Up against the wall
“New Galaxies,’’ from the self-portrait series Dreaming Gave Us Wings,’’ 2017—present, by Sophia Nahli Allison, at the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence.
Caitlin Faulds: Ammonia from agriculture threatens bays
— Photo by Ben Salter
From ecoRI News (ecori.org)
National regulations are needed to limit harmful ammonia emissions from agricultural sources and prevent knock-on soil and water degradation in sensitive estuary ecosystems, such as Narragansett Bay, according to a study recently published in Atmospheric Environment.
The study, completed by a team at Brown University’s Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, analyzed wet-deposited ammonium, or ammonium incorporated into rainfall, in Providence in 2018 to find that agricultural rather than city-based sources are most likely to blame for recent increases in urban ammonium levels.
“The ammonium we measured in precipitation has a significant non-local contribution, which does seem to be transported from what we believe to be agricultural regions,” said lead author Emmie Le Roy, who conducted research as a Brown University undergraduate and will begin a Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this fall.
The levels of nitrate deposition, which come from nitroge-oxide emissions, in the Narragansett Bay area have decreased substantially in the past decades because of the federal Clean Air Act and other regulatory changes, according to co-author Emily Joyce, who published another paper on the topic last year.
Improvements in wastewater-treatment systems, too, have reduced nitrogen input to Narragansett Bay by nearly 60 percent, Joyce said. “That was definitely what they needed to focus on” to get a handle on the problem then, she said, but there’s been “nothing done to atmospheric deposition.”
Joyce’s atmospheric measurements, the first done in 30 years, showed ammonium deposition had risen to six times the amount in 1990.
“If there’s more ammonium, then there’s going to be more algae blooms and fish kills,” Joyce said. “And so from a water quality standpoint … you really want to figure out where that’s coming from and try to mitigate that.”
But to mitigate ammonium, regulators need to know where to focus their efforts — and this is what Le Roy’s research sought to address.
Her team studied the stable isotopes, or chemical signatures, of ammonium in more than 200 precipitation samples collected at Brown University from January to November 2018 to determine where the emissions came from.
“You can think of them as being sort of like a fingerprint that is distinct for different source types,” Le Roy said of the isotopic signatures.
Ammonium from close-range, urban sources, namely vehicle emissions and fossil-fuel combustion, would typically have a higher isotopic composition, according to Wendell Walters, Brown University associate professor and a co-author of the study. While ammonium from agricultural sources, including animal waste and fertilizer, would have a lower isotopic composition.
By scouring weather station databases, the team also found storm systems that developed over land carried significantly more ammonium than those originating over marine or coastal areas. This data supported long-range agricultural sources as the origin of ammonium deposits.
During the past seven decades global emissions of ammonia have more than doubled from 23 to 60 teragrams annually — one teragram is a billion kilograms or 2.2 billion pounds. Researchers say the increase is tied to rising ammonia emissions from industrial agriculture. The ability to grow crops depends on nitrogen, a critical plant nutrient. However, an overabundance of nitrogen, in animal waste and in excess fertilizer, can turn into gaseous ammonia.
When ammonia enters the atmosphere, it combines with pollutants — mainly nitrogen and sulfuric-oxide compounds produced by the burning of fossil fuels — to form fine-particle air pollution that can travel long distances.
Though the exact location is hard to pinpoint, Le Roy said wind patterns indicate that ammonium emissions are showering down onto Providence from states as far away as California, or even across the Pacific Ocean.
The wet deposition of ammonium is a global-scale problem, Walters said, and one that needs regulatory attention to prevent further acidification and eutrophication of sensitive ecosystems.
“It’s not something that the city of Providence could tackle on their own since there’s this large intrastate transport phenomenon occurring with the deposition,” Walters said. “But we may need to address the importance of incorporating ammonia regulations in the future — and that would have to be more at the national scale.”...
Caitlin Faulds is an ecoRI News journalist.
William Morgan: Joy and sadness with an old knife
My wife, Carolyn, is a potter and a gourmet cook. She depends upon and thus respects her tools, but they are to be used, not objects to be displayed. The tarnished copper pots hanging in a row from a beam above the stove are not there to impress; once in a while I might polish one to a shine, but the pots are there to be worked. The knives on Carolyn's wall rack are beautiful to her. She recalls every country auction where she acquired each pitted and stained Sabatier, and knows how each knick was earned. But these blades still need to be used to slice and chop; they are there to serve.
There is one tool, however, that does not get used. Framed, it occupies a place of honor on our kitchen wall. When we first found this in an antique shop on Wickenden Street in Providence we thought that it was a super-realist still life of a knife. The dealer had no recollection of where he picked this up, but it has a framer's sticker from Springfield, Mass.
A faded typewritten note in Hebrew taped to the back revealed something of its history. Two Hebrew-literate friends gave us this translation:
With G-d's Help.
Tuesday - 8th of the Hebrew Month of Av 1948.
To my esteemed and dearest Avraham May Your Light Shine
Shalom & Blessings
This knife is a gift from your father, of Blessed Memory, that I received from him at the time of my completion of Rabbinic Ordination.
Your father, of Blessed Memory, used this knife to slaughter poultry at the office of slaughter on 19 Franziskaner Street that he inherited from your grandfather Reb Gershon (of Blessed Memory).
And at the opportunity of this pleasant visit it seemed fitting to give this present to one with a delicate and appreciative palate - that it should be your inheritance from your father of Blessed Memory, and that this knife is a symbol of a bygone and disappeared era.
With a warm handshake of appreciation and to your refined wife regards and all the best
Missing you and your family
Where was Franziskaner Street? There may have been hundreds of streets by that name in Germany and parts of Poland and the Ukraine. (Franziskaner is a German word referring to Franciscan monks.) Did Avraham's father escape and did he grab the poultry knife as storm troopers pounded on his father's door? Three years after the concentration camps were liberated, and in the year of the creation of the State of Israel, the knife came to the grandson, now safely in America.
There is both joy and sadness in the knife's coming into our house. How could this tool be anything other than a treasure to be venerated? What descendant could not hold on to this link to past? Yet families can fade into oblivion, while the artifacts of their lives end up in auctions and yard sales. So often the excitement of discovering a discarded gem is tempered by the knowledge that it may well mark the end of a family line.
Reb Gershon's blade for butchering poultry has a special place just above our kitchen table, where we will remember him. Growing up in in rural North Carolina, my wife vividly recalls her mother dispatching chickens with a similar tool. So the knife is a special bond between the butcher shop on Franziskaner Street and our kitchen.
William Morgan, based in Providence, writes on architecture and other topics, mostly design-related.
A day on the water
“Bait, Rope and Knife (The Duck Boat),’’ by Stella Ebner, at Cade Tompkins Projects, Providence
Where we’re going
Work of Marcella Green in her show “Points of Impermanence,’’ through June 20 at Periphery Space @ Paper Nautilus, Providence
The gallery writes:
“In this thought-provoking show, Marcella Green uses photographs and text to produce a visual narrative that explores her thoughts about death. The work is contemplative, melancholy and transformative. The result of Green’s meditations is usually in the form of a book or zine, and she has produced several books as artworks; Before Waking and As of Late Marcella Green (published by Oranbeg Press, 2018) are the most recent indexes. For this show, she will use the wall as if it were pages to display text and photographs and, in doing so, tell a story about the power of creativity and a life revealed through photographs as artifacts.
