable trick of psychogeography, the Eastside Monthly recently relocated to the west side of town, right across the street from the Icon café!

5. The Last Honest Auto Mechanic in America and Donigan Park

After going behind Rising Sun Mills, the Woonasquatucket turns south with Donigan Park on the East Bank, and on the West Bank, a lot owned by a guy who works on cars. He has repeatedly refused to sell out to Struever Brothers (Developers of Rising Sun Mills). His lot provides a buffer between Donigan park, which was full of local kids in the playground and adults playing football, and the efforts to clean up the neighborhood. I went through Donigan Park to the riverside across from the back of Rising Sun Mills, where an old dam makes a little waterfall and a toothless couple were sitting with a baby carriage full of cardboard boxes, drinking beer out of aluminum cans through straws.

6. Atwells Avenue the lesser; up the hill, a naughty dog, good tacos

I turned west, uphill on Atwells avenue, marveling at the pleasant feeling that walking up a grade gives me, turning around to see the warm sun brightening the mills along the Woonasquatucket Valley, leading to the downtown skyline. Up and over the crest of the hill, a silly naughty dog was loose, running around in the street and being overly friendly. Down the hill I went, stopping to purchase a taco before turning back to the southeast on Manton Avenue. I ate the taco in Merino park, reaching it via pedestrian bridge across the Woonasquatucket as it enters into Olneyville, downstream from the Dyerville pond. There was graffiti that said “Mount Pleasant Sucks” and a big tag in orange and black spraypaint proclaiming “HOT BOYZ”. I imagined Merino park as it was described to me on my first visit: a sheep field on the banks of the little river. Then a bustling woolen mill, then a fire, then another woolen mill, pumping out thousands of garments with the “Merino Wool” label. Then another fire, and then a lonely park, between fancy new development, a highway and housing projects, on the banks of the little river.

7. Down Manton Avenue, Olneyville again

I saw one man sitting on a bench in a community garden that was all brown and fallow for the season. Some acquaintances who were recently evicted from their Mill space stopped briefly in their car, I tried to give them some salsa from the Taqueria to console them, but they had a new car. On Manton, the round brick Beehive Collective building had its name spelled out on its door with blue masking tape, and a sheet of paper posted over that warned that there is asbestos within.

8. Homeward, Olneyville square, Westminster and Cranston Avenues

I picked up my bike and walked it home. In Olneyville Square I stopped to look at the exhibit in the Dirt Palace (old library turned into a home for wayward young woman/artists collective) window. It was a set of photographed and painted portraits with the contact information for the artist taped on to the outside of the window. I passed one of Providence’s mystery poles, which are difficult to see, despite their frequent occurrence about the city. When attention is called to them, they are usually supposed to be

a) old gaslights b) old street heaters c) vents for the pressurized or noxious underworld

Do you know the poles that I am talking about? Some photos:Providence Mystery Poles

I walked up and out of Olneyville on Westminster Avenue, one of the few entrances to this neighborhood hemmed in by highways. I saw a handwritten sign on the last building before crossing over the train tracks and highways that advertised a near future event for military veterans: “vets, pets and frets”, combining animals, socializing and jamming out with musical instruments. Across the river of commerce that is the highway, I reentered the “Westside” neighborhood. While still on the overpass, I noticed the first of many posters glued up on boxes and poles along Westminster Street (Avenue?) by anti-gentrification activists last winter, somewhat peeling and faded now… “Olneyville needs a new library, not luxury lofts”, “Struever Brothers afuera de Olneyville”… On Westminster, across from Bridgham middle school, where kids were riding skateboards all day, I noticed some scotch broom, in a planter box. Past the West Broadway Neighborhood Association and the “Complex”(?)—which is painted like the top of a DJ’s case for carrying turntables or records—I continued on Westminster until Armory park, where I turned South across the dun colored parade ground. Two older boys were playing on a seesaw, in a foreground dwarfed by the enormous castle of the Armory. Last year someone pointed out to me that armories were built in so many American cities in the beginning of the 20th century, protecting against the fear of armed uprising by urban workers and immigrants… Military outposts in the hearts of American cities. I walked back to the Hudson fur and leather supplier, between Wiggin village and the burnt our laundry, to pick up the toys that I had stashed in the bushes, and took them home with me.

Disclaimer: Commentary about some of the sites and areas listed here are drawn from oral recountings by Providence residents and observation and conjecture on my part, and are definitely subjective and perhaps sometimes romantic.

Posted at Mar 18/2007 02:23PM:
Bochay: Check out my exploration of the Public blog: http://departmentofpublicaddress.blogspot.com/