Hackable City: Providence

HIOW: How cool is Hub2 ?

2007-10-04T23:35:00.000-05:00

I'm a sucker for trying to find valid crossovers between virtual worlds and our real world, where the interplay adds to our face-to-face interactions, rather than simply sucking us into our computers.

Along these lines, I had a great chat with Eric Gordon from Emerson College today, who is shepherding an experiment in Boston called Hub2. They are using Second Life environments to reimagine poorly designed public spaces in Boston, then using that to fuel discussion between citizens in the real world. Check it.

Hub2 strives for a Boston where all residents take control and ownership of their neighborhoods, enlisting digital environments and networks to strengthen real-world spaces and relationships. Hub2 invites community members to collaboratively imagine, articulate, and assert a vision for the kind of neighborhood they wish to inhabit. We use appropriate technology to facilitate that visioning process and as an amplifier for grassroots voices articulating their common dreams.

City News: Daniel Yem, Year Up Apprentice

2007-08-02T23:19:00.000-05:00

From the City News interview series...

Young Apprentices Get a Year to Seize Their Future Careers

In August, when most graduating students have moved on from school, are off looking for jobs in their field, preparing to enter college, or relaxing on a summer vacation, a group of young Providence pupils, ages 18 to 24, just received their diplomas on Wednesday, August 1st. Daniel Yem, 23, who came from South Philadelphia to Providence, is one of the twenty-two new graduates of the Year Up program.

The Year Up program, started in Boston in 2002, is a one-year intensive education and apprenticeship program for young, urban adults. It has branches in New York and Washington DC, and in 2005 the program came to Providence. Located downtown, Year Up’s Executive Director Sara Enright believes that in the next five years, thousands more students will transform both the City and the nation by closing what she calls “the opportunity divide” between our youth. She believes that the combination of intensive training and real world work experience in a corporate setting helps bridge that divide while building America’s future workforce.

Sara and Dan caught up with City News shortly after their graduation ceremony at the Westin Hotel.

Why did you decide to enroll at Year Up?

Dan: I chose to join Year Up because I was working a job that had no job advancement. I could not move inside the job. This is an opportunity for me to learn and also get paid at the same time. So it’s a win-win situation for me.

How would you describe your experience at Year Up?

D: My experience was great – never had a negative one at all. Every moment I spent at Year Up, I learned a great deal from all the instructors, all the teachers and I learned more from this experience than I’ve ever learned.

Where was your apprenticeship?

D: My apprenticeship was at West Greenwich at the G-Tech company.

What did you do there?

D: I did everything a normal computer operator would do. I shadowed them. The first and second day I was on my own working, starting my own projects and finishing them off.

What are your future plans?

D: I got hired by G-Tech, and I plan to move within the company as much as possible. I’m thinking about going back to New England Tech for further education.

How old are you?

D: I’m 23 years old.

You know at this age, a lot of your peers have probably already graduated from college and are off working at a job in their field. What is it like for you to start this process later on in your young life?

D: The people that are graduating college now at my age, most of them can’t even find jobs in the field that they (studied) in. That’s why I love Year Up so much because they put us in an apprenticeship. They exposed us to the corporate world and it gives the corporate world fresh talent apart from the graduates from the colleges. Like I said, we spend a year at Year-Up and we have the same opportunities that people spent four years having at universities.

Sara, what makes Year Up valuable to have in the City of Providence?

Sara: Year Up is beneficial in a few key ways. One, it provides outstanding opportunities for Providence young adults to really get their foot in the door. They get six months of intensive training in technical skills, professional skills, and communication skills. Like Dan talked about, they get six months of full time real world, real work experience at a company like G-Tech, like Bank of America, Citizens Bank or CVS. That combination of training and experience and support and guidance along the way is really an unparalleled opportunity for young adults.

At the same time, every employer in Rhode Island is crying out, ‘where is the future workforce? I need people with problem-solving skills, and technical skills, and professional skills,’ and that’s exactly what we’re providing for Rhode Island’s companies.

What do you expect students to take away with them when they graduate, aside from work skills?

S: I think we expect them to gain confidence and most of all gain a sense that they can truly do anything that they set out to do. There are so many young people in this community and across the country who simply can’t see all the opportunities that are out there and don’t necessarily have access to them. So by providing that first sort of foot in the door experience, students are able to see how much is out there for them and how high their potential really is. So our hope is that Year Up is just a catalyst for a lot of future success, and for Dan and all of his colleagues to go on and do big things!

How many classes have graduated since you opened in Providence in 2005?

S: This is our fourth graduating class in Rhode Island.

That’s wonderful. Congratulations. What is the most special thing about this graduating class?

S: Every class is special. It’s hard to put a particular label on it. I think this class is known for its leaders and supporters. There are a number of folks like Dan who have really been leaders in helping their colleagues, guiding and providing that focus on all the great opportunities that are ahead. And they supported one another through a lot of challenges in a lot of ups-and-downs and they’ve really been just a tightly-knit community and strong group together.

Dan, Sara talked a little about young people your age who may not know how to access programs like Year Up, can you tell us how you found out about Year Up and how you’d encourage other young people to do the same?

D: I found out about Year Up through a friend, Ray Martin. Year Up advertises on buses. I mean the best way to recruit people is through word-of-mouth. I’m also on the recruitment team and that’s the best way I do it. I give them the website, they go check it out, and they come join. They experience the program and they like it and they want other people to do it.

Where is Year Up heading in the future?

S: I think the future of Year Up here in Providence is to continue to be a strong program providing great opportunities and creating an alumni base that’s not just Dan and his colleagues but hundreds and thousands more young people to lead their communities.

I think Year Up across this country -- we’ve set out to close the opportunity divide and we’re expanding and are currently looking at San Francisco, Chicago, Atlanta, and Dallas as potential expansion cities -- I expect that in the next five years, we’ll have close to 10,000 Year Up alumni. And when you have 10,000 young people like Dan who have set out to do great things, and to be real leaders, you start to really create a voice for all those young people who are on one side of that opportunity divide. So our hope right now is to plant that seed for what is a real national change.