The greatest need for new Amtrak money
Sections owned by Amtrak on the Northeast Corridor are in red; sections with commuter service are highlighted in blue.
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Politicians across America, even anti-“Big Government” right-wingers in rural states, want Amtrak service, some of it as local pork, however lightly it is used. But as Congress considers President Biden’s almost $2 trillion infrastructure program, and the $80 billion in it for Amtrak, they should, but might not, set aside the lion’s share of the money to improve the Northeast Corridor, where it’s by far the most needed.
That where the nation’s thickest population density is; such density is very important in justifying rail passenger service. And the great popularity of the service, between Boston and Washington, D.C., has been demonstrated for decades.
The Northeast Corridor line plays an important part in lubricating the economy of this immensely important part of America, which includes both its political (Washington) and financial (New York) capitals as well as crucial technological, education and health-care infrastructure. Amtrak service there should be expanded, for economic and environmental reasons.
Amtrak owns and controls some 80 percent of the Corridor, which means, importantly, that it has considerable control over how the few freight trains use it on short sections. New York State, Connecticut and Massachusetts, for their part, own relatively sections of the route. But Amtrak is in the driver’s seat, as it should be. That isn’t to say that at least one more set of tracks, for freight and passengers, hasn’t long been needed.
You must expect that if all or part of the Biden infrastructure package is approved, that Amtrak service to thinly populated and economically insignificant parts of the country will be preserved or even expanded with lightly used long-haul trains (much beloved by train romantics), especially in states with powerful members of Congress. So be it in legislative sausage-making, but the core need for the benefit of the entire country is the Northeast Corridor.
xxx
Note the importance of Providence’s Amtrak stop not only for Rhode Islanders but for the many people from southeastern Massachusetts and eastern Connecticut who also use it, for Amtrak and MBTA service.
An Amtrak Acela train in Old Saybook, Conn.
Time servers and devoted teachers
Providence’s Classical High School
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
The endless standoff between the Providence Teachers Union and would-be reformers in state government reminds me again of why I don’t like public-employee unions. They become political organizations and rigid economic- interest groups, rife with conflicts of interest involving elected officials (to whom they can give or withhold campaign cash). That isn’t to say that teachers shouldn’t have rigorous Civil Service-style protections.
For some reason, the latest standoff reminds me of when I sat right behind two Providence teachers on a train coming back from New York 30 years ago. All that the duo, who looked about 40 years old, talked about were their pensions. Of course, there are many devoted teachers in the Providence public schools (which my kids attended) but also too many time servers like my fellow passengers that day.
Promote what you're good at
Dome Inside Boston’s Quincy Market on a pre-pandemic day, serving as as the seating area for the food court at the complex. The sign boards of old businesses decorate the walls.
— Photo by Jyothis
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
It’s happy news that Marsella Development Corp. wants to establish a (Boston’s) Quincy Market/Faneuil Hall complex-style food hall on the ground floor of One Union Station in Providence, in the space that, pre-pandemic, housed the high-end Capital Grille and Bar Louie. With COVID-19 having probably permanently reduced the number of people, often armed with expense accounts, who work in downtowns, or in offices in general, the outlook for establishments like the Capital Grille doesn’t look all that good.
But the plan to put in that space a dozen restaurants of varying cuisines and price ranges makes a lot of sense for a state with such a rich food culture. It could become a destination for many people, including tourists, especially in synergy with Waterplace Park and WaterFire. The food hall would presumably feature a lot of local food, such as produce from local farms and fish. It could become quite a destination.
Grace Kelly: Difficult tradeoffs between woodland preservation and solar-energy developers
Woodland ecosystem
— Photo by Dustin M. Ramsey
Solar array in the woods of Canterbury, N.H.
From ecoRI News (ecori.org)
The siting of renewable energy is a complex issue that dances around property rights, tax revenues, the carrying capacity of energy infrastructure, smart grids, energy storage and environmental protections.
Rhode Island began grappling with the siting of utility-scale renewable energy, most notably ground-mounted solar arrays, about five years ago, when developers started to take advantage of the state’s inability to direct such projects to already developed areas. Instead, they bought or leased less-expensive rural open space upon which to erect renewable-energy systems.
The state's green-space energy rush began in earnest in March 2017, when then-Gov. Gina Raimondo signed an unenforceable executive order that encouraged the state to attain 1,000 megawatts of renewable energy by 2020.
The governor’s order, which gave little thought or guidance to where solar installations should be sited, increased the number of renewable-energy applications being filed in cities and towns that hadn’t yet adopted regulations that adequately addressed the impacts of this fast-growing industry.
The solar energy rush overwhelmed municipal officials and volunteer board members — many of whom don’t have the expertise and/or lack a statewide perspective regarding this issue — were caught flat-footed when confronted with an abundance of utility-scale energy development.
While the past five years have given Rhode Island more megawatts of cleaner energy, the acres of installed ground-mounted solar have further fragmented and stressed Rhode Island’s forests.
The covering of open space with solar panels comes with a cost, even it reduces dependence on fossil fuels and generates tax revenue.
“It’s essential that we safeguard and enhance the capacity of forest natural lands to absorb and store carbon,” Scott Millar, senior policy analyst for Providence-based Grow Smart Rhode Island, said during a recent presentation on forest conservation and solar reform.
He noted that both Rhode Island and Massachusetts have the opportunity to become national leaders in balancing two of “our best weapons in the fight against climate change: forests and renewable energy.”
The former Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management staffer moderated a March 17 discussion featuring various experts in the forest conservation and solar realm in New England, each bringing their own perspective and data on how forest conservation and solar could work together.
Part of this relationship, they said, centers around the idea that promoting solar shouldn’t mean clear-cutting valuable forestland. In fact, it can be easily argued that it’s detrimental to the very principals that have spurred on solar use: reducing carbon emissions.
“We need to conserve forests and natural areas to absorb and store carbon,” Millar said. “It has been well documented that forests and natural areas are the most practical and cost-effective tool. The crucial next step is to reform our renewable-energy programs to provide incentives to accelerate solar in developed and disturbed locations, such as rooftops, landfills, brownfields, and parking lots, and stop any incentives that are encouraging the clearing of forests and natural areas to make way for solar development.”
He said the fight against the changing climate is like a three-legged stool, where all the legs are needed: cut greenhouse-gas emissions as quickly as possible; conserve energy and use it efficiently to reduce demand; and conserve forests to absorb and store carbon.
Frank Lowenstein, chief operating officer at the New England Forestry Foundation (NEFF), sees a future where forests are given value both as beautiful natural places and as natural carbon sequesters. He also sees this as indispensable to reducing carbon emissions.
