Interface

Dead Windows

The early seventies were trying years for the city of Providence, and a time of accelerated decline for the city’s nineteenth-century Downtown. From a peak population of 253,504 in 1940, only 179,213 people remained in the city by 1970, as the white middle class evacuated Providence faster than from any other American city except Detroit. ¹ Those who stayed were disproportionately poor, elderly, and in need of social services. Former Mayor Buddy Cianci described the city as he found it upon taking office in 1975:

As I had complained during my campaign, the city was in terrible shape. Obviously it wasn’t all [Mayor] Doorley’s fault, but he certainly hadn’t done much to prevent it. Our infrastructure was old and falling apart, our industrial base—the textile and costume jewelry industries in particular—was gone, storefronts Downtown were boarded up, many buildings were half empty or had been abandoned, our rivers were both covered by cement and polluted, our parks had not been properly maintained, and there was no support for our arts community. Our population base was fleeing to the suburbs, so our retail industry was collapsing; our biggest department stores—Shepherd’s and the Outlet—were either out of business or headed in that direction, and those few restaurants still in business were struggling. ²

Mayor Joseph Doorley (who served from 1965 to 1975) stayed aloof from Downtown’s troubles. Historian Carl Antonucci wrote that “Doorley spent the bulk of his time in office planning for his re-election campaigns by providing city services and city jobs to his supporters at the expense of providing ideas for the economic development of Downtown Providence.” ³ The mayor himself told the Providence Journal in 1970 that “I wouldn’t waste my time planning for 25 years in the future.” ⁴

Providence, the former hub of trade and commerce, had become a parochial federation of wards by the 1970s, governed as the city’s daily paper lamented by “the dreariest sort of machine politics.” ⁵ Downtown mattered little in this order because it delivered few votes and factored little into the daily life of the city’s neighborhoods. It was known to be a dangerous place after dark, and residents with cars or friends with cars went to nearby malls for the shopping and movie-going experience that Westminster and Weybosset Streets once provided. In effect, Downtown had ceased to function as a domain of shared experience in any positive sense.

Mayor Doorley blamed the decline of Downtown commerce squarely on the business owners themselves. When asked about the city’s lack of intervention, he said that “it was not the responsibility of the taxpayers of this city to support business organizations in operations which are not competitive because of their own lack of investment.” ⁶ It was a striking contrast to the collaborative spirit behind Downtown 1970 (1961), and testified to the extent of stakeholders’ withdrawal from the CBD over the course of the intervening decade.

The ones who stayed were less circumspect. High-paying commercial tenants wanted on-site parking, and landlords tore down dozens of older buildings to meet apparent demand. There were some exceptions to this trend—for one, Johnson and Wales University assembled much of its Downtown campus in this period by colonizing vacant prewar structures. Johnson and Wales bought the former Crown Hotel in 1966, the former Dreyfus Hotel in 1975, and the Gladdings Department Store building in 1975: Carmen Maiocco wrote that “by 1990, the school owned 30 parcels, all in the center of the city, and it was still buying.” It was a strategy that several other schools and nonprofits would later follow. ⁷

For white-collar companies, a Downtown address no longer signified prestige or power by the late sixties. Allendale Insurance, Rhode Island’s largest independent insurance company, relocated from Downtown to an office park in suburban Johnston in 1973. That same year, the state announced plans to move its court complex to a sprawling government campus in the city of Cranston, where many state offices and prison buildings already resided.

When Downtown retail started to flag, the more savvy merchants tailed their preferred clients to the commercial strips and indoor malls of outlying towns. In the nearby city of Warwick, the Midland Mall (later known as the Rhode Island Mall) opened on former pasture land in 1967 to become the first fully enclosed mall in New England. Nearly rivaling the Downtown shopping district in size, it offered enough floor space for sixty stores. The even-bigger Warwick Mall opened three years later, to be followed by the Lincoln Mall in the mid-seventies. For white baby boomers, these new retail centers recreated the spatial coherence and human-scaled design of the old Downtown shopping corridors, but with the perceived benefits of climate control, easy highway access, on-site parking, and de facto social screening.