Dan, so now that Sara has knighted you as a leader, what are your words of wisdom for other young people?

To do the best in whatever they strive for. To always keep going. Never give up. Your dreams will come true if you work hard enough.

To learn more about Year Up, go to www.yearup.org or visit them in person at their Providence headquarters at 10 Dorrance Street, Suite 1108.

Providence #5 for Block Parties

2007-07-30T09:57:00.001-05:00

Best Places just named their top ten cities in the US for block parties, and Providence ranked #5. I'm not sure how valid the research methodology was, since it was sponsored by a group of BBQ-centric consumer brands, measuring "the frequency and importance of block parties to the community." But the point is well taken, that block parties build ties between neighbors and social capital.

The sponsors, mealstogether.com, offer a downloadable block party starter kit.

This reminds me that National Neighborhood Day is coming up on Sunday, September 16th. Time to get that block party or neighborhood clean up event planned !

HIOW: Guerilla Drive-In

2007-07-28T09:59:00.000-05:00

Hackable Idea of the Week has been on a bit of a hiatus, but a story on NPR's Weekend Edition caught my ear.

Across the country, citizen-run guerilla drive-ins are springing up in municipal public spaces and vacant lots. A loose collective of folks puts together a showing of a movie projected outdoors on the side of a building, and invites other people to show up. Primarily an urban phenomenon, the drive-ins have an anarchistic edge, with loose organization, word-of-mouth promotion, and an emphasis on reclamation of public spaces with spontaneous activity.

Here in Providence, Cornish Associates, an urban development company, has been running movie nights on Thursdays during the summer, without the self-organized subversive construct of the Guerilla Drive-Ins. Still, props to them for being a catalyst.

Santa Cruz Guerilla Drive in offers a DIY guide to starting your own.

NPR' story on the Santa Cruz Guerilla Drive In.

City News: Ronnie Young, Greater Elmwood

2007-07-26T16:43:00.000-05:00

From the City News Interview Series...

GENS Community Building Director Ronnie Young: “The only way we’re going to be able to build a livable, comfortable neighborhood is by getting out there and talking to your neighbors.”

26-Year Old Ronnie Young of the Greater Elmwood Neighborhood Services (GENS) knows what it’s like to “Celebrate Providence” and his neighborhood, beyond their popular annual community festival. Ronnie, a Providence-born community builder, knows that underneath the festivities and camaraderie lays a strong foundation paved with an everyday, patient effort to rebuild his community one neighbor, and one home, at a time.

His work combined with the experience of GENS in rehabilitating streets and homes in the Elmwood neighborhood is finally taking shape on Parkis Avenue. An historic block once lined with stately Victorian mansions formerly owned by mill-owners in the 1800s deteriorated over time into a street ridden with drugs, prostitution, and a transient population that simply didn’t care about the neighborhood.

Today, and in the future, Ronnie and his neighbors are working hard to ensure that the neighborhood they’ve taken back will be a place where people from varying walks of life will be eager to live in and raise their families.

Tell us about the idea behind the community festival that GENS is producing through Celebrate Providence.

I’m astounded every day about how much talent we have on this street (Parkis Avenue). We have all kinds of artists and musicians. Getting out into the community and talking to the people has made me realized that we live in a very beautiful place. We just have so much in this community to offer, we just have to bring it out.

This is the second year that we’ve done this and when we did it last year we wanted it to be a performance art event, as well as an art event. We wanted the people and the residents of this community to be able to come and enjoy each other’s company and also bring a piece of the festival home. So we had workshops on top of the performances.

The community wouldn’t have to come up with any funds or any materials, they just come simply to participate in the event and take whatever they can. Like last year, we had mask-makers at the festival. The kids absolutely love things like this.

Are there others that partnered with you to get this done?

We partnered with West Elmwood Housing, the Elmwood Foundation, and with an art teacher from the MET School.

What do you want participants to get out of the festival?

I want them to come out from the community and speak to people in the neighborhood. Being the director of the community-building department (at GENS), I’ve been working with the community for the past two years, forming relationships with resident leaders, community leaders, and residents in general. You can’t have a strong community if the community doesn’t know each other or trust each other or don’t communicate with each other. It’s very important that people, especially the youth and children, come out and get to know one another.

So that was our main focus – to bring people outside, to have a really good time, network amongst each other and we understand that music and art opens up the opportunity for people to dialogue on their creative sides and talk about their interests.

And where is the festival taking place this year?

It’s going to be on the lawn of Knight Memorial Library on 225 Elmwood Avenue. It’s a prime location, right on the main street, so we’re hoping that that’s going to be a good way to draw people in from the community. We want people to just know that this is a community-oriented event. It’s open and free to the public and we want as many people to come as possible.

How does this festival relate to what you do on an everyday basis for the Greater Elmwood neighborhood?

My department is in charge of creating positive social change by putting the responsibility of creating a strong livable neighborhood into the hands of the residents, rather than leaving it up to GENS. In order to do that, we have to hold resident leadership development meetings, workshops on financial fitness, networking events, so this festival is just one of those small pieces. This festival is the ‘fun’ side of bringing the community out into the neighborhood and talking to each other.

We’re in a very diverse neighborhood. Language is sometimes a barrier that comes between people; culture sometimes is too. So being in this diverse neighborhood and Providence being so small, we’re all living on top of each other anyway so the only way we’re going to be able to build a livable, comfortable neighborhood is by getting out there and talking to your neighbors, and breaking down those barriers – whether it’s your culture, your educational status, your social status, religion, or language. So, by hosting this art event, and bringing different people together in one place, we’re all hoping that it help break down those barriers.

Why do you do this kind of work?

I do this work because I’m from this neighborhood. I was born and raised here. I’m from South Providence. I was fortunate enough to get a great education in this neighborhood. I was working for Roger Williams University and I loved it there but when this job opened up and it was in my neighborhood, working for my people, I had to apply for it. And I’m just committed now. I want to see my community prosper.

I want to see people in the community be happy and if there are problems within the community, I want the people in the community to know the correct path to take in order to correct those problems, and not to rely on community development organizations like GENS to correct them. I don’t think it should be that way. I think we should be facilitators and help guide the residents into the right direction and find the resources that they need but I don’t think that it’s our sole responsibility to create community and make things better. I think that’s the community’s responsibility.

