I've always loved the painting, "Providence from Across the Cove," by Alvan Fisher. I first saw an image of it in Florence Parker Simister's wonderful 1968 book, Streets of the City, which is out of print now but still may be found in libraries and in used books stores.I like the fact that you can pick out landmarks in the 190-year-old painting that still exist today on Providence's College Hill and the East Side. (The actual painting is in the collection of the Rhode Island Historical Society.)
In the middle distance is the steeple of the First Baptist Church in America. To the right is the brick University Hall of Brown University, and to the right of that, the steeple of the First Unitarian Church.
In the foreground is the Cove itself, a tidal body of water that connected Providence's two rivers (the Woonasquatucket and the Moshassuck) to the head of Narragansett Bay. A defining feature of the Providence landscape, the Cove has all but disappeared today, filled in and covered over more or less by the area between the train station and Kennedy Plaza, and from Providence Place mall to North Main Street. (The circular Waterplace that is the centerpiece of the city's riverwalk is a nod to the historical significance of the original Cove.)
At lunchtime the other day, I thought I'd try to figure out where Fisher had viewed the scene when he made his painting nearly two centuries ago. The three buildings I could still recognize would help me locate the spot, and a small hill on the far left in the painting is probably about where the State House is.
Well, it turns out that Fisher (who put himself in the painting as one of the tiny figures in the foreground) was viewing the scene approximately from the second-floor foyer of the Providence Place mall. (If you cross over on the Skybridge from the Westin Hotel, you enter a glass-walled space from which you can look out upon the "Now" of Fisher's "Then.") The only one of the three buildings that you can still see from there is the First Baptist Church, more or less in the center. To the left, the view is interrupted by the GTech building, and to the right by the Courtyard Hotel. And of course the Cove is long gone, covered by those buildings as well as by Memorial Boulevard and its intersection with Francis Street, plus Kennedy Plaza.
The idyllic scene that is one of the oldest depictions of a Rhode Island landscape is now a busy urban streetscape. Progress has a price, but at least Fisher left us a picture of Providence as it looked once upon a time.