“We need to get down to about half of our current emissions over the next ten years,” he said. “That’s a very big challenge. You need to get rid of 187 gigatons of expected emissions over the course of 10 years.”
To promote healthy forests and therefore help reduce human-generated carbon emissions, Lowenstein promoted the idea of creating incentives for forest landowners to practice what NEFF calls “exemplary forestry.”
The NEFF Web site defines exemplary forestry as “a forest management approach … that prioritizes forests’ long-term health and outlines the highest standards of sustainability currently available to the region’s forest owners.”
In addition to protecting forests and their ecosystem services, NEFF noted that exemplary forestry is designed to accomplish three goals: enhance the role forests can play in mitigating climate change; improve wildlife habitat; and grow more and better-quality wood.”
The third goal — grow more and better-quality wood as a building product — is an interesting part of this complex equation. This goal dovetails with the idea that NEFF promotes of using naturally carbon sequestering materials, e.g. timber, to build carbon-storing structures and limit the use of emissions-heavy steel and concrete.
“It’s one way to increase the productivity of the forest, the actual amount of carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere per acre per year,” Lowenstein said. “We can basically double the average productivity per acre per year of New England forests. That lets you do two things: it lets you store more carbon in living forest … and it also lets you continue to harvest wood to create wood products and long-lived wood products like wood flooring, wood paneling, tables, and wood buildings that all keep carbon dioxide locked out of the atmosphere.”
A local example of this wood-centric construction is the Rhode Island School of Design’s recently completed North Hall, a steel-frame and cross-laminated timber (CLT) hybrid.
CLT is also known as mass timber and is created by gluing milled planks together and layering them to create a sturdy building material.
While the use of CLT is more popular in Europe and gaining some traction at more sustainably minded entities in the United States, tied up in this idea of using carbon-storing wood — and better preserving forests in general — is one word: incentive. And this incentive to preserve forests and use wood to build is linked to solar development.
David Milner, CEO and founder of Warren-based NuGen Capital, discussed how solar developers are often incentivized to clear-cut forests for solar installation because of the difficulty and high costs of siting solar on developed areas and disturbed locations.
Last year his company started construction of a 6.76-megawatt rooftop solar system on a 560,000-square-foot warehouse in East Greenwich. The project is comprised of more than 16,000 solar panels.
“I believe that everyone actually does care where solar is sited,” Milner said. “They just have a different opinion on where those trade-offs should be. I wanted to bring you into some of the fundamental economic reality that comes with rooftops and landfills and solar projects. The reality is rooftops, landfills are much riskier and more expensive than an open field or forestland. So that’s where people want to go.”
He went on to explain how some investors and banks won’t fund projects unless they are directly on the ground, because of inherent risks with elevated solar installations.
“Let’s take roofs for example,” Milner said. “When roofs leak, it’s a serious problem, not so much for the ground. Roofs have to be replaced. So, everybody, by and large, for large-scale solar wants to go to the ground. It’s also really hard to coordinate with the towns. Just last week I was reading about a western Massachusetts solar project that’s enormous, that’s going to clear forest, and the town can get 450 thousand dollars in tax revenue by allowing it to occur. That’s pretty tempting for some rural towns.”
Milner suggested that the only way to really promote sustainable solar siting is through incentives.
“We really do, I think, need to incentivize what we want to see,” he said. “We need to change the market dynamics and I think that’s coming.”
On the other side of incentives for preserving forests is the landowners who often sell or lease their property to solar developers since they see little money in the timber industry.
“This is particularly focused in the industrial forestlands of northern New England that are owned by individuals and companies largely for the financial benefits,” Lowenstein said. “They’re in it as a business proposition and right now they’re not getting paid for carbon in a simple enough way and a high enough value way.”
Lowenstein called for a few solutions that take incentive away from clear-cutting and put them into the sustainably sourced timber industry.
“First of all, no net loss of forest — part of that needs to be stopping incentivizing forest clearing — and increase incentives for solar in developed areas,” he said. “We also need more funding and support for forest conservation and improved management … we need to recognize that … just stopping harvest or reducing harvest, that may not do very much at all in part because wood, as I said earlier, substitutes for more carbon intensive materials like steel and concrete.”
This vision, if aligned with the needs of solar developers in making developed and disturbed locations more financially approachable and profitable, could lead to a symbiotic relationship that could change the world for the better, according to Lowenstein.
Grace Kelly is an ecoRI News reporter. EcoRI News editor Frank Carini contributed to this article.
Stop the ATV angst in Providence
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com.
It seems that Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza’s administration has been unwilling or unable, at least until recently, to strictly enforce laws against the use of ATV vehicles and dirt bikes on city streets, despite the very serious public-safety and quality-of-life issues such vehicles pose, especially given the arrogant, selfish and menacing irresponsibility of some of their riders. Indeed, the mayor has expressed an interest in legalizing their use on city streets, for those who would receive licenses and insurance for such use, although he has more recently back-tracked on that.
So, as a recent GoLocalProv.com article suggested, perhaps Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee should send in the State Police to arrest these riders. ATV’s and dirt bikes don’t belong on city streets.
To read the editorial, please hit this link.
Grace Kelly: North Atlantic Rail's vast initiative for our region
The seven-state initiative, with the six New England states and downstate New York, would be built in three phases.
— From North Atlantic Rail
From ecoRI News (ecori.org)
A group of transit professionals, activists, elected officials and organizations want the North Atlantic region to ride the rails into the future.
The North Atlantic Rail (NAR) initiative proposes connecting small and mid-sized urban centers throughout New England with a high-speed trunk line. It also calls for bolstering and connecting regional rail networks, paving the way for a cleaner, more equitable regional transportation system. The trunk line would operate at 200 mph, and regional and branch lines between 80 and 120.
The NAR initiative also includes building a 16-mile rail tunnel under Long Island Sound, connecting New York City to Boston, with stops in Connecticut and Providence, in a 100-minute ride. In Rhode Island, components include frequent high-speed rails from Kingston, T.F. Green International Airport and Providence to Boston.
The idea for a North Atlantic Rail network was born in 2004 as part of a University of Pennsylvania studio project headed by Robert Yaro, a planner and former president of the New York City-based Regional Plan Association.
“We looked at growth trends in the country and identified the emergence of what we call mega regions,” Yaro said. “And these places are all 300 to 600 miles across, so they’re too big to be easily traversed by automobile and too small to be easily, efficiently traversed by the airplane.”
Six years later, in 2010, another studio project was hosted after Amtrak came out with a proposal for a $50 billion project to reduce travel times between New York and Washington, D.C., by 15 minutes.
“We said, ‘That sounds like a lot of money for not a lot of benefit,’” Yaro recalled. “So we convened another studio … with some very talented professional engineering advisors … and we came up with a high-speed, world-class rail proposal for the Northeast.”
One person who attended the presentation was Joe Biden.
“Ten minutes into the presentation and Biden says ‘Goddamnit, I've been waiting for this for 30 years. Let's do it,’” Yaro said.
And now that Biden is president and pushing a $2 trillion sustainable infrastructure and clean energy plan, NAR is putting the pedal to the metal.