So, I really feel that my work is geared towards making our communities stronger so that they can make the change for themselves.

What are some of the best facets of the GE neighborhood? What do you like most about it?

I like the fact that I have a diverse group of residents that have diverse views. So, when I get out there and talk to residents, I learn things every single day. It’s not always the obvious issues that affect people. It’s not always about the drug dealers sometimes it’s about just wanting to put flowers in their gardens! They just need the simplest things sometimes, or just having the outlet to express themselves.

I also like the fact that it’s small, it’s quaint, we all know each other, or it’s easy to get to know people. All of our politicians are very accessible. The Mayor is very accessible, the City Councilors, our State Reps and Senators – they’re all very accessible and willing to work with this community. So I really appreciate that and enjoy that and whenever we need them for anything they’re always quick to step to the plate and help me accomplish whatever I need to accomplish. It makes my job easier and enjoyable.

How has the neighborhood grown over the last five years?

We have invested a lot on this one street, Parkis Avenue. Anyone who’s a resident of Providence knows that five years ago, if you needed something illegal (drugs or prostitution), you’d come to this street to get it. We still have that kind of history looming over us but the residents who have been here throughout that, I talk to them on a daily basis, and one of the things – even though they lived in these old rundown houses that we’re slowly trying to rehab – they always say to me, ‘you know, I love it here because it has changed so much! I love the fact that you guys are actually doing something.’

We formed a tenant association when I started a couple of years ago and I encouraged all the tenants to be a part of it – whether they wanted to or not! We now have monthly meetings and bring the tenants together to talk about issues in the community.

We got the Lieutenant in the area to join our board – he provides his services or the patrolmen – to come to this street and talk directly with the tenants. I set up ride-alongs with the police department so tenants can see exactly what the police have to go through so they can be more responsive in helping the police accomplish their job.

When I first came here, I saw that the tenants were doing what they can to combat the problems and the police were doing what they could to combat the problems but they weren’t communicating with each other. It’s just a matter of creating those relationships so that when a patrolman is riding by s/he knows who lives here and s/he knows what to expect and that when a tenant calls the police about something, they know what to say.

Creating those relationships has changed this community a lot. The residents don’t feel intimidated about talking to the police anymore, they don’t feel intimidated about talking to the property manager. I just feel as though being patient with the tenants, listening, following up with them, all of these things I have made sure we stayed on top of so that the tenants trust us. Now that we have these relationships, we work really well together.

To learn more about Ronnie’s work and of the Greater Elmwood Neighborhood Services, or to get more information about this Saturday’s festival, call 401-455-0810 or visit www.greaterelmwood.org

Citizens for Responsible Parking

2007-07-26T07:35:00.000-05:00

Some folks in south Providence have started a grass-roots organization called Citizens for Resident Permit Parking (CRPP), to advocate for a resident parking permit that allows overnight parking on the streets.

Its unclear yet whether CRPP will position itself as a traditional petition and advocacy group, or harness some hackability principles to influence and craft a new-and-better parking approach with the city. The website uses citizen-captured photos of "creative" (and illegal) parking approaches to get around the current overnight parking ban, as proof that the current policy is not working.

This has been an interesting topic buzzing around the city for the past few years. Providence is one of the only major US cities without a resident parking program, relying instead on an overnight parking ban. An overnight parking ban for what? Proponents say it prevents car abandonments, decreases on-street crime, and most significantly prevents illegal overcrowding of multi-tenant units. On-street parking, the theory goes, would allow many more cars to be associated with an address, in violation of housing laws.

Unfortunately there isn't much data to support these hypotheses, or proof that the goals couldn't be as well or better accomplished with a well-managed resident permit program. The continued reliance on the overnight parking ban seems to be as much about resource limitations and a reluctance to change a system that administrators know and are comfortable with.

The well-managed resident parking permit programs I've lived around do well with the on-street goals; preventing car abandonments, protecting parking places for residents, and generating revenue from ticket fines for the city. Additionally, a nominal fee for the permits generates addditional fee revenue. Providence hasn't turned the corner on the realization that fees are more effective than fines, because citizens are paying for something they want.

I doubt that a resident permit program would control overcrowding very well. Resident permits would have some proof of residency requirements, and a limitation per unit on the number of permits. But if you are motivated enough to park in your front yard, you are probably motivated enough to find a way around these limits to get a permit, even if you are the third vehicle in a unit (or renting one of the myriad illegal third floor apartments in the city!).

Housing enforcement, which has barely had a heartbeat in recent history, would have to work a lot harder to enforce zoning laws directly. Today, they rather than relying on the parking ban to reduce housing violations, as they hope for today.

City News: David Alexis, Providence Sound Session

2007-07-19T11:48:00.000-05:00

From the City News interview series...

Providence Sound Session’s Mas Camp Manager David Alexis: “Come on down. Come bring costumes. You’ll have a great time!”

A decade ago, Trinidad native and Providence resident David Alexis had the opportunity to meet Donald King, Providence Black Rep’s Artistic Director, at a theater production at Brown University. They formed a friendship that took them to a place where West Indian and Afro-Caribbean culture was influencing the art and music of the neighborhoods – specifically, Brooklyn in 1997.

David invited Donald to the annual J’ouvert Carnival – a celebration of Caribbean folklore, culture, and religion. The Carnival tradition is based on five disciplines: Steel Pan, Calypso, Soca, DJ-ing, and Mas (short for Masquerade). Its origins date back to the 1800s when emancipated African slaves in the West Indies adopted and reformed the French Mardi Gras festivities into their own celebratory gatherings. Many of them would transform their homes into so-called “mas camps,” a type of headquarters for the costumes they’d don at the parades.

The 4th Annual Providence Sound Session, which kicked off this past Sunday, will conclude on Saturday, July 21, with its own unique, homespun version of this festive tradition. In the parade will be many participants and volunteers from the Black Rep Mas Camp, who have been hard at work assembling colorful attires in honor of this year’s parade theme, “Divine Providence.”

