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Providence Preservation Society, 24 Meeting Street, Providence, RI (2026)

08/20/2026

For a close-up view of the Democratic Party’s national identity crisis, look no further than the primary election for Providence mayor. The fight between Mayor Brett Smiley and challenger state Rep. David Morales is a local distillation of the questions being asked of establishment Democrats nationwide.

Providence residents have turned out to mayoral forums and debates in droves, but with minimal polling, no clear front-runner in the race has emerged. To understand the support behind each candidate, the Post turned to the proxy battle taking place in their bank accounts.

Every quarter, candidates for public office must file a summary of their campaign finances, including a list of each contribution and expense. In Rhode Island, a given candidate can accept no more than $2,000 in annual donations from individuals and political action committees, or PACs, private groups that pool money and donate to candidates they support.

While Smiley has raked in twice as much money as Morales this year, the challenger has more than twice as many individual donors and fewer overall PAC donations. The source of the donations, with Morales proudly proclaiming not to accept corporate funding, has become a campaign issue in its own right.

“This is a national-level story playing out in Providence,” said Raymond La Raja, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Read the full story: https://ppsri.org/a-national-level-story-playing-out-in-providence-what-can-campaign-contributions-tell-us-about-the-mayoral-race/

08/18/2026

A beady-eyed herring leapt onto the Exchange Street Bridge on a late July morning, landing on the concrete with a soft “clink.” Blue-striped, 6 inches long, and painted onto a ceramic tile by local artist David Allyn, the fish is one of the first pieces of a public art installation coming to downtown bridges this summer.

The project — conceptualized and carried out by local design and art production company Chroma Council — spans a half-mile of the city’s iconic Riverwalk and will bring work from 17 artists, primarily in tile, to five bridges near Waterplace Park by the end of the month.

Soon to appear among the sites are a flock of pigeon tiles, a panel inspired by Cambodian woven mats, abstract designs based on state maps and diagrams, and more.

In imagining the installation, Chroma Council co-founder Linsey Wallace said she hoped to stimulate passersby and help them interact “more thoughtfully” with their surroundings. She thought of the Providence of 20 or 30 years ago, a city with gritty art and music scenes and walls plastered with posters.

“It felt like this place was alive,” Wallace said. “We want to bring some of that texture back.”

Read the full story at the link in our bio.

08/11/2026

Providence is facing a serious housing crisis. The city’s average rent has been on the rise since at least 2016, according to the annual Housing Fact Books released by the research and policy organization HousingWorks RI. In 2016, the annual household income necessary to afford the average two-bedroom rent in Providence was $45,040; today, renters have to make more than double that amount, or $90,560.

It’s no secret that the Smiley administration is hoping the city can build its way out of skyrocketing rents. However, that strategy begs the question: Where can we build?

Smiley’s predecessor Jorge Elorza attempted to address this question during his last year in office by creating the Providence Neighborhood Land Bank. The program is administered by the Providence Redevelopment Agency, or PRA, a quasi-public authority with the broad goal of eliminating and preventing “blighted and substandard areas” in the city. The agency was originally established in 1947, at the start of the urban renewal era — a time when the federal government funded mass demolition and redevelopment projects in American cities.

The agency has seen a boost in new activity over the last five years thanks to another, more recent infusion of federal money. In the wake of the devastating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, hundreds of billions of dollars in American Rescue Plan Act funding, also called ARPA, was distributed to state and local governments across the country. Between 2021 and 2022, the City of Providence alone received a total of $166 million in ARPA funds.

In 2022, Elorza established the Providence Housing Trust Fund using both ARPA funding and municipal bond money. Since then, Elorza and Smiley invested more than $55 million total in the Housing Trust Fund.

The Providence Neighborhood Land Bank, also established under Elorza in 2022, is financed by the Housing Trust Fund. According to a planning document, the purpose of the land bank is to “acquire, hold, and transfer underused vacant land throughout the City, with the goal [of] generating new affordable housing and revitalizing Providence neighborhoods.”

