What it’s Like Being on the Night Shift in Rhode Island

Photography by Jonathan Pitts-Wiley

As the sun sets, Rhode Island closes up shop — or so it would seem from the abandoned highway lanes and retail stores rarely open past 10 p.m. But for thousands of workers, the day is just beginning — a day when they’ll make deliveries, prepare meals, respond to calls, check on patients and fulfill all the other tasks that keep the state running through the night. COVID-19 and other recent shifts have forever altered our economy. In many places, twenty-four-hour stores and restaurants are a thing of the past, and the businesses that remain are the essential ones where employees accomplish the work others can’t — or won’t — do. For them, the job goes on regardless of weather or daytime obligations. For several weeks this past winter, we followed their work (and attempted their sleep schedules) and uncovered a camaraderie and sense of mutual care rarely glimpsed during the day. Here are their stories.

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9 PM

Newport

Newport Mental Health

Photography by Jonathan Pitts-Wiley

As the temperature descends below freezing, Jennifer Alexander (top photo) and Natasha Garcia (above left) drive their nightly route up Broadway in Newport. The two behavioral health specialists for the Rhode Island Outreach team at Newport Mental Health keep an eye out for anyone in need of help — behavioral or otherwise. “We’d never leave anyone behind at night,” Alexander says. The program launched in 2023 with the goal of reducing unnecessary hospitalizations and incarcerations among Newport County’s most vulnerable residents. Providers patrol in pairs between 7 a.m. and 11 p.m., seven days a week, and work closely with first responders and meal site providers to deescalate situations and support basic needs. “We come in, we deescalate, and we try to listen to the individual and figure out what they need,” Garcia says.

Photography by Jonathan Pitts-Wiley

Originally, the team also stocked street supplies — gloves, hand warmers, sleeping bags — to hand out as needed, but a decline in funding means their shelves have run bare in recent months. Both women have experienced mental health or substance use challenges firsthand, or with family members, and say their backgrounds help them gain clients’ trust. “They deal with people day in and day out who don’t understand them, and they feel frustrated, like they’re a number,” Alexander says. “They want someone who’s been through it. They want hope.”

Photography by Jonathan Pitts-Wiley

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10 PM

Providence

The Beatrice

Photography by Jonathan Pitts-Wiley

It’s been snowing all day, and Providence’s roads and sidewalks are covered with a thick slush that deters guests at The Beatrice from leaving the hotel in search of a late-night snack. Two DoorDash drivers arrive, buzzing the front door so that front desk attendant, Cecilia DiAngi, can collect takeout from McDonald’s and Chili’s to deliver to guests on the upper floors. Throughout her 3 to 11 p.m. shift, DiAngi answers phones, provides guest assistance, offers restaurant recommendations and even waters the wall of pothos plants behind the desk. “You never know what you are getting yourself into, but it’s always fun,” DiAngi says. “Some days we might come in and there’s a couple of VIPs coming in, and we have to set certain things up in the room for them.”

Photography by Jonathan Pitts-Wiley

DiAngi completes a checklist every workday, including sanitizing, emptying the trash, running reports, checking people into the hotel and keeping track of special packages that might include a chilled bottle of prosecco waiting in the room when a guest arrives. Sometimes, there are special requests, like that one time a hotel guest requested twelve bath mats for his room. DiAngi even provided comfort to a guest whose baby was in the Women & Infants neonatal intensive care unit. “I remember the guests and things about their lives,” DiAngi says. “The woman with the baby in the NICU, it’s so nice to be able to be here and take care of her. It’s nice to do what I can to make sure she’s OK.” —Jamie Coelho

Photography by Jonathan Pitts-Wiley

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Midnight

Woonsocket

Woonsocket Police Department

Sgt. Robert Frye patrols in his vehicle. Photography by Jonathan Pitts-Wiley

At five minutes to midnight, officers gather at the Woonsocket Police Department for the morning shift. The lights flicker, and conversation falls away as they line up for roll call. A snowstorm is coming, Sgt. Robert Frye instructs, and they should keep an eye out for unregistered vehicles that need to be towed. Before they can leave the station, a call comes in: breaking and entering in progress in Fairmount, a one-time mill village on the city’s western edge. They jump in their squad cars and head to the scene.

Police take a person into custody outside an apartment building. Photography by Jonathan Pitts-Wiley

Outside the house, neighbors in pajamas peer from the decks of their triple-deckers. After forty-five tense minutes and one arrest, the situation dissipates, and silence descends once more upon the street. Another call comes in, this time for a domestic dispute. Criss-crossing the river that bisects the city, Frye is on familiar territory. He grew up here, in an affordable housing complex on the city’s eastern side. After dropping out of high school and obtaining his GED, he joined the Rhode Island National Guard and deployed to Afghanistan. He later worked a stint at the Wyatt Detention Facility before training as a police officer. His first job was in North Smithfield, but he stayed for only a year before transferring to his hometown department. “I didn’t like it,” he says. “You have cops here who have six months on the job who have more experience than a guy with five years on the job in a small town.”

