PANEL 6
Plan and elevation 6-Acre site between Benefit Street and South Main Street, where they terminated at Wickenden Street, showing the rehabilitated Old St. Stephen’s Church (Barker Playhouse) with reconstructed steeple, rehabilitated historic structures, parking, a new Tent-shaped theatre for the Providence Players, and a new knife-blade apartment tower, within an open plaza.
CLAIRE ANDRADE-WATKINS
"The selection of panels #4, #6 and #8 for review is based on a conundrum of being both a witness and participant in the ‘lived’ moment of those spaces as the center of the Cape Verdean community, yet invisible in the vision and execution of the College Hill Plan. I see the ‘footprint’ in panel #4 of the house on 26 Planet Street where I was born and raised; the house at 28 Planet next door where I often babysat, the Goff house on the corner of Benefit and Planet where we often visited, and the Burnside Apartments with the wonderful curved iron rail that was the delight of children in the neighborhood.
Reconciling those memories to ‘footprints’ and what the implementation of the plan created in terms of the human consequences to the denizens of those spaces is another perspective: one of existing, but not visible, and voiceless in the determination of ‘significant or insignificant to the historic fabric ’, worthy of preserving or relegated to ‘infill.” The conundrum is not a resolution but a question. What do we remember? Or more importantly, who decides what and how we remember? The challenge is not the regret of the past, but the hope for the future to reconstitute those lost memories and absent voices and integrate them into the new ‘vision’ of significant historic fabric."
DAVID BRUSSAT
"Panel 6 represents, again, the survey recommendations at their most obnoxious. The Barker Playhouse has apparently been rehabilitated as St. Stephen’s Church, restoring its religious function, but the theater has been shoved into a tent-like structure next to a residential tower that, with the tower at the north end, bookends Benefit Street. This was not the sort of “symmetry” that College Hill needed.
Urban renewal created suffering and disaster wherever it was tried in America. The survey reminds us of the demolition of the West End in Boston, which displaced a poor neighborhood in favor of high-rise living for the more fortunate. The North End of Boston was under a similar cloud but was spared. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and its predecessor agency defined slums far too broadly to justify urban “removal.” The entire survey district is a demonstration of what a more natural private regeneration can achieve. Gentrification is a pejorative term for a frequent result that is far less brutal to the lives of existing residents than urban renewal, with its evictions en masse accomplished by eminent domain."
IAN BALDWIN &
JONATHAN BELL
Today, I-195 has been relocated and the land from South Main to the river reclaimed. When this panel was drawn, however, the original 195 would have been in planning or under construction. For 50 years this site faced a two-story granite retaining wall topped with high-speed traffic, so a tower and an iconic cultural building might have been the best way to reclaim livable space and buffer Fox Point from the expressway. The design is at least ambitious, quite in contrast to the bland office building and asphalt lots there now. Still, we’re glad it didn’t come to pass: the historic fabric that did survive on this block creates its sense of scale and enclosure. Removing it all for a tower podium would have been a terrible mistake.