Read the full story: https://ppsri.org/explainer-can-the-providence-neighborhood-land-bank-ease-the-housing-crisis/

08/07/2026

“TIRES,” proclaimed a 1936 advertisement for Broadway Tire Sales Company. “1000 used tires to pick from, $1 and up.”

Today, Tony Carlone laughs and shakes his head in disbelief. He knows the old shop well; his family spent decades running the business at 113 Broadway before closing the location in early 2023.

“I’d want them to count every one,” he said. “There’s no way you could put 1,000 tires — we could barely put 300.”

For more than a century, if something rolled through Federal Hill on tires, there was a good chance someone in the three-story wood-frame building — likely built before 1875 — could fix it. As Columbia Repair Shop, the storefront repaired bicycles and installed baby carriage tires before cars dominated Providence streets.

Later it became Broadway Tire Sales, then BTS Tire & Service, serving decades of drivers until the Carlone family consolidated the business into their Pawtucket location, where Carlone serves as the company president. The Broadway building was sold two years later, and now, after 115 years of commercial life, it’s heading for demolition.

Read the full story at the link in our bio.

08/06/2026

The Providence Historic District Commission, responsible for overseeing and protecting the character of the city’s historic districts, voted on several projects at its July 27 meeting.

The group approved the demolition of a deteriorating Broadway tire shop and provided preliminary approval for a new residence on Pratt Street, while a proposed adjacent addition got denied. It also gave the green light for a new garage and ADU on Hidden Street.

Read the full story at the link in our bio.

07/21/2026

On June 23, a coalition of residents, organizations, and city departments held an open house called “Envisioning Resilience: The Providence Waterfront” at the Save the Bay Center. The night was the culmination of a community engagement process that began in 2023. The goal of the project was to identify the ways in which the Port of Providence could be transformed into an asset to the area — as opposed to a burden on local health and wellness. It explored opportunities like constructing a pedestrian boardwalk along the bay and utilizing native wildlife to support the structure of the shoreline while filtering polluted water.

Posterboards in the open house offered the event’s nearly 100 visitors four different options: bio-retention, floating wetlands, marsh creation, and infrastructure reuse. The ideas are not mutually exclusive, though all of them would require some degree of cooperation from the current property owners of the parcels on the Port.

The schematics for nearly all of these ideas show a possible boardwalk along the shoreline. Such infrastructure is made possible by Rhode Island’s shoreline access law; the state constitution has long declared that all Rhode Islanders have the right to access the shore, but a law passed by the state legislature in 2023 clarified where exactly the public shoreline begins and ends.

Read the full story: https://ppsri.org/the-people-may-be-gaining-ground-in-the-port-of-providence/

07/21/2026

In the 1960s, under the auspices of the South Main Street urban renewal project, sections of the historic Providence waterfront were divided up for new development. This time period brought about new builds such as the Heritage Building (1966-67) and the Providence Plantations Apartments (1973). A new modernist office building was also constructed during this time on this stretch of the street — and though it still stands, the average onlooker wouldn’t know it.

The building, which first served as the Providence branch for office technology company IBM, was erected in 1963. The facade, with its distinctive diamond slits, was designed by Robinson, Green & Beretta, a local firm whose projects around this time included RISD’s 1957 dormitory on Waterman Street and Martin Luther King Elementary School (1967).

While the building was considered a fresh addition to the city in the early 1960s, only 30 years later, public opinion had turned and it was deemed a dated “eyesore.” When the Patridge, Snow & Hahn law firm acquired the building in the early 1990s, it decided that the facade had to go.

Read more at the link in our bio.

07/17/2026

Federal Hill today boasts several grand Catholic churches that were constructed as immigrants poured into the neighborhood in the 19th and 20th centuries — Church of the Holy Ghost, Church of St. Mary on Broadway, and Our Lady of Mount Carmel Roman Catholic Church all still stand today.