Back in Providence, restaurants, hotels, movie theaters, and countless other businesses closed as foot traffic dwindled. Small shops fell first, followed by the big department stores. An early casualty of the Downtown’s decline was the once-luxurious Narragansett Hotel, torn down in 1960 after years of dwindling occupancy. The nearby Crown Hotel closed soon after. The Arcadia Ballroom was demolished in 1963 by owner B. A. Dario after doubling for some years as a boxing ring; and the illustrious five-story RKO Albee Theater, owned by the same Dario, was demolished in 1970. The Port Arthur, a once-popular Chinese restaurant cum jazz club run by the Tow family since 1921, could no longer fill its block-long dining area by the early sixties and closed in 1965. J. J. Newbury’s department store closed in 1967, along with Kresge’s the five-and-dime. Newbury’s failed despite its owners’ modernization efforts, which included the installation of an escalator and porcelain enamel sheathing over the store’s French-classicist facade (in pursuit of the streamlined look prescribed by Downtown 1970 ⁸ )

Many businesses held on through the 1960s, but precariously, with social trends and economics working against them. To investors, the Downtown retail market was no longer viable, because the built environment from I-95 to the Providence River was functionally obsolete—and by the seventies, this prolonged, entropic state of noninvestment was threatening a total collapse of the district economy. Shepard’s, one of the largest department stores in the region, closed in 1973. Child’s, another major retailer, closed the same year. Also on Westminster, the Kent Hotel “had become a rundown flophouse for the city’s elderly poor” and closed for good in 1974. On Westminster Street, the erstwhile Great White Way of southern New England, it was said that “you could fire a rifle … at dusk and not hit anyone” (see Figure 1). ⁹

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Figure 1.

Westminster Mall in 1976. Built in 1964, the pedestrian mall was intended by the authors of the district’s 1961 master plan to serve as “an urban setting able to compete with the modern shopping mall center.” It faced immediate competition, however, when the fully enclosed Midland Mall opened with parking for thousands in the southerly suburb of Warwick in 1968. The even-larger Warwick Mall opened in 1972. Within a decade of Westminster Mall’s ribbon cutting, all the street’s major department stores had closed except for Woolworths. Finally in 1989, the mall was torn up and the street reopened to vehicular traffic. Source: Jay Boersma, Providence, Rhode Island in 1976 (Jay Boersma) and re-Vision: photography by Jay Boersma, accessed June 15, 2015, http://www.re-vision.com/photography/providence1976/intro.html#.VYGno_lVhHw.

If any part of Downtown fared reasonably well in the seventies, it was the Financial District centered at the intersection of Westminster and Weybosset Streets. It was here, albeit on a very limited scale, that the national office-building boom of the mid-seventies had a growth impact. New construction included a twenty-three story precast-concrete tower at 40 Westminster Street, built in 1972, and the twenty-eight-floor Hospital Trust Tower of 1973 (also precast-concrete), still a dominating feature of the city’s modest skyline. Despite the spatial dominance of the new structures, however, the human scale of the nineteenth-century district remained intact, and the office crowd supported daytime commerce at street level as they had for well over a century.

By the 1970s, hastily sited transportation networks old and new cut across the terrain of Downtown Providence with little provision for the comfort or safety of people on foot. Between Union Station and the State House, the elevated rail line forced pedestrians heading north or south along a forbidding detour. Meanwhile, the railroad’s abandoned freight yards had been converted into blacktop lots, the largest known as “the pork chop” for its suggestive shape. The nearby Providence River, once a hub of maritime trade, was noxious and half-forgotten. Much of its course had been decked over for parking, and the resulting Crawford Street Bridge was declared by the Guinness Book of World Records to be the widest in the world in 1980, at 1,147 feet. ¹⁰ Exacerbating all of these problems were Interstates 95 and 195, which severed Downtown from the inner-city neighborhoods of South Providence, the West End, Federal Hill, and Smith Hill, and deadened the blocks adjacent (see Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

Land clearance for Interstate 95, then known as the “north–south freeway,” December, 1960. Rhode Island Hospital and the erstwhile streets of Upper South Providence are in the foreground. The path of demolition sweeps westward through the Weybosset Hill section of Downtown (upper left). The Financial District and the Rhode Island State House can be seen in the upper right corner. Source: Providence City Plan Commission and sponsoring agencies: Walter H. Reynolds. Downtown Providence, 1970: A Demonstration of Citizen Participation in Comprehensive Planning. Providence, RI: Sentry offset service, 1961.