Officer Jason Berthelette and police K-9 Recon respond to a suspected breaking and entering. Photography by Jonathan Pitts-Wiley

The shift is the first stop for new officers, and most appear to be in their twenties, barely a few years into their careers. These officers have come of age at a time when the role of police in society has been called into question, a shift Frye says is evident in their changing mentalities. He serves as the use-of-force instructor for the department, heading up trainings intended to reduce altercations and injuries. “More training and experience makes you a better cop, and we need to be better cops than we were before,” he says.

Bethany Boisclair works as a dispatcher for the department. Photography by Jonathan Pitts-Wiley

Back at the station, Silin Windham, Charlee Seymour and Bethany Boisclair manage the phones in dispatch. 911 dispatchers put calls through to the three women, who then relay instructions to officers on the road. It’s an unseen role, made all the more difficult because often the end result remains unknown. “For me, it’s honestly the calls with kids,” Seymour says. “No matter what type of call, those are the ones that get me.”

Frye with dispatchers Silin Windham and Charlee Seymour. Photography by Jonathan Pitts-Wiley

Frye, too, has calls he’d rather forget. Despite the challenges, he has no intention of moving on to a different city. The streets he patrols, he explains, are the same ones where his wife and kids live, and the job means something. “The city humbles you,” he says.

Photography by Jonathan Pitts-Wiley

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2 AM

Providence

Rhode Island Hospital

Photography by Jonathan Pitts-Wiley

An emergency code blares over the intercom at Rhode Island Hospital, shattering the night. A brief flurry of activity follows before the floor returns to silence. Unlike some other departments, the hospital’s cardiothoracic intensive care unit maintains a mostly peaceful calm through the night hours, with staff holding vigil at the nurse’s station and occasionally ducking into a room to check on a patient. Donna Dumouchel has served as nursing supervisor since 2019, overseeing nurses on the night shift at Rhode Island Hospital and Hasbro Children’s. “Nights can be very active, but it’s a different activity,” she says. “You’re dealing with less resources, so we’re making sure the resources are where they need to be.” Some nights are harder than others. Dumouchel remembers being on the day shift in 2003 when she was called in late to assist with patients in the aftermath of the Station nightclub fire.

Photography by Jonathan Pitts-Wiley

“It was amazing to see everybody come together and do their job,” she says. More recently, she was at home in Smithfield preparing to head in for her twelve-hour shift when she learned of the mass shooting at Brown University. With hospital staff uncertain how many patients would arrive, Dumouchel and others worked to empty beds in the trauma intensive care unit to make room for incoming victims. “It’s all hands on deck at that point,” she says.

Photography by Jonathan Pitts-Wiley

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4 AM

Providence

Buono’s Bakery

Frankie Buono and his cousin, Stephanie Buono, prepare the bakery’s front counter early in the morning. Photography by Jonathan Pitts-Wiley

Reach into any breadbasket on Federal Hill, and chances are the slices inside came from Buono’s Bakery. Since 1989, the family-owned bakery has supplied many of the state’s best Italian restaurants, as well as the customers who make their way to the Hartford Avenue shop. Before the Buono family purchased it, the location was known as Monda’s. “This building has been a functioning bakery for going on 100 years,” says Frankie Buono, who took over the bakery with his mother after his father’s death in 2015.

Packaging the finished rolls. Photography by Jonathan Pitts-Wiley

At 4 a.m., staff has already put in a full day’s work, prepping through the night for the two bake sessions necessary to complete the day’s orders. The bakery produces about 3,000 pounds of dough every day (4,500 on weekends), according to Buono, an amount that translates to “thousands of loaves.”

The oven was imported from Italy and can bake loaves up to six feet long. Photography by Jonathan Pitts-Wiley

While he’s gradually modernizing the business (“When I took over, everything was handwritten,” he explains) and hopes to eventually expand to a second kitchen, he knows customers rely on the handmade quality honed over the years. His own memories of the bakery date back to childhood, when he’d sleep across flour sacks while his father worked through the night.

Dough ready for baking. Photography by Jonathan Pitts-Wiley

“I’d be rolling wine biscuits on the bench to the left of the oven there,” he says, pointing to the imported Italian oven. Today, his nineteen-year-old son is involved with the business as well, offering hope that the four-decade family legacy will live on for another generation.

Drivers depart by 7 a.m. to deliver bread to restaurants around the state. Photography by Jonathan Pitts-Wiley

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4 AM

East Providence

Munroe Dairy

Photography by Jonathan Pitts-Wiley

The fleet of trucks idles outside A.B. Munroe Dairy like a herd of anxious cows, each awaiting its fill of milk and other provisions before venturing into the night. Inside, delivery driver Nick Galego reviews the day’s orders on a counter that looks pulled from a 1950s diner. Yellow order slips detail the day’s routes, the Rhode Island locales joined by further-out destinations like Pawcatuck, Connecticut, and Lakeville, Massachusetts. Milkmen today sport baseball caps and Munroe-branded hoodies instead of the white hats and bowties of black-and-white films, but the profession remains mostly unchanged since the company’s founding in 1881.

