A Look Back at Garden City Center’s Past as a Coal Mine
The beloved outdoor shopping center in Cranston operated as a coal mine for more than a century.
Photography courtesy of the Cranston Historical Society and the Providence Public Library’s digital collections.
What’s a deep, dark, dirty secret in Rhode Island — not related to politics? The coal mine that laced the earth under Garden City Center in Cranston, a mine that operated for more than a century.
There were a variety of much smaller coal facilities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries scattered around the state, but Cranston’s was the biggest and longest lasting, even if records show the coal quality was poor and provided a lousy burn. How poor? It was said if you didn’t want your home to accidentally go up in flames from a coal fire, use Cranston coal.
The mine opened in 1857 and was shut down by the state 102 years later when a cave-in killed a miner, the only fatality in its history.
In 2001 the mine let itself be known when a sinkhole opened up under a piece of heavy machinery in the shopping center parking lot, where most of the mine was. Faith Lockhart, Garden City’s marketing director, said management now keeps a keen eye on things, doing geological surveys down below when work is done above.
One sunny day, I did an unofficial but fun survey of shoppers and store personnel in the retail mecca now in its seventy-fifth year, that revealed how many people knew of the mine. Turns out, not a lot.
Crate & Barrel? You can carry a lot of coal in either one, but no one there knew what lies beneath. Restore Hyperwellness? They have many treatments there, including chilly cryotherapy, but the cold hard fact is no one had heard of the mine. A Gracious Soul? They were most gracious, but nary a soul knew Garden City’s subterranean secret. Ben and Jerry’s? A nifty offering here could be Baby, It’s Coal Underside!, but no one knew a drip about the mine.
Diamonds are formed over millions of years from coal, so surely people at Providence Diamond knew, right? Wrong. No one, from the security guard who lets people in to the staff, knew a single carat’s worth of Garden City’s gem of a secret. In all, of twenty-four people asked, zero were in the know of the history under their feet.
“Not a lot of people realize it’s there,” says Lockhart, a Connecticut native who knew nothing of the mine herself until she moved here for her job a few years ago. “It’s not really a secret — it’s just that not many know of it.”
Photography courtesy of the Cranston Historical Society and the Providence Public Library’s digital collections.