In 1974, the once-teeming Union Station was in bad shape, and only strict weight limits kept the elevated track from collapsing. Interface read:

At present, the floor is cracked, the interior is dark and dirty and the leaking roof has caused paint and plaster to peel off the ceiling and columns. Water has also affected the wooden paneling, which is warped and pulling away from its supports. One of the subway tunnels to the tracks has been closed and the other is in disrepair. Of the four buildings in the complex, only the terminal itself and the adjacent building to the east are heated. The once popular restaurant is gone, as are the bootblack, the flower and newspaper sellers, and soda fountain operators. ¹¹

In sum, Providence was too old, too overbuilt, and too little valued to meet the challenges of the postwar years. The city was emptying out, and the Downtown, once a built expression of industry-driven wealth, was becoming a stony preserve of orphaned symbols.

It was in this dreary atmosphere that a Rhode Island School of Design Department of Architecture class drafted Interface: Providence, the visionary 1974 master plan that would inspire a generation of Downtown advocates. It was a radical plan in many ways and a near-complete departure from both the Downtown 1970 and Civic Center Plan visions of then-recent years. But circumstances had changed for the worse, and the question for the new plan’s authors was not how to best to keep the Downtown alive, but rather how to repurpose its ruins.

The Plan

Imagine a thriving city … narrow bustling streets … tight cellular private spaces … the whole spatial garment ever changing under the changing light of day ….

The Arab oil embargo of 1973 provoked a serious (though short-lived) reevaluation of the US transportation policy. After three decades of car-dependent, centrifugal growth along far-flung interstate roads, fuel scarcity suddenly made the cost of driving a hardship for many.

As Amtrak prepared to take control of the Northeast Corridor, the US Department of Transportation commissioned a report to determine the extent of needed improvements to aging rail lines between Washington and Boston, and old Northeastern railroad terminals including Providence’s Union Station stood to benefit. In a preliminary sort of way, transportation policy thus seemed to be shifting in favor of older cities like Providence.

At the Rhode Island School of Design, professor of architecture Gerald Howes offered a course called, “High Speed Rail, Any Effect on Providence?” Howes and his students explored the idea of building a stronger regional mass-transit network centered on Downtown Providence and exploiting the many rail and bus lines that already converged there. This in turn led to Interface: Providence, a highly imaginative Downtown master plan premised on the idea that the spatial transformations brought on by the private automobile were the ruin of the once-teeming Downtown, which could only reclaim its importance to the region by supporting mass transit as the primary means of access to the district (see Figures 3 and 4).

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Figure 3.

Downtown Providence circa 1972. In those years, the district spanned roughly 350 acres and was bounded by the Rhode Island State House, the Moshassuck and Providence Rivers, and Interstates 195/95.Source: Gerald Howes et al., Interface: Providence (Providence: Rhode Island School of Design, 1974), 6, 10.

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Figure 4.

Physical changes proposed for the same area by Interface: Providence. As shown center right, the Providence and Woonasquatucket Rivers would be reclaimed from beneath an unsightly patchwork of asphalt decking and a landscaped cove would serve as the centerpiece of a new State House Park. In place of surface parking lots, which then occupied sixty acres of central business district (CBD) land, the plan proposed the creation of riverwalks and small pockets of greensapce throughout the CBD. Many of the plan’s design features were recycled into later plans and projects, most notably the River Relocation/Memorial Blvd. Extension projects (1984–1993), which exhumed and rerouted two-thirds of a mile of waterways and installed grade-separated pedestrian walkways along their banks, as well as installing a ceremonious cove known as Waterplace Park. Public access to the waterfront was further extended by the I-195 Relocation Project (2001–present), which moved the junction of Interstates 95 and 195 away from the densely built core and reconnected Downtown to the historic Jewelry District. Source: Gerald Howes et al., Interface: Providence (Providence: Rhode Island School of Design, 1974), 6, 10.

A challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Arts financed publication of the plan, which met the criteria of “highlighting urban design and intermodal transportation strategies.” Matching funds came from the newly formed Providence Foundation (a nonprofit organization that would prove crucial to the advancement of Downtown projects in the years to follow), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Urban Systems Laboratory provided technical support. ¹³

National concerns set the tone of the work. As the plan introduction stated:

This study will be published in February 1974, in the middle of the first winter of the officially declared ‘Energy Crisis.’ Those of us who have been interested in cities and the accessibility of their centers have long been aware of the irrational use of energy involved by employing the automobile as the predominant, and, in some cases, the sole method of access to and within cities …. The problem of transportation and the problems of energy consumption, in the case of serving our cities, are one and the same—solve one rationally, and the one solves the other.