“We see this as a kind of once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get this thing done,” Yaro said. “The key to making ticket prices affordable is to have the federal government cover the capital cost. Until the Georgia Senate races were decided, everybody just kind of rolled their eyes when we said that, but now it's something that’s a very serious likelihood. It’s more than a possibility; it’s gonna happen.”
NAR steering committee members have estimated that the project would cost a total of $105 billion to design and build the top priority projects and trunk line.
The benefits of a high-speed rail go beyond interconnectedness, and NAR proponents believe that it would also stimulate the economy by creating jobs, result in the creation of more affordable housing, and promote environmentally friendlier transportation through electric trains.
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), rail travel has a “much lower carbon intensity” compared to other modes of transportation, such as air and car. IEA also notes that if intensive, aggressive rail transportation was implemented globally, carbon dioxide emissions could peak by the late 2030s.
“The next economy that wants to emerge by disrupting the carbon economy is a green economy,” said Christopher “Kip” Bergstrom, a project manager at the Connecticut Office of Policy and Management and member of the NAR steering committee. “Anything that carbonized is just a dead man walking.”
The NAR also promotes the idea that high-speed rail will create a more equitable society by allowing people to easily commute to work and by creating job opportunities and wealth redistribution within urban areas.
“The opportunity to reduce our carbon footprint, while simultaneously reducing income inequality, lies in re-localizing and shortening the chains of supply and distribution; and in building local wealth and redistributing it in a circular rather than extractive business model,” wrote Bergstrom in a white paper titled North Atlantic Rail: Building a Just and Green Economy.
The coronavirus pandemic has underscored a lot of these societal problems, making pushing this effort forward all the more urgent.
“I think it’s important to underscore, why now?” said John Flaherty, deputy director of Grow Smart Rhode Island, one of the NAR’s associated organizations. “This is about much more than improved mobility. It’s about an economic recovery, it’s about climate. In the Northeast 40 percent of the emissions are from the transportation sector … so unless we do something that’s bold and transformational, we’re never going to get our arms around that.”
Grace Kelly is an ecoRI News reporter.
Urban uplift
Downtown Providence in 1844
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Providence officials, aided by professional planners, are trying to envisage how to improve the city’s downtown by stitching it together more tightly after car-dependent, suburban impulses have tended to fragment it.
Manuel Cordero, co-founder of the nonprofit DownCity Design, said “The idea is to create spaces that are welcoming and vibrant, and to address some of the longstanding issues, such as lighting and accessibility, to create a better set of interconnected spaces for our downtown.’’
Of course, every city needs to try to implement the best design ideas to adjust to changing demographics, technology, architecture, engineering and economics. But that might be even trickier than usual now because of the uncertainties of COVID-19. How might the pandemic permanently change how we live in, work in and visit cities?
To read ecoRI News’s report on this, please hit this link
The new Amtrak train hall in the Pennsylvania Station complex.
— Photo by Jim.henderson
One very good piece of urban news, especially for those of us in the Northeast Corridor: A new, natural-light-filled train hall opened Friday in New York’s Penn Station complex. It has 92-foot-high ceilings and glass skylights and recalls the glorious masterpiece that was the Beaux-Arts Pennsylvania Station, opened in 1910 and torn down in ‘60’s. It was replaced by the hideous cavelike, dank, dark and overcrowded Penn Station that we all hate – the busiest train station in America.
The new hall is in the James A. Farley Post Office building, across Eighth Avenue from the main Penn Station, which is under Madison Square Garden.
The facility will only serve Amtrak and Long Island Railroad passengers, at least initially. Subway and other riders/victims must continue to use the old station. But more changes are planned in the passenger-rail complex – by far America’s busiest – in coming years.
What a nice way for New York City, which suffered much from the COVID catastrophe in 2020, to start the new year. And maybe it will inspire the political will to fix a lot more of America’s decayed transportation infrastructure. Big things can still be done, even in mostly gridlocked America, with strong and brave leadership.
The Yale architectural historian Vincent Scully (1920-2017) famously bemoaned the destruction of the 1910 Pennsylvania Station: “Through Pennsylvania Station one entered the city like a god. Perhaps it was really too much. One scuttles in now like a rat.”
Grace Kelly: The bumpy road to R.I.’s East Bay Bike Path
Facing south near the East Bay Bike Path's southern terminus, in Bristol
From ecoRI News (ecori.org)
“These days it’s hard to find someone who thinks creating the East Bay Bike Path was a foolish idea.” So begins a Providence Journal article written in 1999 by Sam Nitz, which chronicled the bike path’s beginnings and eventual completion.
The same could be said in 2020, a year when a pandemic forced people to get creative with their time. They took to the outdoors when the weather turned warm, with many dragging a set of wheels to a Rhode Island bike path that runs from Providence to Bristol.
I cruised along this path myself, dodging hand-holding couples, bold squirrels, and the occasional toddling roller-skater.
A map of the East Bay Bike Path from a 1984 pamphlet. Construction of the trail took place from 1987-92.
While looking at the path today might give the impression that it was a beloved idea all along, as Nitz noted in his article, “the path’s beginnings in the early 1980s were fraught with controversy and rancorous political debate.”
The 14.5-mile stretch of asphalt was hardly a shoo-in. In fact, it was met with raucous opposition, German shepherds, and even a letter to a high-level staffer of President Reagan begging for federal intervention.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
The story of the East Bay Bike Path starts with an old stretch of railroad that connected Providence to Bristol, with stops in Riverside and Warren and a connecting line that went to Fall River, Mass. It was a handsome railway, with postcards and old photos depicting almost modern-looking platforms and stations — one particular image of the rail near the future Squantum Association, a private club in East Providence, could be from the 2000s.
But as automobiles began to capture the American spirit, the railway slowly faded into disuse and the passenger line ended in 1938. In 1976, the State of Rhode Island acquired the right of way for the old Penn Central line, the section that ran from East Providence to Bristol.
It would also be automobiles that would inspire Bristol state Rep. Thomas Byrnes Jr. in the late 1970s, to lead the charge to create a bike path on the old Penn Central line.
“When I started at the State House in ’78, the oil shortage was … tough,” said Byrnes in a 2002 interview with his daughter Judith. “People were driving bombers around and they were having a hard time keeping their cars filled with gas. So, they were talking about looking into alternative means of transportation to cut our use of oil.”
And one idea that came up: bicycles.
In the ’70s, the United States experienced a bicycle boom, with some 64 million Americans using bicycles regularly. A 1971 article in Time magazine noted that America was having “the bicycles biggest wave of popularity in its 154-year history.”
So, at the time when Byrnes started thinking about alternative methods of transportation, bicycles were everywhere, and other states such as Maryland were starting to investigate turning old railways into bike trails.
In March 1980, Byrnes and Matthew Smith, who was the Rhode Island speaker of the House at the time, wrote a joint bill that called for a study of bicycling as an alternative form of transportation and as an energy saver. The idea of the East Bay Bike Path was born.
What happened next was years of pushing through heated resistance.