Photography by Jonathan Pitts-Wiley

“My cousins and my family all had Munroe when I was growing up,” says Galego, a Riverside native. “I’d eat over their houses and I’d pour a glass of milk, and now I’m delivering it.”

Photography by Jonathan Pitts-Wiley

Every night, thirty-five trucks and drivers deliver an average of 4,500 gallons of milk, a massive dairy delivery effort that unfurls across three states. While other dairies have succumbed to economic pressures, Munroe has maintained its customer base in part due to the availability of other groceries through its delivery service. Familiar names like Calise, Matos, Venda and Mills dot the shelves in the East Providence warehouse, where Galego now completes the orders before climbing into the truck.

Photography by Jonathan Pitts-Wiley

For the next eight hours, he’ll wind through Swansea, Somerset and North Dighton, Massachusetts, making doorstep deliveries. Music, he says, is key to making it through a shift, and he’s not picky about the type. He’ll just as soon blast out musical theater hits as other genres. “One of my top albums last year was Wicked,” he says.

Photography by Jonathan Pitts-Wiley

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5 AM

Providence

Seaplane Diner

Waitress Stacy Oliveira preps for the morning rush. Photography by Jonathan Pitts-Wiley

“Are you having regular or decaf this morning?” Stacy Oliveira asks, sliding a set of utensils over to regular John DeSousa. Outside, Allens Avenue maintains an unnatural stillness, but inside the Seaplane Diner, nearly every seat is full. Camo patterns and safety orange sweatshirts are well represented at the diner sandwiched between Providence’s Hospital District and its industrial waterfront, where most patrons start their day before the morning rush.

Regular John DeSousa cracks a joke as Oliveira and chef Mynor “Oscar” Recinos look on. Photography by Jonathan Pitts-Wiley

DeSousa stops in daily between double shifts in construction and hauling snow. “I’ve been waitressing since I was sixteen,” Oliveira says. “I went to school for physical therapy assistant, and it wasn’t for me.” “Yeah, but she sucks as a waitress,” DeSousa says with a laugh. “She’s the worst waitress in this place.”

Recinos arrives at 4:15 a.m. daily. Photography by Jonathan Pitts-Wiley

In the kitchen, Mynor “Oscar” Recinos starts lining up potatoes on the griddle before the customers arrive. He works most days until 3 p.m., then runs a cleaning business with his wife. “We used to be open late-night, too, but I had to do that in. I did it for fifteen years,” he says.

Stacy Gaudiana has worked at the diner for around fifteen years. Photography by Jonathan Pitts-Wiley

Few Rhode Island establishments remain open twenty-four-seven anymore (“COVID closed down a lot of nights,” says another waitress, Stacy Gaudiana), but those that open before sunrise still find themselves feeding a hungry crowd. “We’ve had the same customers for years,” Oliveira says. “I’ve waited on the same faces. You just get to know everybody.”

Oliveira serves coffee to DeSousa. Photography by Jonathan Pitts-Wiley

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8 AM

Narragansett

Point Judith

Shawn Manville has fished from his boat, the Natator, since 1993. Photography by Jonathan Pitts-Wiley

After a full day and night on the water, Shawn Manville and his daughter, Allison, pull into Point Judith to offload their catch. Two nights ago, the forty-five-foot-long Natator departed Galilee for the fishing grounds about fifty miles south of Block Island, where the crew netted close to 1,700 pounds of fluke.

His daughter, Allison, trained as a dental assistant but prefers fishing. Photography by Jonathan Pitts-Wiley

While the summer bounty allows for a more regular schedule — Manville fishes 3:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. daily during the warmer months — the winter scarcity means trips are fewer and longer in duration. “We had six hours’ drive just to get where we were going,” he says. “I try to get to bed by nine o’clock just so I can function.”

Allison and Shawn peek out the front window while waiting to unload their catch at The Town Dock. Photography by Jonathan Pitts-Wiley

Manville learned the fishing trade from his stepfather and built his own boat in 1993. His daughter, Allison, studied to be a certified dental assistant but never worked in it, preferring the long hours and tangible exertion of the sea. “I’d rather be outside,” she says. “She’s the best deckhand I ever had,” Shawn adds.

Clearing snow off the boat after an early morning storm. Photography by Jonathan Pitts-Wiley

Today, they unload their catch at The Town Dock, a seafood wholesaler based in Galilee and one of the country’s leading suppliers of calamari. Along with his three daughters, Shawn’s grandchildren have grown up on the Natator, though Allison hopes her own children, ages eight and fourteen, pursue a different profession.

The pair prepares to unload buckets of fluke caught about fifty miles south of Block Island. Photography by Jonathan Pitts-Wiley

The past few years have been tough on the industry, a decline her father attributes to the introduction of wind turbines near Rhode Island Sound and fluctuating seafood prices. “The fishing gets worse every year,” Allison says. “It’s a struggle to be a fisherman.” Shawn says he has no plans to retire anytime soon, as long as he and the Natator remain seaworthy. “Until I can’t get on the boat anymore,” he says.

Nika the pup shelters from the weather inside the wheelhouse. Photography by Jonathan Pitts-Wiley