New Exhibit Shows Providence Before the Renaissance
In 'Providence Revisited,' Roberta Kaufman's lens uncovers a gritty urban landscape most tourists wouldn't recognize.
“Providence Revisited: Before the Transformation” runs through Feb. 1 on the third floor of Providence City Hall. Photo courtesy of Providence City Archives.
As a photography student in the early ’80s, Roberta Kaufman spent many afternoons on her bicycle, camera at the ready, photographing everyday life in downtown Providence.
She captured it all: The gritty, urban cityscape that many today would not recognize. When traffic snarled around “Suicide Circle,” storefronts were shuttered and the city’s rivers were shrouded in layers of concrete and asphalt. Before Waterplace Park. Before Providence Place. Before the Convention Center, the Westin, WaterFire. A city The Wall Street Journal famously called “little more than a smudge beside the fast lane to Cape Cod.”
You can see a glimpse of Providence, pre-Renaissance, at “Providence Revisited: Before the Transformation,” featuring Kaufman’s black-and-white photographs and drawings on the third floor of Providence City Hall. The exhibit runs through Feb. 1.
A pedestrian in Providence’s Kennedy Plaza in the early 1980s, photographed by Roberta Kaufman. Photograph by Dana Laverty.
Kaufman fell in love with photography while a philosophy student at Boston College. When she graduated, she returned to her native Providence and enrolled in Rhode Island College, studying photography. Her professors all had the same mantra: Take pictures, and lots of them.
“They said, ‘Go shoot.’ So where else are you going to go?” she says. “Downtown.”
Her favorite spots were the Westminster Mall, back when it was a pedestrian walkway closed to cars, where she’d photograph men sitting on benches, feeding pigeons, and shoppers going about their day. She explored the many snaking side streets as well, Weybosset Street and “Suicide Circle,” an oft-congested roundabout at the intersection of Washington Street and Memorial Boulevard, where the 150-foot-tall World War I monument stood before being moved to South Main Street’s Memorial Park in the mid 1990s. There’s the old train station and the amber-hued University of Rhode Island extension building, both demolished to make way for the river relocation project.
Dozens of Kaufman’s photos and sketches are on display in Providence City Hall. Photo by Dana Laverty.
Kaufman developed her photos in her basement darkroom, and drew sketches of the ones she liked best. She amassed 300–400 pictures in all, which she donated to the city. Archivists are in the process of scanning and watermarking them all. The exhibit, curated by the Providence City Archives department, is a way of thanking Kaufman for her donation, says Caleb Troy Horton, the city archivist.
“Her pictures are a great artifact of that era in time,” he says.
A print tucked in between a shot of “Suicide Circle” and a photo of a police officer patrolling on horseback hints at the Renaissance yet to come: a construction worker strides past a basin of water surrounded by layers of dirt and debris, the old Union Station buildings looming in the background. It’s Waterplace Park, rising from the rubble to set the city on a course of renewal and regrowth.
“Providence Revisited: Before the Transformation” runs through Feb. 1 on the third floor of Providence City Hall. The building is open weekdays from 8:30 a.m.–4:30 p.m.
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