“There was a lot of opposition, a lot of opposition,” said Robert Weygand, who was the chairman of the East Providence Planning Board in the early ’80s, and who later went on to be a U.S. congressman and Rhode Island lieutenant governor. “In every community there were people that came out opposed to it.”
Weygand became involved in the project through his work on the East Providence Planning Board and later as part of a group called Friends of the Bike Path. He saw its creation as a way to help restore East Providence’s once-rich history of activities and attractions along the water.
“We heard about what Tom [Byrnes] had been proposing for a bicycle trail along the railroad tracks … and we were in East Providence, which had a long history of having amusement parks and various venues along the railroad tracks,” Weygand said. “So we were interested in trying to reinvigorate the idea of having activities along the waterfront, which had been abandoned for a very, very long time.”
The East Bay Bike Path had plenty of fierce opposition, but had the support of the Rhode Island Department of Transportation and its then-director Edward Wood.
The wheels were now set in motion, and in 1982, Gov. J. Joseph Garrahy and the Rhode Island Department of Transportation (DOT), which was then led by Edward Wood, who died this year, threw their support behind the project and hired an engineering firm to research feasibility and design.
“The biggest thing that really helped us along the way was governor Joe Garrahy … he really embraced it,” Weygand said. “And also, there was a fella that was the head of the Department of Transportation, Ed Wood.”
But though Wood and Garrahy supported the project, many in their own circles were firmly against it.
“Even Wood at DOT ran into opposition by his own staff,” Weygand said. “They wanted to preserve the East Bay railroad track system … potentially for freight traffic and rail traffic … so his own staff was fighting him because they thought, if we give up the railroad tracks, we'll never get them back.”
Meanwhile, Byrnes, Weygand, a man named George Redman — you’ll find his name and portrait on the section of the bike path that crosses Interstate 195’s Washington Bridge — and a group of others were busy fighting their own battle on the ground to win the people of the five municipalities over on the idea.
“We constantly met, talked about different opportunities, did public hearings and meetings … and we’d get together periodically to share war stories about what was going on,” said Weygand, with a chuckle. “There was some real opposition. We had a public hearing in 1983 at the Barrington YMCA, and people were yelling and screaming and swearing at us, saying that all the criminals from Providence would use this bike path to come down and steal things from their homes. It was terrible.”
One vivid memory Weygand has of the resistance was when he helped organize a walk of the proposed area to give people a feel for what it could be like.
“One of the things that happened that day that we had this walk was, we had about 50 or so people go along the path … and in notifying all of the abutting owners, one of the owners was Squantum Club,” Weygand recalled. “We had invited them to join us along the way, and when we got to the Squantum Club, the manager was there with German shepherds and cars to prevent us from passing anywhere near their property.”
James W. Nugent, who was a member of the Squantum Association at the time, even went as far as to write a letter to James A. Baker III, a friend of his who was the chief of staff of President Reagan.
“At a time when the nation is looking for ways to cut expenditures and increase income, I thought it appropriate to call to your attention an expenditure that to me, and to many residents of Rhode Island, seems almost frivolous,” Nugent’s letter reads. “When there is publicity about people going hungry and dangerous federal deficits, the logic of expanding over $1 million on a bicycle path escapes me — especially when so many people along the route of the path object strongly to it. They fear increased vandalism and housebreaks from the transient traffic when their properties become more easily accessible.”
Nugent goes on to ask Baker to sway the federal government to withhold funds for the project.
Though opposition was strong, there were supporters who should not be discounted. One of them was Barry Schiller, who was the on the transportation committee of the environmental group Ecology Action.
In a 1984 letter to Wood, Schiller wrote, “This should be an ideal bikeway, scenic, safe and relatively flat that will become the pride of the East Bay.”
Schiller’s words were prophetic in some ways. Instead of being a so-called crime highway, the East Bay Bike Path has become a place where friends and families gather and exercise. Instead of negatively affecting home values, living near the bike path is considered an asset. It’s also inspired other Rhode Island municipalities to build their own bike paths; there are eight today, according to DOT.
In the end, the proponents won out, and on May 22, 1986 ground was broken at Riverside Square, and the East Bay Bike Path became a reality.
“It seems like a long time ago, but it really wasn’t,” Weygand said. “It was absolutely wonderful, breaking ground and seeing it constructed.”
Construction took place from 1987-92, and today when Rhode Islanders cruise by on its blacktop, many are likely unaware of all it took for it to get done. But those who were there, those who helped push it through, they remember.
“Every time I ride the East Bay Bike Path, it gives me the inspiration to keep going, because I knew it took persistence in the face of strong opposition to get it done,” Schiller said. “It’s a lesson for all of us to not give up.”
Grace Kelly is an ecoRI News reporter.
It might go up after all
The controversial Hope Point Tower
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
I’m surprised to be saying this, but at this writing, it looks likely that a development group run by Jason Fane will build a $300 million, 46-story luxury residential lower, to be named Hope Point Tower, in Providence’s Route 195 relocation district. I’m surprised because I didn’t think that Mr. Fane would get the financing, especially when the pandemic makes downtown developments look like bad bets and Mr. Fane continues to face loud and well-organized opposition from some establishment groups.
Rhode Island Superior Court Judge Brian Stern recently okayed the project, ruling that the City Council was within its rights in approving it. Foes, including Mayor Jorge Elorza, will appeal to the state Supreme Court, but that seems very unlikely to succeed.
So what’s the economic rationale for continuing with this project in a time of pandemic and the deep recession it’s causing? I think it’s that even now, mid-size cities such as Providence with prestigious colleges and rich cities nearby -- in Providence’s case New York and Boston -- and in scenic areas, can look alluring. There would be stirring views from the upper stories of the Fane Tower, though, of course, its great height is what its foes would most hate about it – until, that is, they got used to it, if they ever do….
And COVID-19 has made big cities scary for many people, leading many affluent folks to seek to set up homes in less crowded places, even if they, too, are cities and even if some, like Providence, now have high COVID rates, too. And some of the units in the Fane tower would be bought or rented by the many very rich parents of students at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. And the pandemic will end, sometime in 2021.
Then there’s the prospect of hundreds of construction jobs at the Fane Tower – a great allure for the state’s politically powerful construction unions.
So this huge project remains very much alive, as Mr. Fane looks to what Providence might look like after the pandemic.
William Morgan: For creative responses to the graffiti challenge
After a seemingly endless rampage of city-blighting graffiti, the mayor recently announced that the police had finally identified and charged the most notorious tagger who "soiled hundreds of walls and buildings." The alleged culprit could get two years in prison for defacing property, "which had to be cleaned using public funds."
Dumpster on Providence’s Smith Hill.
— All photos by William Morgan.
This was welcome news, as most citizens regard as vandalism the bubble signatures and symbols painted on blank walls, mailboxes, dumpsters, and electrical boxes. Some lawmakers, however, protested that graffiti was a minor issue, while one accused the mayor of cracking down on graffiti as "a way to forge political consensus."