But another Roman Catholic church once stood at Atwells and Sutton Streets in Federal Hill: St. John’s Catholic Church, which was founded in the 1870s.

James Murphy — who also designed St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church just a few blocks over on Broadway — was the architect for the project. The church acquired the land in February of 1872, under the leadership of the pastor, John J. McCabe, and the building was erected by 1875.

The church, ultimately demolished in 1993, is rumored to have inspired H.P. Lovecraft’s 1936 short story, “Haunter in the Dark,” in which an ominous Federal Hill church is home to an unknown and mystical evil.

Read more: https://ppsri.org/the-roman-catholic-church-that-disappeared-from-federal-hill/

06/30/2026

🌈 Happy Pride! We're closing out the month of June with an op-ed from Dr. Cutler Thomas about the first public forum on LGB rights and pride in Rhode Island.

This year marks the 50th Anniversary of Providence’s Pride Parade, yet not many know the history of how it began: with a public forum discussing the lack of civil rights for Le***an, Gay, and Bisexual people in Rhode Island which organizers called the “Congress of Gay Concerns” at the Old State House. The idea behind “Pride” hinges on the decision to claim being a Le***an, being Gay, being Q***r, or being Trans as something to be proud of in public rather than as a source of shame to be kept secret.

In the early 1970s, Reverend Joseph Gilbert began holding Christian services catering to Le***an and Gay people who had lost their spiritual communities due to their sexualities at the Providence Metropolitan Community Church (MCC) off Chapin Street in Providence’s West End. At the time, Rev. Gilbert also served the MCC in Worcester, and along with the Worcester Homophile Organization, the MCC organized Worcester’s first Pride Parade in 1975. This ignited a vision for having one the following year in Providence.

It just so happened that 1976 was also the United States Bicentennial; the formation of the U.S. as a nation established by forcibly dispossessing Indigenous peoples of their lands and separating from the rule of Great Britain. Early Pride organizers in Rhode Island leveraged the language and visual symbols of the Bicentennial in their organizing strategies, arguing that G**s and Le***ans had always been part of the country’s history. Therefore, according to them, their participation in the Bicentennial celebration was, in fact, patriotic.

Read the full op-ed from Dr. Cutler Thomas here: https://ppsri.org/the-old-state-house-and-the-1976-congress-of-gay-concerns/

Photos:
1 - Film still courtesy of Rhode Island Historical Society
2 - From “Coming Out in Providence” by Hubert Kennedy
3 - Film still courtesy of Rhode Island Historical Society
4 - Courtesy of the U.S. National Archives

06/25/2026

At the June 16 meeting of the City Plan Commission (CPC), commissioners tied in a 2-2 vote over whether or not to lower the required number of parking spaces for a health center on Cargill Street from 66 spots to 20. Without the variance, the project is left in flux; the commission scheduled a special meeting for Aug. 18 to revisit the matter.

In addition to continuing the project on Cargill Street, the commission also approved an extension for a minor subdivision at 16-22 Grove Street, and gave a positive recommendation for the abandonment of a small portion of Western Street in Mount Hope. The latter case will go to the City Council for a final vote. Lastly, the CPC granted approval to a preliminary plan for a business park at 70 Houghton Street in Wanskuck on a Providence Redevelopment Agency-owned parcel that’s gone underutilized for decades.

The applicant for the 52-foot-tall health center at 14 Cargill Street is Rhode Island Public Health Institute (RIPHI), a non-profit health organization serving vulnerable populations. RIPHI requested a handful of variances, including permission to combine the master and preliminary plan stages — which ordinarily require separate appearances before the CPC and opportunities for public comment — and a dimensional variance from the parking requirement.

Read more: https://ppsri.org/city-plan-commissioners-split-over-approval-of-federal-hill-health-center/

Providence Preservation Society

08/20/2026

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07/21/2026

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