Waterfronts for Work and Play: Mythscapes of Heritage and Identity in Contemporary Rhode Island
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ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: WATERFRONTS FOR WORK AND PLAY: MYTHSCAPES OF HERITAGE AND IDENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY RHODE ISLAND Kristen A. Williams, Doctor of Philosophy, 2010 Dissertation directed by: Dr. Nancy L. Struna Department of American Studies My dissertation examines the relationship between heritage sites, urban culture, and civic life in present-day Rhode Island, evaluating how residents‟ identities and patterns of civic engagement are informed by site-specific tourist narratives of eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth-century labor histories. Considering the adaptive reuse of former places of maritime trade and industry as contemporary sites of leisure, I analyze the role that historic tourism plays in local and regional economic urban redevelopment. I argue that the mythscapes of exceptionalism mobilized at Rhode Island‟s heritage sites create usable pasts in the present for current residents and visitors alike, alternatively foregrounding and obscuring intersectional categories of difference according to contemporaneous political climates at the local, national and transnational levels. This study is divided into two parts, organized chronologically and geographically. While Part I examines the dominant tourist narratives associated with Newport County, located in the southeast of the state and including Aquidneck Island (also known as Rhode Island), Part II takes the historic tourism associated with mainland Providence Plantations as its case study and focuses exclusively on Providence County, covering the middle and northern ends of the state. In each of these sections, I explore, challenge, and re-contextualize the politics of narratives which reference the earliest Anglophone settlers of Rhode Island as religious refugees and members of what scholar Robin Cohen refers to as a “victim diaspora” against the rich co-constitutive histories of im/migrant groups that, either by force or choice, relocated to Rhode Island for work and thus constitute a “labour diaspora.” The existence of these two or more populations living in close proximity to each other in areas of Newport and Providence, I argue, produced what Denis Byrne calls a “nervous landscape” fraught with cultural, economic and political tensions which exists even as narratives of the pasts associated with each group are mobilized in the contemporary urban environs of each city and its tourist attractions. WATERFRONTS FOR WORK AND PLAY: MYTHSCAPES OF HERITAGE AND IDENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY RHODE ISLAND by Kristen A. Williams Dissertation submitted to the faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2010 Advisory Committee: Professor Nancy L. Struna, Chair Professor Ronald Dufour Professor Christina Hanhardt Professor Cynthia Martin Professor Jo Paoletti ©Copyright by Kristen A. Williams 2010 Preface: In Search of the Back Roads: Mobilizing Dominant and Alternative Historical Narratives for Economic Redevelopment Tourist narratives exist to promote a given place as a “destination”—a site that is attractive, noteworthy and offers services that will keep visitors satisfied as they explore and learn. If tourism promotes pride of place, it also boosts local economies, so it is not surprising that most narratives associated with tourist destinations are positive and upbeat, often celebratory of events, populations, and structures. But cultural and historic tourisms pose some particular challenges to this dominant model. In cultural tourism, narratives are complicated by who is telling the story, and which perspectives are included. Historical tourism, the particular subject of this dissertation, is perhaps even more vexed, involving not only the nuances of multiple and complex cultural perspectives, but also the near-constant influx of new information, the result of ongoing and often controversial new research. As cultural and historical tourism narratives evolve, they often shift, forced to integrate new ideas in ways that visitors will still find palatable and accessible. Accordingly, even dominant tourist narratives prove exceedingly flexible as they absorb, integrate or, in some cases, co-opt and transform alternative narratives. Alternative tourist narratives are developed in opposition to dominant narratives (though they are not necessarily reactionary), and pose questions such as: What might a past or present resident have to say about a walking tour of their neighborhood? What sites would they include that a mainstream tourist narrative might eschew or obscure for the purpose of saving time or emphasizing architectural or historical significance? Though answering these questions can be a difficult proposition for visitors to an area, residents or those familiar with a particular location have a unique perspective: they often ii know how their home is marketed, but they also know their everyday experience of that place as they work, play and dwell. Accordingly, I have chosen my own home state as a case study for this dissertation, in the hopes of presenting a critical academic perspective that is informed by the more intimate feelings of genuine attachment inspired by the places people call home. Uniting these two perspectives, I believe, establishes a much- needed and valuable balance between extant cultural landscape scholarship and more popular studies of the relationship people have with the spaces, places and structures where they earn and spend money, meet and interact with friends and loved ones, experience pain and joy, and, perhaps most significantly, gain the knowledge which, for better or worse, informs their personal and collective navigation of their worlds. Like many Rhode Islanders, my family has always been quite provincial. Traveling from Warwick, located in the central part of the smallest state in the union, to Woonsocket, located on the northern border of Massachusetts, is a trip that takes roughly 45 minutes of highway travel, and for us this has always constituted a “long drive.” Yet we have an unabashed love of back roads, and will happily extend any trip if it means avoiding the highways in favor of more scenic terrain. Since you never know what you might find along the back roads, my family reasons, drivers should never take Interstate Route 95 from Warwick to the capitol city of Providence if they can help it. Why bother? Once traffic is considered, traveling along Warwick Avenue to Narragansett Boulevard, the same route as the number 3 RIPTA bus1, ends up being quicker. And this route guarantees views of maritime and industrial landscapes that are steadily eroding and may one day disappear altogether. Along Narragansett Boulevard there are long-established neighborhoods featuring relatively recent additions such as Johnson and Wales Culinary 1 RIPTA is the abbreviation for the Rhode Island Public Transportation Authority. iii Institute and Harborside Campus. If you make the trip in the morning, you will see the chefs-in-training on their way to classes, replete with sparkling white smocks and cream puff hats. You will also see empty industrial fields, abandoned factories, gas stations, auto repair shops, several strip clubs and adult video stores as your car trips along the train tracks that are no longer in use but have never been removed from the center of the road. Some of the historic buildings on the left as you make your way toward the state‟s capitol city have been demolished to build the new ramp to I-195 from Providence to the East Bay (a plan conceived in the 1980s and finally implemented more than 20 years later), but the old Port of Providence is still there on your right. This is where many Mediterranean immigrants arrived from 1880-1921, when a French steamship company called the Fabre Line offered trips directly from Mediterranean ports to Providence, Rhode Island, allowing immigrants to bypass Ellis Island and keep their family names and, some have suggested, their health and dignity as well. Years after new immigration laws forced the Fabre Company to abandon their lucrative business and closed the port to immigrants this spot enjoyed a brief tenure as a container port before effectively retiring as a brown field and an eye sore, closed to public access, with only a handful of still- operating marine businesses. Now the port seems to have a shiny new future ahead: as the home of a luxury residential and entertainment complex imagined by Rhode Island constitutional scholar and real estate magnate Patrick Conley, who has already purchased and refurbished the old tire factory at the edge of the lot and established a private wharf with a ferry service carrying tourists from Providence to Newport. iv If you skip the highways, then, you see a microcosm of urban, work-a-day Rhode Island before being blinded by the glittering redesign of downtown Providence, with its water park, miles of river walks, “festival marketplace” shopping mall, luxury hotels and convention center. The back roads (which until the mid twentieth century were the only roads) take you from the predominantly white middle-class suburbs of Warwick to ethnic working class sections of Cranston to the increasingly urban and predominantly Latino and Black neighborhoods transitioning into Providence, and you see where Rhode Islanders from these neighborhoods used to work but do not anymore. If you pass Solitto‟s liquors on Narragansett Boulevard heading north into Providence during business hours, you will also see their mascot. This