City News catches up with David to talk about the history and the future of the mas camp ritual.

Tell us briefly about the origins of Mas Camp. How did it come to be a part of Sound Session?

I’d go back to taking Donald to Brooklyn for him to witness masquerade and parade, and then taking him to Trinidad where there are big parades and camps where costumes are made. He observed the atmosphere that was built around it and we decided that we would bring that element here to Sound Session with the parade.

The parade and mas camp started three years ago when we just decided to make costumes, jump in the parade, and have fun. In 2006, we decided to be more constructive and have it more organized. So we decided to use downstairs (at the basement of the Black Rep), we got materials and made costumes. People came in and did their own thing, made their own costumes and we entered the parade and had fun!

You’re from Trinidad …

Yes, I am.

What is the historic connection of mas camp to the West Indies?

It goes back to Carnival. It happens many places in the world. It has been said that the French brought it, yes they did, but Africans always had forms of celebration. When African slaves worked in the Caribbean, the French were the rulers, the plantation owners. The slaves observed the festivities that the French had around the Lenten season, which is forty days before Easter. The slaves weren’t a part of it but they observed. These types of celebration were the types of pomp and circumstance, where they showcased the best that they had, go to people’s houses and make costumes.

The slaves were emancipated in 1834, and in 1838 they took to the streets and celebrated – that was August the 1st. It is during that time that they used to celebrate with drums and other instruments that they had. In 1881, they started to celebrate at night and bring torches and drums, but the public did not like that. They didn’t like torches because of fire for one and they didn’t like the noise. So, many tried to stop these celebrations. But the emancipated slaves fought back and started the Camboulay Riots.

Camboulay means “cane burning,” taken from the form of rebellion used by the slaves against their masters where they would burn the sugar cane fields. What would happen is that the masters would call upon other plantation owners to send over their slaves to put out the fires. This, in turn, became a reason for the slaves to meet and gather. They met from different plantations, sang songs, and participated in a celebration. “Cane burning,” or Camboulay is where they met.

So, the festivities in the Caribbean were one, Marti Gras, or the French celebration that took place forty days before Easter and two, Camboulay, by the slaves that was celebrated on August 1st. Eventually, Camboulay was abolished and they were told to join the Marti Gras festivities instead. The slaves wanted to have a whole week to celebrate but they were denied that, and well, the slaves were so eager to celebrate they couldn’t wait until the morning parade, so they began the ritual of celebrating at 12:01 (just past midnight!).

At their camps, (the mas camps) is where they’d get their food and get their costumes. It was their form of separation from the Marti Gras festivities. It is the process for the parade. The parade happened one day or two days but the process (at mas camp) took a long time to build the costumes. Mas is short for Masquerade.

Similar gatherings have taken place in other cities in the U.S. and the Caribbean, what makes the Providence version unique?

Oh! It is unique. First off, most of these parades happen during the day. This one happens at night! That makes it unique in itself.

What is the importance of assembling a Mas Camp today? What does it signify and how does it benefit the participants?

The significance is that it brings people together. It brings families together. First off, the parents are the ones that are sewing the costumes and they bring the kids along and the kids participate and watch what’s happening. Obviously, it’s a place where people come together and they meet new people, they meet new friends.

Making the costumes, sometimes is a strict, stringent type of activity and so for fun, we have volunteers who come and bring food, tell jokes, and you know – make it easier on the workers who are volunteering.

So the significance is bringing people together.

Tell us about the theme of this year’s Mas Camp and Parade, “Divine Providence.”

We came up with that theme because we know that Providence has a history of slavery. Also today, we have a lot of immigrants in Rhode Island here. To them, it’s Divine Providence! Just to come here and to look for a better life that Providence would provide.

Caitlin Beck, who is a graphic designer, did some images for us and came up with a concept for the theme. The concept touches upon Providence with its history of slavery, combined with the symbolism of the water (through which many slave ships have passed). So she took the concept of water as a symbol and so most of the costumes come from that theme.

What were some of the attires/costumes people should expect to see?

We have six different sections; each section comprises fifteen to twenty people. We have three sections of women and three for the men. For the women, the sections are Sirens, Calypso, and Skimp. For the men, they are Sea Warriors, Fishermen, and the Sea Monster. Also, we have people that are coming in doing their own thing. These are concepts that we make but people can come in to the mas camp, use their own materials, and make whatever they want to make; or you can make your costume at home and come to the parade and have a good time.

What goes into making them?

We have some people sewing here with some assistance and people come in periodically and whenever they can to the mas camp to volunteer. It definitely is a real group effort.

How many participants and volunteers do you expect to see this year?

Just for the Black Rep/Divine Providence group alone, we expect to get at least sixty to eighty people here – that doesn’t include those that will be coming in with their own costumes. So this will be very big!

For the parade, we also have a Bolivian group coming with fifty dancers and beautiful costumes. We have a Polynesian group coming – so it’s very diverse. So, this is not just a West Indian-derived thing, it’s all different nationalities coming together doing their thing!

We also do lots of outreach to the community in Providence. Eventually, we’d like to do workshops with them, show them how to make masks, make costumes and come and participate. It is our goal to teach our kids to make masquerades all year long.

Now that a tradition that originated in your native land has finally come to Providence, through Sound Session, how does that make you feel?

I take pride in that. I’m very happy to see that it’s not just a Caribbean thing because most of the people that are working in the camp, some of them have never even seen a West Indian parade! But it’s all a work of art and we are an artistic company here. So I’m happy to see another art form that is accepted at the Black Rep.

What do you want to tell people about Sound Session?

Be a part of Black Rep! Be a part of Sound Session! Come on down. Come bring costumes. You’ll have a great time!

Providence Sound Session is produced by the Providence Black Rep in partnership with Mayor Cicilline and the Department of Art, Culture and Tourism. The festival runs through this Saturday, July 21. For more info on concert schedules, festival events and partners, and the parade route, go to www.providencesoundsession.com.