The mayor, however, is not Jorge Elorza of Providence, but the mayor of Rome, Virginia Raggi, and the alleged tagger was identified as “Geco” (no full name given).
But whether it's Providence or the Eternal City, the problem of such urban defacement is old as human settlement. The ancient Romans battled it, as did the Egyptians centuries before that. During World War II, American G.I.s' painted “Kilroy Was Here’’ on walls from Anzio to Guadalcanal. Like the poor, graffiti will always be with us.
On Ives Street, in Providence’s Fox Point neighborhood.
Called tagging, painting your name in bold letters on the side of a building or a railroad car is about self-expression. Free spirits, the rebellious, and the disenfranchised tag their names to declare that they exist. According to Paolo von Vacaro, an authority on graffiti, "You tag your name to show that you are king of the street."
Competing artists lay their claims to a Providence wall.
As with many forms of self-expression, one man's creative genius is another's vandalism. One might admire the styles of particular graffitists, or how practitioners have artistic duels on public walls. But when the walls are historical, such as Providence Marine Corps of Artillery Arsenal, on Benefit Street, in a section of the city known for its historic architectural beauty, then graffiti is, according to the City of Providence, "a public nuisance and destructive of the rights and values of property owners as well as the entire community."
Defacing the Arsenal, the David Macaulay mural on I-95, or the Providence River pedestrian bridge is unacceptable. If residents and business are really stung by tagging, then they should push the city to get really serious about apprehending the spray-can brigade, and mete out fines stiff enough to cover the restoration of damaged walls and objects.
But how much of a public nuisance is the run-of-the-mill graffiti that covers so many walls, particularly in less affluent neighborhoods? Does it threaten the commonweal? Does painting freight cars make them less efficient? Or are the giant bubble letters symbolic of deeper strains within the community?
Masterpiece of railroad freight car graffiti.
Visual pollution is as unfortunate as it is indefinable: a certain building may enhance or offend, one man's Christmas lights may seem tacky to his neighbors. Graffiti, like smut (the late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart declared that he could not define smut, but knew it when he saw it), may be impossible to eradicate.
One of many injury law billboards.
If we are to tackle a city's visual pollution, why not eradicate the billboards that are a blot on the cityscape? As soon as you pass border signs admonishing you to “Discover Beautiful Rhode Island,’’ there are billboards touting one personal-injury law firm after another. (A traveler crossing Rhode Island for the first time might wonder if we do nothing here but chase ambulances)
Rocky and Bullwinkle mural visible from the train, by a 21st-Century Leonardo.
Why not a creative solution for the Creative Capital? If graffiti is a fact of city life, why not embrace it? The destruction of property should be discouraged by strict law enforcement, but the vibrancy of famous artist-provocateurs such as Banksy and Jean-Michel Basquiat should be encouraged. Why not embrace it?
How about hosting a graffiti conference and contest, where local talent and free-spirited geniuses from all over America would come to compete for a national title? Blank walls on warehouses, factories, and other structures would be donated. Providence businesses could sponsor walls, the Rhode Island School of Design could offer a residency for certain artists, and there could be conferences on tagging, along with publications, and maybe even art-school scholarships for disadvantaged would-be artists. Such an event could boost the city on many levels.
Many free-spirited paint bandits might balk at the contra-indication of control, so they would have to continue their vandalism as outlaws. But in the spirit of the successful Gravity Games of 1999-2001, let’s plan for some post-COVID-events that encourage fun, artistic energy, and above all, optimism.
“If your graffiti is exceptional, thank your art teacher’’ says my wife, Carolyn Morgan. Graffiti mural on North Main Street by Jasper Summers..
William Morgan is a Providence-based architectural historian, essayist and photographer. His latest book is Snowbound: Dwelling in Winter
Todd McLeish: She's watching deer, earthworms and other threats to region's native plants
A Salt Marsh Pink flower. Hope Lesson is trying to propagate the rare native plant in Connecticut.
From ecoRI News (ecori.org)
Thanks to lessons taught by her grandparents, Hope Leeson has always been drawn to plants. Some of her oldest memories are of trees, especially their different shapes.
“I’ve always had this haunting sense of awareness of their forms,” said Leeson, a botanist, plant conservationist and botanical educator from South Kingstown, R.I., who has walked much of Rhode Island in search of wetlands and rare plants. “I was always interested by their shapes, and by other little things on the ground that also attracted my attention, like the incredible structure of inch-high plants, sedges and flowers. There are so many different unbelievable shapes and forms that plants take.”
Through more than 30 years of field experience, Leeson has developed an intimate knowledge of the Ocean State’s plant communities, and she has applied that knowledge to the protection of rare species, the sustainable collection of plant seeds and the propagation of native plants for habitat-restoration efforts. This work has given her unique insights into the changes taking place in the state’s natural areas and their impacts on native species.
“There’s a lot happening in the ground that we don’t see,” she said. “And there’s certainly a lot happening because of deer eating much of what’s on the ground. Both of those are influencing the next generation of plant communities.”
She noted that Rhode Island’s abundant deer primarily eat native plants, and they are so voracious that in many places few young plants have a chance to mature before they are eaten. And since deer avoid most invasive species, they are providing inroads for invasives to gain a foothold and spread widely.
“I also worry that we’re not really aware of the far-reaching impact of earthworms,” Leeson said of the eight species found in southern New England, all of which originated in Europe or Asia. “The plant communities we have are adapted to a slow cycling of nutrients, and earthworms really speed that up. They also take a lot of leaf litter and pull it down into the soil, which changes the whole nutrient cycle, in terms of what’s available to plants.
“So like deer, earthworms are opening up areas for nonnative species to come in, because those nonnatives come from areas that have earthworms and can take advantage of the opening that’s been created. We can’t control where earthworms go, and they’re really changing the chemistry of the soil.”
It’s not just soil chemistry that’s changing, Leeson said, but it’s also soil temperature. And that may be affecting the mycorrhizal relationship between plants and fungi that enables plants to acquire nutrients through their roots. If that relationship is disrupted, many plant communities could be impacted.
“I just see so many places where it appears like the forest is dying, particularly areas that are more urban,” she said. “It smells different, it looks different, it’s a big change, and how that comes out in the end, we don’t know. It may all be fine, but on our human scale it seems like a loss of something — or maybe there will be a gain in another hundred years.”
Leeson grew up in Providence and South Kingstown and earned an art degree at Brown University, where she took as many environmental courses as she could. After graduating, she spent a few years painting murals in people’s homes and creating decorative stenciling, before taking jobs as a naturalist on Prudence Island and at Goddard Memorial State Park in Warwick. That work led to jobs at the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management and several environmental consulting firms.
During one project, when the Narragansett Electric Co. proposed a new power line corridor from East Greenwich to Burrillville, R.I., she walked the entire 44 miles to locate any wetlands the route would cross.
In more recent years, she consulted with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Save The Bay, The Nature Conservancy and other agencies to document rare plant communities and invasive species. She also worked for more than 10 years as the botanist for the Rhode Island Natural History Survey.