Howes and class delighted that “Providence has retained a clarity and comprehensibility of scale in its center which resembles the walled cities of medieval Europe.” ¹⁴ They suggested that Downtown Providence was the ideal size to serve as a regionally central public space, thanks to its historically determined compactness, and perfectly situated to again function as a metropolitan transit hub.

To be sure, Interface represented a radical departure from the planning prescriptions of Downtown 1970 (published in 1961), but it recycled several concepts from the old plan in spite of itself. Like Downtown 1970, Interface recommended ring roads on the Downtown periphery and high-capacity parking garages near highway off-ramps, reasoning that such measures would protect the CBD from auto-traffic and the correlative demand for ever-more surface parking. The ring roads were prescribed in both the old plan and the new for the sake of “routing all vehicular traffic to the outside of the district and giving the inside to people.” ¹⁵ Both plans likewise recommended the construction of several municipal garages along the periphery of Downtown to capture automobile traffic from highway off-ramps.

Downtown 1970 proposed converting the retail-dominated Westminster Street into a pedestrian mall. ¹⁶ That goal was partially achieved in 1964, when the street was closed to cars from Snow to Dorrance Street. Interface took the pedestrian mall concept further by leaps and bounds, recommending that the entire Downtown core be made an autorestricted zone. At the time, about 41 percent of the 350-acre greater Downtown was consumed by roads, parking lots, and garages—but no one thought it possible to reclaim that space for “supporting commerce, living, and services,” because middle-class workers commuted by car and mass transit was no longer viable (see Figure 5). ¹⁷

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Figure 5.

Lower Weybosset Street circa 1976, with Grace Episcopal Church spire behind. By this time, as noted by the Interface team, sixty acres of the central business district’s 350 acres were devoted to automobile parking. Source: Jay Boersma, Providence, Rhode Island in 1976 (Jay Boersma) and re-Vision: photography by Jay Boersma, accessed June 15, 2015, http://www.re-vision.com/photography/providence1976/intro.html#.VYGno_lVhHw.

Downtown 1970 noted approvingly in 1961, that Downtown was becoming a “visibly bounded entity,” thanks in large part to highway construction on all sides, as well as the waterways and hills that marked its northern and eastern borders. Interface also saw opportunity in these physical boundaries, including the highways, arguing that under the right conditions, their bounding effect might induce the higher densities necessary for Downtown to thrive.

The greatest point of departure between the old plan and the new plan was their opposing views on the role of mass transit in the city’s future. Based on emergent postwar trends, Downtown 1970 assumed a continued rise in private car use and planned accordingly. Hardly optimistic about the flagging passenger rail industry, it proposed to demolish Union Station and move the tracks away from the CBD to a site farther north.

In contrast, the 1974 plan thought “the delights and variety of city life” could only be supported in hand with mass transit. ¹⁸ With this in mind, it made a goal of reclaiming the space of the city center from the automobile for more intensive uses as well as for small public parks. Likewise, regional mass transit needed a central hub, and the plan suggested that Downtown’s Union Station could again serve that purpose well. Interface proposed that the five-building 1898 terminal be restored and upgraded to handle bus and commuter-rail traffic as well as indoor retail. Bailey wrote for the Journal in 1973;

If any one proposal is key to the RISD plan, it is the need to keep Union Station where it is, and expand it into a multi-system terminal. By fortunate historic accident, the RISD planners say, Union Station is just the right size and in just the right place to make a coordinated transit system successful. ¹⁹

The other essential, and novel, feature of Interface was its “startling emphasis of Providence’s waterway system as a central, orienting Downtown spatial element.” ²¹ The plan declared:

Of the potential civic amenities in the Downtown core, Providence’s rivers are the greatest. Indeed, it is difficult to think of a single successful city in the world which is not a port city or does not have a river running through it. ²²

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Figure 6.

An artist’s rendering of the Interface vision for Downtown renewal. The view is looking southwest across the Providence River from Market Square, an eighteenth-century center of maritime trade at the base of College Hill. In the 1970s, this stretch of the river was buried beneath “the world’s widest bridge” (so-called by the Guinness Book of World Records in 1980), an unsightly patchwork of asphalt covering 1,147 feet of badly polluted water. The granite column pictured to the left (since relocated) was a World War I memorial encircled by a perilous rotary known to locals as “suicide circle.” Source: Gerald Howes et al., Interface: Providence (Providence: Rhode Island School of Design, 1974), 65.