Identity in the Hackable City

2007-07-12T21:29:00.000-05:00

Over at The Place of Social Media, Eric Gordon is starting a discussion on what the emergence of social media means for cities, communities, and the individuals who live in them. He makes a great point, that "digitally annotated physical communities often rely on the full disclosure of identity for their functionality. For instance, when it comes to neighborhood issues – it is important to know one’s real name and location."

So as we more fully engage with our civic society through digital means, our identities and opinions may be more extensively tracked; an unintended but logical outcome of digital democracy.

At the same time, American cities, like corporations, are glomming onto digital media because of its populist resonances. They are paying attention to online neighborhoods and seeking to aggregate that data into meaningful information. The ideology of digital media – as evidenced in the phrases “participatory media” and “user-generated content” – is accessibility. Digital media directly aligns the rhetoric of progress with the rhetoric of populism. Social web media makes explicit what has only been implied in the recent rhetoric of city governments – that anyone, regardless of social position, can participate in the ordering of city experience and politics.

City News: Michelle Ahlborg, Federal Hill Commerce Association

2007-07-06T13:56:00.000-05:00

From the City News interview series...

Federal Hill Commerce Association’s New President Michelle Ahlborg Monitors Providence’s HeartBeat

Six years ago, opening a business on Atwells Avenue was merely a dream for marketing and communications executive, Michelle Ahlborg, who is thrilled to finally be running her firm, A&M Productions, on the street she calls, “the heartbeat of Providence.” But more than just being a business owner, Michelle carries some passion and vision for the neighborhood business district that is also one of the most popular tourist destinations in the City.

A fresh new outlook combined with a true love for her neighborhood might just have won Michelle her newest role on Federal Hill, as the president of the Federal Hill Commerce Association. Even with a well-established popularity among natives and visitors alike, Federal Hill could just be getting a new sense of vitality and community under Michelle’s leadership.

She talks at-length with City News about current beautification projects underway and encourages anyone who visits or lives there to get out of their cars and start strolling along the Atwells Avenue strip. Based on her experiences, you might still find some of the best-kept secrets in town.

As the new president of the Federal Hill Commerce Association, what do you plan to bring to the table?

I have a tremendous amount of goals – both long-term and short-term. In the short term are some of the things you’re seeing out here now: working with the Mayor’s Office and the Neighborhood Markets Program, doing the tree-planting, and we’ll have a total of about eighty hanging baskets by next spring.

We plan on doing large planters on the sidewalks as well. We’re looking to do wrought-iron garbage cans. Those are the surface beautification things but there are many other things that are so much deeper.

Parking is a situation up here. Everyone’s very aware of it and I’m working with Bernard Lebby (City Traffic Engineer) on a site plan to make these streets work better and to better organize the parking situation.

I’m also hoping to work with the Mayor’s office to get compacting dumpsters so we can manage the garbage better. That’s a real important situation for us.

What I’d like to see happen in the long term is to work on storefronts, and to try to keep some kind of historical feel to a lot of the fronts of the buildings up here. This is not to say that we’d keep people from coming in or not coming in but rather to make suggestions on how the storefronts can stay the look of what Federal Hill has been known to be.

Another thing that is very, very important to me is creating a community up here – people working together, people working as a team to better Federal Hill as a whole, to not be individualized but to look at the whole area as an important piece of Providence that we all work together at to maintain what it is, and to keep its reputation as the heartbeat of the City. It’s the heartbeat of Providence and so we all need to put our hearts in to it to make sure that actually happens.

In your opinion, what are some of the facets of Federal Hill that make it so attractive to do business in, to live in, to work in, and to visit?

Federal Hill is an amazing, amazing area. It has such charm and character -- character in individuals as well as visual character. We know we have some of the best restaurants and that’s our thing, but we have some fabulous boutiques and shops and art galleries. I mean there’s so much in this little, tiny space!

It’s easy to access everything. Another goal of mine is to get people on foot up here. Until I really started walking Atwells Ave, I had no idea of these wonderful little hidden shops. What people don’t know is that they’re here unless they get out of their cars and walk.

I’ve always wanted to be in a neighborhood all my life, where you know everybody. You walk in and you can walk into any restaurant and you feel comfortable and you feel safe. As a female going in to any of these spaces by myself – that’s a huge asset to me.

I love the idea that you can buy some of the greatest cheeses in the world, and the best bread – I love on Sundays you can smell it everywhere and people are lining up and they’re sold out of bread by noontime. I mean there’s just so much –and now we’re starting to get music up here.

Where do you see the future of Federal Hill heading?

We really want to bring in more music and art to the district. We want to have it where on Saturdays you’ll see strolling musicians, or saxophone players in the park, artists painting – and then you’ll be able to buy their CDs or buy their artwork. And a lot of these young students or young musicians, these young artists are trying to make a name for themselves. That should be available up here on Saturdays or Sundays, and even during the week, having people up here constantly to decorate the streets with talent.

Again – generating people on foot. We want people to be able to come up here and stroll. There’s nothing better than having good food, hearing good music, and chatting with good people. There’s nothing better than that in a neighborhood and that’s what Federal Hill is but hopefully it’ll have a lot more of it!

Tell us about how the Neighborhood Markets Program worked for you.

The Neighborhood Markets Program is a god-send to us. We were granted $25,000 through them. The hanging baskets, the tree-planting, is all from that. There’s still money left over which we hope to use to buy new garbage cans and to continue to beautify the area. We, on our own, have hired people to water the plants. We’re getting community service people to clean up the streets and we’re buying them t-shirts that say Federal Hill Commerce Association. The Neighborhood Markets program money is so important to us that I couldn’t do any of the things I’m doing right now without it and I look forward to going back when the time comes to get another grant.

There are so many fabulous programs that come out of the Mayor’s Office and the City – people aren’t aware of it and I think it’s important that that message gets out there. That’s why I have that (Neighborhood Markets sticker) on my front door is because I want people to know that there are places for us to go. We can go and ask for help. City Hall can’t manage every little street corner, but you can do it as a neighborhood if you go and say, ‘if you can help get the funds, we’ll do that job.’ That’s all we care about and that’s what the Neighborhood Markets Program does for us.