“Not only does Hope like to dig into the academic understanding of plants, she values the study of native plants because they connect to so many of her other interests and areas of accomplishment, including gastronomy, environmental conservation, art, gardening, teaching, and social networking,” said David Gregg, director of the Natural History Survey. “Her multi-level connection to native plants is readily apparent when you spend time with her, and is an important reason, besides the interest inherent in the projects themselves, that volunteers have been so attracted to working with her on the Survey’s various Rhody Native activities.”
Leeson’s establishment of the Rhody Native program to propagate up to 100 species of native plants helped diversify habitats at wildlife refuges, salt marshes, and private and public gardens. Eventually, the program became so successful that she was receiving orders for thousands of plants, which was more than she could produce on her own. Without a commercial nursery willing to take it over, the program was discontinued.
SShe is now completing a project to grow a rare wildflower called Salt-Marsh Pink, which is limited to two sites in Rhode Island and one in Connecticut. The plants she is growing will be used to bolster the Connecticut population following a restoration of the marsh.
“We thought we might cross-pollinate plants from Connecticut with the Rhode Island populations to reduce the genetic bottleneck,” Leeson said. “But the Rhode Island populations are really small, and rabbits ate all of the seedpods before they were ripe, so I was unable to collect any seedpods. But the Connecticut seeds are sown, and they’re just resting for the winter.”
When she’s not working, Leeson enjoys riding horses, which she said can “eat up a couple hours every other day.” But she’s never far from plants, whether in her garden or in nearby forests.
“I’m drawn to places that are rocky, because that geography and geology is interesting to me,” she said. “And the coastal plain pond shores are endlessly fascinating to me because their geological life cycle is so interesting. When water levels are down, they have this explosion of plant species, many of them rare, and then there will be a decade when everything is underwater and you wait for 10 years before they all reveal themselves again.”
Leeson also enjoys foraging for food, including the tubers of evening primrose, which she roasts with carrots. She even occasionally cooks with invasive species — she makes pie from Japanese knotweed, pesto from garlic mustard, and enjoys the berries from autumn olive.
As she approaches retirement age, Leeson is teaching botany and plant ecology at the Rhode Island School of Design. She is especially looking forward to teaching a five-week course in January called “Winter Treewatching” and a spring semester class on the “Weeds of Providence.”
“That one will look at all of the areas around Providence that are vegetated by things that come in on their own,” Leeson said. “It’s getting people to think about how we don’t even notice these things, and yet they’re performing pretty important functions, from carbon sequestration and air filtration to providing food for insects and birds.”
Although she said that teaching online during the pandemic has been “weird,” she has been pleased to see so many people walking at Rhode Island’s parks and nature preserves.
“It’s really helping people to slow down and look around them more, at least I hope it is,” she said. “They seem to be noticing things they never noticed before, and I think that’s a really good thing.
“We’ve gotten so distanced from the natural world around us that there’s not an impetus to steward it or take care of it. There’s a sense that it will always be there and it doesn’t really matter, but it’s what sustains us all. We won’t exist without it.”
Rhode Island resident and author Todd McLeish runs a wildlife blog.
The lure of the local
Mr. McFeely ("Speedy Delivery"), in Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, leads a group to the post office to hand deliver their completed 2010 Census forms during the "Count Me In In 2010 Rally" in Homestead, Penn.
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Then there are other local glimmers of light. An example: In the past couple of weeks, some of our neighbors in Providence organized outdoor parties to honor a couple of friendly (including to dogs) and very reliable mailmen in our neighborhood who recently retired. It was a joy to see such benign civic activities bringing people together.
But events like this are less likely today in our dispersed, suburban/exurban society, in which interactions are increasingly on screens. We make fewer opportunities to do things together in person.
Consider that we don’t shop together as much. I thought of this the other week as I strolled around the little downtown of the town where I spent much of my boyhood. Back then, everyone went to the village’s locally owned grocery store (accurately called “Central Market” and smelling of ground coffee) and the town’s only drugstore, also locally owned. You’d bump into friends and neighbors there. Indeed, you’d make friends there.
Both have long since closed, succeeded by chain drugstores and chain supermarkets dispersed around the area. While many villagers a half century ago would walk to the downtown almost daily to shop, now pretty much everyone drives to wind-swept store parking lots.
I wonder if, when the COVID-19 crisis fades, whether pent-up demand for real, in-person interactions might help revive small downtowns. And after all, malls and big-box stores at the periphery of the old downtowns had been closing at a good clip before the virus in the Amazon avalanche.
Grace Kelly: Getting more Black and Brown kids out into nature
A meeting in the woods of Exeter, R.I., of students in the Movement Education Outdoors program.
— Photo by Grace Kelly for ecoRI News
EXETER, R.I.
A group of five 10th-graders tromp through a wooded path at the Canonicus Camp & Conference Center on Exeter Road. They talk about school, the platform Doc Martens they would love to have, and how New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is great but also, it’s probably better not to idolize politicians. {Canonicus was a 17th Century Narragansett Indian chief.}
Their guide on this excursion is Joann “Jo” Ayuso, founder of Movement Education Outdoors (MEO), an organization with a mission to provide outdoor experiences for community-based organizations serving Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) youth. She shows them nature.
“The outdoors is sacred, and yes, this land,” she said, and spreads her arms around her, gesturing at the grass and trees, “has a history of colonization, but I want us to feel welcome here. I want to invite you to make your own memories today, to decolonize this space. I introduce you to these spaces so you can own them and feel connected to the land.”
According to the National Health Foundation, while people of color make up nearly 40 percent of the population, 70 percent of the people who visit national forests, parks, and wildlife refuges are White. A mere 7 percent of national park visitors are Black.
There are many factors at play when it comes to communities of color not having the same opportunities to experience the outdoors. Ayuso said:
“I think it’s very important for people to know, that, for example, when your mom is a single parent, working three jobs, doesn’t have a car, how is she going to have time to take her kids hiking? And, unfortunately, bus lines don’t take you to any of the green space Rhode Island has to offer.”
There’s also the fact that outdoor gear is expensive, with basic equipment such as lightweight coats, hiking boots, and backpacks costing a premium.
“Equipment is always a barrier for young, low-income and urban youth,” Ayuso said. “Even having the proper layering for hiking in the fall or winter, that’s expensive.”
By starting MEO in 2018, Ayuso hopes to change this paradigm.
Ayuso’s journey from being born into poverty to being an outdoor educator for BIPOC youth started in the forests of the southern wild.
“One of my very first experiences with the outdoors was in the military,” she said. Ayuso entered the military after graduating from Joseph P. Keefe Technical High School, in Framingham, Mass., prompted in part by her brother who had also joined, and by the desire to work her way up in the world. While military service didn’t prove to be her dream, it was how she discovered her love of nature.
“One of the things I loved about the military was being outdoors, just hiking, having my rucksack on and just hiking for hours,” said Ayuso, who served in the Army in 1989-1996. “To this day, I can still remember smelling the eucalyptus trees in the South, and also smelling the pine trees when we would do our training early in the morning. It was just something that really helped me pass time, and that was one of the most memorable times of me experiencing the outdoors.”
