May 1988.
Crocodile Dundee II was at the top of the box office charts, Republican Ed DiPrete was governor, the city of Providence was exhuming its long-lost rivers, and a little startup called Rhode Island Monthly put out its inaugural issue — in true Rhode Island style — from its offices just above the old Benny’s on Branch Avenue in Providence.
Our first issue dove into the local TV news ratings battle, with well-known faces like Ann Conway, Doug White and Walter Cryan gracing the cover. In the three-plus decades since, we’ve written about everything that makes the Ocean State such a quirky, wonderful place to call home, from clam cakes and Rocky Point to Buddy Cianci and Ni-Ro-Pe and everything in between.
To celebrate this milestone, we dug into the archives to find some of the best stories we’ve published over the past thirty-five years. We hope you enjoy taking this trip down memory lane with us, and here’s to many more years of chronicling life in this little state we all love.