Federal Hill is one of the more established neighborhood business districts in our City. We all know that there are other similar areas in Providence that are trying to achieve that same vitality in their neighborhoods as well. How does your work extend itself to other neighborhoods or business areas in Providence?

It comes down to one simple ingredient – power in numbers, people working together. If you can work together and really envision your area – whatever it is – as a whole, and not individuals. I think a downfall with many areas is people being too individualized and not seeing the big picture. It’s crucial because the way it works is when everyone works together, comes together – comes to meetings, participates, have an opinion.

It should never be one group running a whole area. It should be one group implementing the thoughts of many. That’s how it has to work. If you don’t form that early on as a foundation, you’re not going anywhere because you have people separated and butting heads and not making those decisions as a group. Once you get them to that point, and you get them on the same page so to speak, it’s endless.

When you have so many merchants in such a condensed area, it takes very little financially from everybody to really make a huge difference. It’s also extremely important for associations to have someone that’s really good at grant writing.

People working together in spite of the differences in business character or offering?

Right. People need to see past that. It’s an issue in every single business district because people are competitive and it’s good to be competitive. Competition is healthy but they have to say, ‘if the area does well, we all do well.’ That’s the key. I know that if we pack this place, we’re all going to be packed but if we start thinking that ‘it’s just about me,’ nobody wins.

Well let’s talk about you. Your business seems to be a unique one in this area, among rows of restaurants and boutiques, here you are, a film/video/interactive media company. Tell us what you do and how you think your business contributes to the character of Federal Hill.

It is an unusual business to have on Atwells Ave. But again, my heart of hearts is on Federal Hill and personally that’s why I want to be here.

A&M Productions has been a part of Federal Hill for five and a half years. We were on West Exchange and my dream was to be on Atwells Avenue. I was so excited when I came in here.

My business is an internal-external communication and marketing firm. If you have a message, we relay it to whatever form of media that is – whether it’s a television commercial, radio, through internet, through website, DVD sales, video – whatever they are – we take that message that you have and we distribute it to the audience that you’re looking to distribute it to.

Me being up here, for the association, the asset is that I’ve created a new website for the Federal Hill Commerce Association, which is going to be fabulous. We’re doing that pro bono, we’re just giving that to the association. And I think that I can help market Federal Hill so that’s what I’ll give back to the community is marketing the community as a gift to them, so to speak.

I hope that it really comes back ten-fold and that people really see a lot more of Federal Hill and how great it really is. If I can reach an audience that we haven’t touched before, I’d be real tickled about that.

People do tend to see Atwells Avenue as Federal Hill.

Exactly and it’s not. Federal Hill is a large area. Broadway is a part of us, even though most of the businesses are professional offices for doctors and lawyers but we’d like to see a few more shops over there. There are some great restaurants over there as well, but we really want to start encompassing Broadway to be more of a part of Federal Hill, even though it is Federal Hill, it sometimes gets separated and we want to pull it back in.

And another thing that is important to me is involving the residents. I want to see residents get involved. We’re trying to form garden clubs, like for people who want to come out and help plant. If we purchase the plants for them, would they come out and plant? And neighborhood clean-ups, getting the neighborhood to take pride in their areas, which many people do – we have phenomenal residents – but we want to see that spread a little more. We’re hoping that everyone kinda’ catches that and wants to really clean up the area. Stop the graffiti, stop the junk that goes on, and just make for Broadway to Atwells, which are the gateways to this area, to make the whole place just be gorgeous.

Even as the interview wraps up, Michelle’s enthusiasm for Federal Hill continues to spill out of her. This passion could just be a testament to how much you can really get done and see while you’re strolling along Atwells Avenue. To learn more, visit www.federalhillri.org.

City News: Gail Daniel, St. Martin De Porres Senior Center

2007-06-29T15:28:00.000-05:00

From the Providence City News Series...

If presiding over 4 children, 14 grandchildren, and 11 great grandchildren isn’t enough for family matriarch Gail Daniel to keep her on her toes, volunteering and participating in the multitude of daily activities at the St. Martin De Porres senior center keeps this 72-year old busy for sure.

Rooted deeply in Providence, Gail stays very much involved in her community and is well aware of the important role that neighbors and family members play in helping our City’s seniors stay mentally and physically active. Even with an arthritic back and an ailing knee, Gail makes it to the center, as she does almost everyday, to meet and assist her peers.

She takes the time to talk to City News about the value of hard work, keeping active, and doing building relationships with your community.

How long have you lived in Providence?

My whole life -- I’m 72 years old and I was born in Providence and I’ve lived my whole life in Providence.

What neighborhoods have you lived in?

I was born on the East Side and I lived there until I was maybe 22, and then I moved to South Providence. I lived in South Providence until I was maybe 30 and then I moved to Marlborough Avenue (in the Elmwood section) and I lived there for oh! – a lot of years – I don’t remember exactly how many years! And then I moved past Roger Williams Park. I bought a house there and lived there for about 20 years. Now I live with my daughter on Potters Avenue (in South Providence).

What do you like most about your neighborhood(s) and the City?

I worked in the federal court and traveled all over. Providence is my home and I wouldn’t want to live any place else. I like to go to other places on vacation but I want to live here.

Why? What has made it home for you?

Well, for one thing – the four seasons. I’ve been to the south, I’ve been up north. They get a lot of snow up north and they get a lot of heat in the south. Providence – we get hot weather, we get a hurricane every now and then but for the most part the weather is ideal.

The people are great. I remember when we had the blizzard of ’78 and for a week I couldn’t go to work. No matter where you went – up the street, down the block – everybody was very helpful. They talked to you and you talked to them. Storekeepers were very nice. Even if you didn’t have the money, they still gave you the food. After the week was over, they cleaned up everything and people were back to doing what they were doing before but for that week, it was really, really great.

Even now, I find – since I have this arthritis on my knee and I sit on my porch a lot – I find that there are different ethnicities (in my neighborhood). There are Asians there, Puerto Ricans there, Blacks there. I sit on my porch and they go by and wave. I wave to them. My new neighbors introduce themselves to me and I introduce myself to them. I dropped my cane on the ground and the kids came and picked it up for me. So, it’s that kind of stuff that makes it nice to live here. You know. For the most part, I don’t want to live any place else.