Ayuso would come back to that moment years later, and it would be part of a series of experiences that would inspire her to create an organization to bring Black and Brown youth into nature.
In the years that filled her life between the military and MEO, Ayuso built a personal-training business in Wellesley, Mass., and left it, started a new life in Providence, learned she loved working with young people, began practicing mindfulness, and discovered her ancestral roots in Puerto Rico and West Africa.
But it was when she was hit by a car two years ago outside her Providence home and spent six months healing that she started to unravel what she wanted to do with her life.
“I had six weeks of recovery, and in those six weeks I was like, ‘I’ve gotta do something different,’” said the 48-year-old. “My partner and I just got to talking about what is it that you want to do for the rest of your life? What is it that you think you will enjoy?”
Her partner asked her to reflect on the past 15 years and think about the things she really loved.
“And I thought, ‘Damn, I really loved that time in the military when I was hiking. That was awesome.’ I felt like that was healing, that kept my mind kind of straight,” Ayuso recalled. “So my hiking experience in the military, the mindfulness training that I’ve had in the last 20 years, the Native and Black history I learned for myself, and seeing the environmental justice and climate change on Black and Brown bodies, that became the four pillars of Movement Education Outdoors.”
MEO partners with local schools such as Nowell Leadership Academy, in Providence, and such nonprofits as Riverzedge Arts, in Woonsocket, to bring underserved youth into the outdoors and to help them reflect on who they are and where they come from.
And on this chilly fall day in Exeter, the students are loving it.
As they walk through the forest of pine, oak and maple, they notice the acorns on the ground, the oak apple wasp galls tucked between fallen leaves, and learn about how beavers change the landscape to suit their needs.
They pause for a guided meditation at a bridge overlooking a pond and breathe in the cold air, watching as their breath billows around them when they exhale. They continue through the woods and stop at a rock wall to discuss the farming history of this land.
“So when the glaciers melted, they left lots of rocks here,” said a MEO intern. “And the colonizers used them to make rocks walls.”
Ayuso noted that these rock walls delineated farming property, and that between 1636 and 1750, South County farmers turned from enslaving Indigenous people to enslaving thousands of Blacks from Africa to make their farms into plantations comparable to those in the South.
The group continues onward and upward, heading to a steep incline and making their way to an overlook known as “The Pinnacle.”
The students pause at a large boulder, resting weary Converse-clad feet and shooting the breeze. Ayuso then asks them what made them want to be outside, how they came to be here. One said:
“I was a city person, but when I went on my first camping experience, it opened my eyes. I was so against it at first, but when I go on these trips, I’m so happy.”
Another student reminisced about her first time camping and how waking up outside was so special.
“The last time we went camping, my friend and I woke up at 5 a.m., and waking up to the morning dew, the smell of morning dew … it was so nice,” she said.
“It’s a break from the city, life with social media, everything feeling so controlled … when you’re outdoors, you’re on your own,” another student added.
Ayuso smiled as the group continued their discussion about life, nature, and what the future holds.
“Ya’ll are gonna make me cry,” Ayuso said, laughing. “You’re making me feel all the feels. I’m blessed to be here, to be able to do this.”
Grace Kelly is a journalist for ecoRI News.
William Morgan: Raymond Hood and the drama of the American skyscraper
In 1916, a little known, 35-year-old architect and Rhode Island native proposed a monumental civic structure for downtown Providence. Raymond Hood's Civic Centre would have been sited where the Industrial Trust Building was later built; it was to be 600 feet tall and would serve as courthouse, library and prison. Its tower would symbolize progress and prosperity at the head of Narragansett Bay.
A few years earlier, Hood had done his thesis at the prestigious École des Beaux Arts, in Paris, on a design for a city hall for his hometown of Pawtucket. While neither of these fanciful schemes was built, they demonstrate the early vision of a man destined to become of one of the 20th Century's most significant skyscraper architects.
Raymond Hood, Proposed City Hall for Pawtucket. Year-Book of the Rhode Island Chapter, American Institute of American Institute of Architects, 1911
“Raymond Hood and the American Skyscraper,’’ an exhibition initially organized for showing to the public at the David Winton Bell Gallery, at Brown University, opened online only on Sept. 11. The show, underwritten by the Brown Arts Initiative and Shawmut Design & Construction, features loans of drawings and photographs from RISD, MIT, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania and the Smithsonian Institution. Hit this link to see the show.
Ralph Adams Cram (left) and Raymond Hood in Bermuda, c.1930. Hood worked for Cram as a young architect; Cram designed the Pawtucket Public Library. Courtesy, Cram & Ferguson Architects
Beyond the lectures and other materials associated with the show, one can access information on Hood through the handsome 48-page catalog written by two of the show's co-curators, Prof. Dietrich Neumann and Brown doctoral student Jonathan Duval (the other curator is Jo-Ann Conklin, director of the Bell).
Catalog cover with Rockefeller Center, with the soaring RCA Building.
Hood would go on to design several iconic skyscrapers of the 1930s, serve as the head designer of Rockefeller Center, and would be, in Neumann's words "the most powerful architect in New York City." Significant exhibitions like this one reacquaint us with sometimes forgotten figures and force new assessments of their contributions to our cultural landscape.
RCA building at Rockefeller Center, photographed in 1933. Library of Congress.
Hood died far too young at 53. And in one of those ironies of architectural history, Modernists denigrated as too conservative the skyscraper that secured Hood's career and transformed him from dreamer to real player.
Howells & Hood, Chicago Tower. PHOTO ©Hassan Bagheri
As Neumann and Duval remind us, Hood was a struggling draftsman when he teamed up with the fashionable New York architect John Mead Howells (designer of Providence’s Turks Head Building) to enter the major international competition to build the Chicago Tribune's headquarters building in 1922. Howells and Hood beat out 262 other entrants from 23 countries with their skyscraper scheme.
I remember professors in college and graduate school ranting about the shortcomings of the Tribune Tower, labeling it "dishonest" for hiding its modern steel frame underneath a cloak of eclectic, historicist detail. It is time to acknowledge that Hood's design was the one that deserved to win, and to accept that the verticality of Gothic was wholly appropriate for such a soaring form.
Almost 100 years after that famous controversial contest, the Tribune Tower remains an absolute triumph, proudly standing in the skyscraper capital. Hood's more streamlined skyscrapers in New York – the RCA building, the Daily News Building and the McGraw-Hill Building – still inspire us, and they are especially instructive when placed against formless pieces of real estate such as Providence's proposed Fane Tower.
McGraw-Hill Building, New York, PHOTO © Hassan Bagheri
The effort that Brown has applied to the work of Raymond Hood is the sort of public service that universities offer the commonweal. Such scholarship is especially welcome now, as study of great architecture and urbanism is crucial to rebuilding after a time of pandemic.
Providence-based architecture critic and historian William Morgan has taught the history of architecture at Princeton University, The University of Louisville and Roger Williams University.
His latest book is Snowbound: Dwelling in Winter