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Figure 7.

From the pages of Interface. Facing southeast, this sketch also imagines the Providence River exhumed from beneath its old decking. In place of the failed rotary, a pedestrian bridge surrounded by greenspace connects Downtown to College Hill. This feature of the plan did indeed come to pass in slightly modified form: between 1987 and 1996, William Warner’s River Relocation Project moved the war memorial to a new public park, demolished the rotary, and replaced the old bridge decking with a much-acclaimed public riverwalk. Source: Gerald Howes et al., Interface: Providence (Providence: Rhode Island School of Design, 1974), 69.

The plan also called for an interpretive restoration of the Cove Basin, a nineteenth-century public park surrounding a circular inlet. The Cove was lost to rail yard expansion as the city’s economy shifted to inland manufacturing and commerce, but the plan insisted that the defunct Cove held “an important place in the history of the city which should be preserved.” In the plan vision, the new cove would serve as the centerpiece of a proposed urban park extending from the State House lawn to the elevated track line (see Figures 8 and 9). ²³

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Figure 8.

Looking west toward the Financial District (the State House would be just behind). In the 1970s, the land represented in this sketch was occupied by surface parking, but the Interface team proposed a public park featuring a rebuilt cove. Following this image in the pages of the plan is text that reads, “What holds us back: fear of expenditures to be made? Apathy and disbelief? Numbing of the memory of what a city can be? Where is the little courage that allows so many of us yearly to fly to other areas to see and enjoy these very things that could be available here?”Source: Gerald Howes et al., Interface: Providence (Providence: Rhode Island School of Design, 1974), 67–68.

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Figure 9.

The Interface vision of a rebuilt cove and public park between the State House and Union Station. Middle ground is shown an elevated rail line then known as “the Chinese wall,” which was demolished between 1984 and 1986 when the Federal Rail Administration rebuilt the Northeast Corridor tracks a half kilometer north. Source: Paul Bietz and Gerald Howes, “Interface: Providence Booklet,” Rhode Island Council for the Humanities 40th Anniversary Digital Archives, accessed June 17, 2015, http://rich40.omeka.net/items/show/7.

In sum, Interface called for the recentralization of metropolitan growth, arguing that new development should be promoted along the radial corridors of existing mass transit lines, instead of claiming more farmland and forest along new exurban roads. Interface envisioned Downtown Providence as the reborn center of this bounded metropolis, and argued that the district could only prosper if freed from the spatial demands of private cars:

As soon as the streets of Providence are freed of the automobile by the substitution of a balanced interfacing transportation network …. Within the street pattern itself, transformations may be wrought by developing those areas vacated by the automobile …. New values of city life will be sought; and their symbols, in the form of spaces, will be created. ²⁴

The new plan also challenged the prevailing practice of functional separation. Instead of zoning the CBD “functions” into separate districts as postwar policy did—that is, putting offices in one place and apartments in another—Interface advocated for mixed-use zoning and intrazonal porosity as defining features of the human-scaled city.

Thus, the vision of Interface might be read as a coordinated reclamation of the human scale of the prewar built environment against the city-killing effects of Rhode Island’s postwar sprawl—and a return to the body as the primary metric of physical planning. With these principles at work, the plan declared:

A vocabulary of experiences will thus be created, and joy of use will be re-established …. New values of city life will be sought; and their symbols, in the form of spaces, will be created. Human movement by foot will be re-established and with it all the nuances and subtleties that are contained therein. The acts of strolling, walking, running, standing to talk, standing to stare, sitting to eat, to drink, to read, to love, will demand spaces to reflect their many moods. ²⁹

Thirty-five years later, it seemed that “modern societies abruptly lost their power to blow away the past.” ³³ Whether in the neighborhoods of Providence, the South Bronx, or Detroit, the half-built “super city of the automobile age” (as Downtown 1970 wishfully rebranded Providence in 1961) was deserted and broke, its skylines lit by nightly tenement fires. And the Futurama vision, though institutionally dominant still, had lost its power to enchant in the wake of both urban renewal’s failures and suburbia’s cultural vapidity. ³⁴ Marshall Berman wrote:

… during the spectacular boom that followed the second World War, the central symbol [of modernity] was the federal highway system, in which the driver could go from coast to coast without encountering any traffic lights at all. But the modern societies of the seventies were forced to live in the shadow of the speed limit and the stop sign. In these years of reduced mobility, modern men and women everywhere had to think deeply about how far and in what directions they wanted to go, and to search for new media in which they could move. It is out of this process of thought and searching—a process that has only just begun—that the modernisms of the 1970s have come. ³⁵

The authors drew inspiration from the bustling and compact metropolis of the prewar past. They wanted to recapture the spontaneity and “variety of city life” that urbanists like Jane Jacobs saw in older inner-city neighborhoods and celebrated. And though for Howes, like others, nostalgia may have fermented these vanishing city streets into places half-mythical, something essential to the viability of civic life was indeed lost during Rhode Island’s postwar spatial metamorphosis. ³⁶ Against the deadening effects of urban renewal, road building, and the most insipid forms of modernism, Interface thus hoped to create the conditions under which “the population is freed once more to use its energy ingeniously.” In other words, it prescribed a different role for planning—not to define and control the city’s development, but to make the city functional and attractive for people, any and all people, who through occupation could define it for themselves.

Conversely, as a master plan, Interface recognized its own effective limits, and the limits of planning generally—namely, that plans could not unbraid the accumulated and thickly interwoven qualities, forms, and functions of urban space without the risk of their dissipation. Inevitably, drastic intervention in one realm—as for example with “slum clearance,” functional zoning or expressway building—brought unintended consequences in other realms, and schemes to reinvent the city in one swoop were bound to fail. As the best of postmodernist urbanism understood, plans were simply too brittle, too thin, and necessarily too limited to account for all the complexities of real life. What planning could do, and do well, was to promote a humane and democratic city center. In the case of Interface, this meant improving access through mass transit and promoting civic culture through the provision of public space. ³⁷ In this sense, the plan was a call to open the project of city building—or placemaking, as it were—to ordinary people and informal processes once again. The plan thus embodied Jacobs’ idea that “The main responsibility of city planning and design should be to develop, insofar as public policy and action can do so, cities that are congenial places for this great range of unofficial plans, ideas, and opportunities to flourish.” ³⁸

For all that, Interface was a policy prescription and bound to the basic conventions of urban planning practice as such. Alongside poetic descriptions of the city as a spatial garment “ever changing under the changing light of day,” the plan referred to pedestrian movement as a “system” and defaulted to highly simplified visual models as its main discursive tools. This apparent paradox gives the text an odd flavor—and with these two ways of approaching the subject constantly interposed—one embodied, fluid, and multisensory, the other alienated, out of time, and purely visual—it seems as if Interface were rebelling against its own methodology. This may have been owing to the influence of the MIT Urban Systems Laboratory, which contributed at Howes’ request a “hard professional critique” in line with professional practices. ³⁹ Either way, as a cultural artifact, the internally conflicted plan was one register of the tensions emergent between the deepening alienation of mind and body (through postwar technologies of administration and “the reductionism to which knowledge is prone”) on the one hand, and the renewed primacy of the embodied subject—in the realms of art, architecture, and political discourse—on the other. ⁴⁰

Five-Year Outcomes

Interface began as class project, but as it took shape, professor Gerald Howes came to believe that it was “a demonstrable framework” for real Downtown renewal, and he advocated with passion for its official adoption. In May 1973, he presented the plan in slide-show format to the Chamber of Commerce, the Statewide Planning Council, and the RI Department of Transportation. Reactions were mixed; state planning chief Daniel W. Varin said that “In general, I’d be in favor of this plan.” But Mayor Doorley was characteristically skeptical, and Director of Providence Planning Vincent Pallozzi was “very, very pessimistic” about funding. Pallozzi also disliked the key proposal for an intermodal Union Station, preferring to see the tracks relocated farther north as Downtown 1970 proposed. ⁴¹

One year after Howes’ presentation, the city was engaged in a hotly contested mayoral election, in which federal mob prosecutor Vincent “Buddy” Cianci, running as a Republican, challenged Democratic incumbent Joe Doorley. The problem of what to do with the ailing Downtown was a central issue, and the thirty-three-year-old Cianci adopted Interface as his Downtown renewal platform. Against the odds, Cianci won the election and brought new attention as mayor to CBD growth and preservation. Over the course of his first two terms, Cianci directed city and federal money to Downtown improvements and advocated for several major projects as discussed below. ⁴² Years later, he credited Interface with inspiring his Downtown advocacy, calling it “the seed that would grow into a new city.” His enthusiasm was shared by others active in the city’s Downtown “renaissance” as well. ⁴³