What are some of the changes you’ve seen in your lifetime since you’ve lived in Providence?

Oh! A lot of changes!

What stands out the most for you?

I think Mayor Cicilline is doing a good job. He’s come here to the Center and I’ve met him in a lot of different things. He’s done a lot for the City.

I have to say that the one thing I’m really thankful to Mayor Cicilline for is the new garbage bins (The Big Green Can). We had a lot of rats in our neighborhood and I have to say that with his help, it’s been a cleaner city. Because the bins close, the rats have no place to go, no place to eat. I have to say that’s one of the good things that have happened.

How do you stay active as a senior? Tells us about the activities you participate in at the St. Martin de Porres Senior Center.

I try to stay active. I come to the center every day, just about. We have a program called the St. Martin de Porres Family Guild, which started thirty years ago. I wasn’t old enough to belong to the guild at the time but I belonged to the guild because my mother was a senior.

The family guild was made up of children and grandchildren of seniors to help them raise money, do some of their activities – like we ran a bingo for them for a lot of years to support them.

Today, I’m the president of the family guild. I’m also the president of the FACTS committee here and we do a lot of things to raise money for our director at the center and to help her with the budget.

They have a lot of programs going on here: a computer class, exercise class, arts & crafts class, Bible study class. So, every day there’s something going on and it’s a chance to come out and meet with your peers. Rather than sitting at home by myself seven days a week, I can come here five days a week and meet with my friends and we talk about things.

Once a week, they have programs to give seniors information about medical issues, or housing, or whatever so we get a lot of information from our director and her staff. Then, in the afternoon, we play cards. So there’s always something going on here. We enjoy it very much.

I’m on the nutrition council too which is part of Meals on Wheels. We sit down and go over the meals before they’re given out to the centers. Every center is involved in it and I enjoy that. We get to meet the managers of the meal site and tell them what we like and dislike and they’re all very nice.

So, yeah – I’m also on that council. Let’s see what else do I do ….

Oh yeah! I helped with the Mayor’s Night Club at Noon program last week and that was a big success. We had a lot of fun with that. We do a lot of things!

It’s terrific that you are so active in your community. Why do you think it’s important for seniors to remain active?

Coming to the center is one of the things that keep them active. Most seniors live alone. There are some that live with their family like me I live with my daughter but she works two jobs so I’m at home basically by myself during the day anyway.

It gives me a chance to come out and keep my brain and mind active by talking with other seniors and doing something. You know, you sit at home and watch TV all day and after awhile your brain is not working and you get in a rut. I see a lot of seniors that get sick and die because they do that and they don’t come and meet with other people.

I swore when I first retired I was not going to be one of those that came to the center five days a week! Well, I’m here five days a week! My leg feels bad today but I still came today because I can’t just sit at home. I have to get up and move. So I got up and got dressed and came to the center. And that’s the story of my life!

What do you tell your peers about staying active?

I just tell them to come out and join us. We try to do programs here.

Oh! I forgot to say that we do a bingo here three days a week and they get a lot of seniors that come out for that. And I just try to tell them just to stay active, come to the center because we do a lot of things. We try to do a program once a month something different just so seniors can come out and see what we’re doing.

We have one of the larger meal sites here and people come and have lunch. A lot of times when you’re at home by yourself you don’t eat right either but here you get a nutritious meal five days a week and a chance to talk to your peers.

We laugh a lot and play cards a lot! It’s just fun.

What is the wisdom you impart to younger generations about life?

The younger generation is nothing like the older generation, okay?! I have a grandson (I have a lot of grandsons) who lives with me that works at Walgreens. He’s always late but he’s right around the corner from the job. I tell him, ‘you couldn’t work for me!’

In my day, you got a job, you stayed there, you went to work everyday unless you were really sick, and you went to work on time. The generation today they don’t care about anything like time, they don’t care about staying on the job, they move around a lot, but --- I can understand that because jobs have changed.

In my day, if you stayed with a job, you got an excellent pension when you retire. Nowadays, those pensions have changed into IRAs and all that stuff where if you put your money in then you’ll have money when you retire. And so, in a lot of these jobs today, kids don’t feel like they should stay in a job. They hop from job to job to job. This is one of the big changes I see in the workforce today.

So I tell my grandchildren to stay in school, get a good education, and if you’re in the workforce, go to work and go on time and do the best you can regardless of the circumstance. That’s what I instill in them.

Gail had a long career in the federal court system in Providence that spanned three decades, retired, got bored, and got a job as a surveillance officer at the Foxwoods Casino – a job she stayed in for seven years while commuting back-and-forth from Providence to Connecticut, then she retired again. She’s intimated that she’s thinking about coming out of retirement for a second time and is looking to get a new job again! For this active senior, nothing – not even a bad knee – keeps her from making sure her day is jam-packed with stimulating activities, while at the same time, inspires others to do the same.

If you or a member of your family is a senior and are interested in participating at the St. Martin de Porres Senior Center, you can call 401-274-6783 or visit them at 160 Cranston Street.

The Rise of the Pro-Am (Part I)

2007-06-21T20:50:00.000-05:00

Part of developing a hackable society is having a community of users who also feel willing to engage and capable to contribute. In the past, this has not been the pattern of cities. Experts - politicians, technocrats, and their close associates in law or business - made decisions in small circles where knowledge and power were highly circumscribed. Citizens - residents and employees - lived with these decisions, or they could push back against them in elections, pickets, protests, or strikes. Co-creation was impossible in a world where only one group had all the knowledge and power.

Today we are witnessing something much different - the rise of the Pro-Am Citizen. Pro-Am stands for "Professional Amateur", and it was coined by Charles Leadbetter, a social scientist in Britain in a 2004 white paper. Leadbetter's thesis, that a fundamental shift in knowledge and power from centralized to diffuse and distributed was allowing amateurs, who had the enthusiasm to work to professional standards, to play an increasingly important role in shaping our societies and economies.

I'm not going to restate Leadbetter's ideas here, but they are a good read, and his group and others have documented the Pro-Am revolution around the world. What I love is seeing the emergence of Pro-Am cultures here in Providence, because they are hackability at work.

