Hot topic: Providence Independence Trail tour

Sporting his trademark bow tie and button-down shirt, Bob Burke's only concession to yesterday's extraordinary heat was wearing seersucker shorts instead of long pants, which of course meant no socks with his loafers. Shortly after high noon, when the temperature downtown hit 95 degrees, Burke was leading about a hundred people on the second annual Providence Independence Trail walk, exploring the city's entertaining history on foot.

The oldest walker was 82, the youngest 6, and all of them had gathered to begin the walk at Burke's fabulously rococo Federal Reserve restaurant (built as Union Trust bank in 1901) at 60 Dorrance St. There, beneath the 24-karat gilded 20-foot ceiling and row of stained glass rosette windows, Burke was offering an array of Rhode Island down-home specialties — clam cakes, clear chowder, saugy dogs and Narragansett beer — to fortify the walkers for the tour. Serving such down-home fare in such luxurious surroundings was a bit of purely inspired Burke-manship.

Burke, who grew up in Rhode Island and was a pioneer on Providence's fine dining scene with his Pot au Feu restaurant, has had a love for the city's history since his days as a student at LaSalle Academy. He has taken on as his personal mission the correction of the false claim by Boston to have begun the American Revolution with the Boston Tea Party of Dec. 16, 1773. Burke rightly says the Revolution actually started on June 9, 1772 (236 years ago today) when a group of daring Providence men boldly burned the British ship Gaspee in Narragansett Bay. "Compare that as an act of war with dressing up as Indians and throwing tea into the water 18 months later!" crowed Burke, who is himself plotting a bold march on Boston this fall to force the issue of correcting the historical record.

One of the many high points of yesterday's entertaining history walk was Burke's action-packed description of the events surrounding the Gaspee burning, beginning with the story of how the captain of the Rhode Island ship the Hannah not only eluded the Gaspee but also cleverly suckered the British ship onto a sandbar where ultimately it was burned by the pre-Revolutionary Rhode Islanders.

Burke expects to make his Independence Trail walking tour available to everyone for free with a cell-phone download keyed to the 48 sites on the 3-mile route. He's also working on a Web site for the tour. Right now, he's offering it for groups such as schools, scout troops, corporations and community organizations.

The number to call for information is (401) 273-8953, or email bob@federalreserveri.com.

"Across the Cove" across the years

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.

Then and now: Westminster Street view

I was a sophomore at Providence's Classical High School in 1967, the year that the Rhode Island Mall (then called the Midland Mall) opened in Warwick. That year is generally thought of as marking the end of retail in downtown Providence — at least, until the present "renaissance."

But it isn't really fair to say that the opening of the Warwick malls killed downtown, because it had already been failing. An effort to restore vitality to Westminster Street by turning it into a pedestrian walkway closed to cars wasn't working, even though as late as the mid-'60s, the street was still lined with stores that were far busier than those that are there today, 40 years later.

In the old postcard view on the left, you can see the planters that occupied the middle of the Westminster pedestrian mall, along with shoppers heading for stores like Woolworth and Thom McCan shoes on the left side and Kay Jewelers on the right. At that time, the two big downtown department stores were still operating — Shepard's and the Outlet — along with dozens of smaller stores like Peerless, Gladding's, Lerner and Casual Corner.
All are gone now, and the present view (right), taken from the corner of Westminster and Union Street (next to Tazza cafe), shows the planters gone, the street reopened to cars — and an absence of shoppers on a weekday afternoon. This might be because the stores that have opened in the past few years on Westminster are determinedly upscale: A wine boutique called Eno, a modern furniture store called Design Within Reach (whose?), and women's fashion stores such as Elsa Arms are typical. Other than a few stores like Oop and Bowl & Board that cater to students decorating their dorms, there's little for sale on Westminster to draw the everyday shopper. The expectation is that the hundreds of condos for sale downtown will soon fill with well-to-do people who will need to buy fine wine and Eames chairs but who won't need to run out for groceries or a pair of stockings or a tube of toothpaste.

It generally works better, though, when stores go where the people are. In 1967, the malls were built in the suburbs because that's where the people had moved. Speaking about the Warwick malls, which he co-managed, for a 1999 Providence Journal article, developer Aram Garabedian said, "The shopping center (in Warwick) followed the people; the people didn't follow the shopping center."
Forty years later, Providence is still hoping they'll be back soon.

Spring perspective: Prospect Terrace

Spring 2008 arrived this morning at 2:05, but you wouldn't know it by the weather. A light rain is falling with a heavy overcast and a temperature of 42.
But just a couple of evenings ago, you could feel the spring coming from the pretty East Side overlook park called Prospect Terrace, where this couple sat watching the sun set from the best perch in the city: a park bench near the towering statue of Providence founder Roger Williams, watching over the city he started in 1636 at the base of this hill.

Probably even at that time, courting couples came to this spot to look out over the Great Cove of Providence, now covered by all those downtown buildings in the space between the State House (which was built atop a small hill that jutted into the north side of the Cove) and the turreted Industrial Trust tower, which sits on land that was at the southern shore of the Cove.

Just about a block in length, Prospect Terrace is located at the intersection of Cushing and Congdon Streets in a lovely residential area of the East Side. Anyone who has lived in Providence for any length of time feels nostalgic here, remembering long-ago people and long-ago times in the city that Williams named for "God's merciful providence" to him and his followers in their time of distress. (He had been banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for holding "diverse, new, and dangerous opinions" challenging church-run government.)

Prospect Terrace is an easy walk from the Brown University campus and the East Side. From downtown, walk up steep Thomas Street next to the First Baptist Church in America, and turn left at Congdon.