The Elements of Providence

Seeing it the first time, you have every right and opportunity to interpret it as authoritatively as somebody who's lived here." Tourists, often blamed for ruining event places by diluting their local character, actually help WaterFire succeed. "With tourists, you have that new energy, that discovery, going on. It's not the same as centuries-old religious and ethnic festivals with layers and layers of meaning and neighborhood-to-neighborhood rivalries you wouldn't hope to understand at all as a tourist."

I'm not a local, but I'm not exactly a stranger to Providence, either. I grew up in Chicago, where I first encountered an exquisitely gloomy, peak-roofed, demon-haunted Providence in the pulp fantasy stories of H.P. Lovecraft, the city's literary hero. There's a single phrase in Lovecraft's The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath , which I first read when I was 10 years old, that hooked me on Providence for life: "There is Providence quaint and lordly on its seven hills over the blue harbor, with terraces of green leading up to steeples and citadels of living antiquity." I have lived in the Northeast more than half my life, and in Boston, only 45 minutes north of Providence, since 1997, and I know my way around the real Providence almost as well as I know my way around Lovecraft's city, but I will always remain an outsider. In Rhode Island, one of the most proudly local and un-homogenized places in America, people give directions by referring to buildings that were torn down long ago. If you don't know what they're talking about, you're out of luck. For a Chicagoan, too, Providence's greater age makes the place seem all the more inscrutable: smaller than my city, yes, but denser, tighter, more deeply layered with secret history. WaterFire raises the ghosts of Providence; I half-sense them, indistinct presences collecting along the riverfront, drawn by the light, warmth and sound.

THE LIGHTING IS NOW IN FULL SWING, a rhythm it will sustain until 1 a.m. The music rises and falls, as do the fires, replenished by the boats. Other craft decorously ply the waters: refurbished water taxis from Bangkok, long black gondolas and a glamorous little boat fitted out with a canopy under which two couples sip wine at a wooden table by lantern light.

WaterFire's intimate yet grand scale adds to its potency. I could easily throw a cellphone across the Providence River, but it's still wide enough to seem like a significant body of water. WaterFire's half-mile-plus stretch of riverfront terrain feels rich but compact, complex but knowable. After an hour or two of strolling up and down its length, I find myself returning to and lingering at the junction of the three rivers, where the land narrows to a point like the prow of a ship thrust into the Providence River. Standing on that point, where the secondary line of braziers on the Moshassuck converges with the main line of braziers on the Woonasquatucket and the Providence, I feel for a moment as if I may have found WaterFire's heart. The moment will pass, though, as the music changes, the night deepens and my own perspective shifts with each phase of rest or motion.

I WALK TO POT AU FEU, a restaurant near the far downstream end of WaterFire, to see Bob Burke, its well-connected proprietor. Barnaby Evans and several others have told me to talk to Burke if I want to understand what WaterFire means for Providence. I find him at the downstairs bar in his restaurant. Like almost every other provider of food and drink located anywhere near the riverfront, he's doing excellent business tonight. Burke, whose swept-back silvered hair, good suit and bow tie are offset by the crinkled mouth of a recovering class clown, takes me for a walking tour of his end of downtown. WaterFire enlivens the blocks by the water, but when we turn inland the aroma of wood smoke follows us down darker, quieter streets.

As we walk, he tells me about the falcons that hunt squabs from a deco skyscraper known as the Superman Building (for its resemblance to the Daily Planet building in the comic books and the old TV show), and about the landing pad for zeppelins on its roof. He explains that there are people in town who brag about "the Big O in the Big O" -- that is, having sex in the giant letters atop the Biltmore Hotel that spell out its name. He shows me the Arcade Building, claimed by some to be "the first indoor shopping mall in America," the two dissimilar classical facades of which preserve in stone a nearly two-centuries-old disagreement between its architects -- the perfect Providence story in that it features antiquity, independent thinking, a beef and a quirky result.

To understand WaterFire's importance, Burke says, you have to talk about downtown Providence's amazing comeback in the past couple of decades. First, there was a classic postindustrial decline, spanning the mid-20th century, that bled the life from the city. "Downtown was a graveyard with lights," he says. "In our minds, we were dead and buried. We all knew why we were in the Guinness Book of World Records ." Extensive concrete decking covered the rivers, including a 1,147-foot-wide platform listed by Guinness as the widest bridge in the world. Atop it was an intersection known as Suicide Circle. Pedestrian-unfriendly streets, city-

dividing highways, railroad tracks, parking lots and other dead spaces dominated the cityscape. Reduced from a cultural and commercial hub to a desolate crossroads for cars on their way to other places, the once-lively downtown felt entombed, like its paved-over rivers. Most citizens, urbanites as well as

suburbanites, shunned it.

But Providence was lucky, it turned out, to have been so depressed and passively led that it failed to wreck its elegant building stock with the sort of sweepingly misguided urban renewal projects that trashed other cities' downtowns in the 1950s and '60s. That made it easier, beginning in the 1980s, to refit downtown as a place where people want to go: to shop, to have fun, to encounter culture, to imbibe the city's history and character, and, when WaterFire's braziers are lit, to enjoy a passeggiata in the company of their fellow citizens. Since Burke bought Pot Au Feu in 1986, he says, Providence has added more than 12,000 restaurant seats, part of a downtown boom that has also brought stores, office space and hotel rooms.

The most crucial step of the comeback was uncovering and rerouting the rivers to restore the city's connection to the water, giving it a new physical and ritual center. Burke says that this monumental project, completed in the early 1990s, "had a profound effect on the collective unconscious of Providence. When you began to tear those bridges apart and uncover the land, dig into the earth to move the rivers -- and we all saw the unearthing -- we were thereby psychically exhumed from our urban grave." In his account I hear echoes of Lovecraft, whose oeuvre features both live burial and reanimation.

Burke insists that restored infrastructure could not have, by itself, produced new life. "You still have to make the streetscape, the hardware, interesting to people," he says. "And for that you need software -- like WaterFire, which is the great example. It brought people in the region back to the city, got them in the habit again." Visitors started coming, too, from Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York and beyond. It's no exaggeration, he says, to credit WaterFire with making downtown Providence a destination.