Douglas Riggs wrote that Interface had “an exhilarating three-year run.” ⁴⁴ Following the plan’s publication and Professor Howes’ spirited promotion of its vision, there were several coordinated efforts to reverse Downtown’s decline. Instrumental in many of these was the Providence Foundation, a nonprofit group formed by Downtown business leaders who helped to fund the Interface project. The foundation made its goal to “create, plan, and facilitate feasible Downtown development projects which can then be implemented by others.” In that capacity, some of its earliest successes included bringing the state court complex Downtown, rehabilitating the Ocean State Theater, and commissioning the Capital Center Plan of 1979. ⁴⁵

Cianci believed that “for Providence, our history was our future,” and indeed, Downtown advocacy was nearly synonymous with historic preservation in the late seventies. ⁴⁶ After years of icy relations between the Providence Preservation Society (PPS) and city officials, Cianci reached out to the PPS chairwoman, Antoinette Downing, within a week of taking office and partnered with the society to save the century-old city hall from pending demolition. ⁴⁷ Later, with funds from the Mayor’s Office of Community Development, the city and the Providence Foundation helped to save the Westminster Arcade of 1828, now the only remaining structure of its kind in the United States. ⁴⁸

Perhaps the most important project of the decade, and a symbolic turning point for the CBD, was the Biltmore Hotel redevelopment of 1979. Situated between City Hall and Union Station, the Biltmore is an elegant redbrick neo-Federal high-rise built in 1922 by the Providence Chamber of Commerce. For years, the hotel served as a hugely popular gathering place and a grand point of entry for visitors. ⁴⁹ By the 1970s, however, the Biltmore had lost its cosmopolitan aura, and its owners found themselves deeply in the red. The landmark building finally closed its doors in 1975 after the Providence Gas Company turned off service for nonpayment. ⁵⁰

The shuttered Biltmore, looming between City Hall and Union Station, was a spectacular symbol of the urban economy’s collapse. Fortunately for the Downtown, it did not remain so for long, as city elites concerned about the CBD’s future rallied to save the hotel. Soon after its closure, several companies including the Providence Journal, the Outlet Company, and the Textron Company formed a private consortium called The Business Development Company of Rhode Island, which then bought the building and negotiated a ten-year tax abatement with the city. ⁵¹ The hotel reopened in 1979 after extensive renovations, this time with an illuminated glass elevator built into the wall of the eighteen-story facade.

As the Biltmore project attests to, part of the legacy of Interface, and of the era that followed it, was a renewed culture of cooperation between public and private stakeholders, who pooled knowledge and resources to achieve otherwise cost-prohibitive goals. For better or worse, public–private partnerships have since been crucial to several major redevelopment projects in the city. With this in mind, Outlet Company CEO and then Rhode Island governor, Bruce Sundlun, remarked that “In retrospect, 1974 appears to be the turning point in bringing about the partnership aspect of Providence’s progress.” ⁵²

Howes believed that radical changes in the realm of transportation policy were needed to reanimate the Downtown and to foster sustainable regional growth. He hoped that through the adoption of Interface, the Downtown would be “freed of the automobile by the substitution of a balanced interfacing transportation network.” ⁵³ And though the plan was highly regarded by Downtown advocates for decades after, its raison d’être—the revival and expansion of regional mass transit—was quickly lost in the drift of political and fiscal tides. To be sure, the new guard of Downtown advocates praised Interface highly, but with more of a focus on its design aesthetic than its transportation policy prescriptions. ⁵⁴ Despite the several preservation and renewal efforts described above, the total vision of a car-free city center serving as the hub of a regional transportation network never leapt from dream to reality. Instead, the primacy of the private automobile and the perceived need for abundant inner-city parking went unchallenged, and even today it remains the dominant paradigm. ⁵⁵

Be that as it may, Interface clearly inspired a revaluation of Downtown—not as a failed real estate market or “obsolescent nucleus” but as a uniquely dynamic and irreplaceable center of public life. The plan may have failed on its own terms and in its own time, but it “put redevelopment on the public agenda” after a decade of entrenched cynicism, and several major planning efforts since have been driven by the idea of “turning Providence into a walking city” with Downtown as its center. ⁵⁶