Here's a few recent examples:

The Urban Planet Discussion Board: filled with urbanist fan-boys and powered by a core of pro-am urban planners, this group more exhaustively and publicly documents new buildings, restorations, parks, and other planning developments than any official forum ever could. Using low-barrier internet tools like Google Earth, Map mashups and photo sites, they offer and discuss alternatives for development projects in ways that were previously the purview of architects and city planners.

Witness the unfolding tackling of the Vista Della Toro, a planned luxury hi-rise in Federal Hill. Planned on vacant lots, this big-ticket project would historically have been unveiled to the city when it broke ground, way past critical city meetings and design reviews. UP's pro-am's spotted up the early signs of the developer clearing critical and controversial city zoning hurdles, showed up at the city meetings, found and publicized the planned design. UP's pro-am core of "plan-atics" ably critiqued the project's fit with Providence's comprehensive plan, and proposed alternate design options with visuals on the UP website.

The East Side Public Education Coalition: what started as a traditional protest movement has become a highly influential pro-am education reform group. In 2006, a group of residents, parents and teachers on the East Side of Providence who are passionate about public education and neighborhood schools got together to protest the closing of Nathan Bishop Middle School, the only middle school on the East Side. Since a mutual abandonment between East Side parents and Nathan Bishop had decimated neighborhood attendance in the 70's and 80's, the Providence Public School district was right to ask whether East Siders would show up to recommit to a public middle school if Nathan Bishop was reinvented and reinvigorated.

What followed was a fascinating evolution, as ESPEC realized the "experts" didn't have all the answers, and needed someone on the other end of the line to co-create a new school. ESPEC's pro-ams have engaged and held accountable the City and school district, held open forum debates on the structure and organization of a new Nathan Bishop, advocated at the policy and state education funding levels, and worked with the district-hired architectural firm on new school design options. Their blog and use of internet advocacy tools like CitizenSpeak have made them the go-to resource for other local groups looking to shape their local education environment.

In Part II I'll look at what these pro-am groups have in common, and how the city could embrace these pro-am citizens to co-create the next version of Providence.

City News: Harry Papavasilou, Dairy King

2007-06-04T06:24:00.000-05:00

From the City News interview series...

My Business: Cranston Street Dairy King Harry Papavasilou doesn’t do it for the money

This Wednesday, one of the warmer days we’ve had so far, many people were flocking to their favorite lemonade and ice cream stands to cool off. One such destination in Providence has been around for almost half a century, and in the last three decades, Greek immigrants Harry Papavasilou, and his wife Penny, have been serving their popular banana boats and sundaes at the Dairy King Ice Cream on Cranston Street.

With eager young faces waiting in line, and tons of flavor combinations and sweet treats to choose from, Harry takes a few minutes off a busy, hot day to chat briefly with City News about why he loves his job.

How long have you owned the Dairy King?

I’ve owned the business for 29 years, since 1978.

Tell us how you got into the ice cream shop business.

My cousin owned the Dairy King before me. I wanted to try something different. I wanted to go into my own business.

Is it a seasonal business?

Yes, April through September.

And your hours?

11 to 11, Monday through Sunday.

What do you like most about doing business in the Cranston Street neighborhood?

I like the job because I’m good with people. I like working with people everyday.

In the last 29 years, what changes have you seen in the neighborhood?

Oh a lot. Every year, there’s something different. There’s more people, different kind of people – and they come here. I’ve never had a problem. I know everybody! And I’ve known them since they were babies!

Why do you think the neighbors like the Dairy King so much?

I take care of my customers. They love me and I love them. They call me by my first name – all the kids and their families. And everybody comes here, not just from Providence, but from everywhere. They’ve known about the Dairy King for a long time.

I’m very friendly with my customers. Some people they do this for the money. No – I do it because I love my customers. I love the people.

What’s the most popular item on the menu?

Sundaes, banana boats – and on hot days, frozen lemonade.

Can you tell us what’s in your frozen lemonade?

No, I cannot.

Well, I thought I’d ask. Okay, what is the difference between a Cabinet and a Milkshake?

It’s all the same thing. Different places call it different things. Some call it cabinets, some call it milkshakes, and some call it frappes. It’s a regional thing.

Why do you like this type of work?

Because I like it. If I wasn’t doing this, I’d be doing something else!

If you’re passing by Cranston Street, you won’t miss the Dairy King. Just follow the long line of happy customers to Harry’s stand. The Dairy King is located on 472 Cranston Street.

Embracing Hackability

2007-06-01T20:56:00.000-05:00

This week I had a visit from a fellow in Atlanta who is struggling to create positive change and a more engaged society in his own city. He's a frequent visitor to Providence, and marveled at our manageable scale, overlapping social networks, and cool groups and organizations. He loved the idea of a hackable city, where the citizens could co-create and re-invent their communities, sharing the best building blocks.

While we talked, I was half agitated, and half excited. Excited because we really do have a chance to do city-building differently in Providence. I've been to a lot of cities, and we have a rare combination of elements that make hackability possible, in a way that will never be true for Atlanta (trust me, I've lived there). Agitated because there is so much being left on the table. Every minute that a high school student, a new immigrant, a small business owner, a retiree is not engaged in co-creating their city is potential wasted. Every time we choose not to "share the code" of our neighborhoods, organizations, and city government - too much effort, too uncomfortable - is a missed opportunity to turn the virtuous circle faster.

A big part of the challenge is that we have no common language for sharing this stuff, and no place to go look for it. Before the 80's, our common language was built and shared in old style social institutions - churches, elks clubs, knitting circles, bowling teams. These thick threads of social fabric were the keepers of the local code, though their open source was highly localized.

Today: mobile, dispersed, distracted, digital. Our localized social institutions haven't kept up, so in our scarce leisure time we've retreated to home-and-hearth, or taken our social life virtual. Unfortunately, this has allowed our civic government to retreat within itself and harden its edges - for the past 20 years, no one really wanted to plug in anyway.

"Yeah", you say, "we've heard this social deconstruction riff before." True, but I don't think anyone's asking the next question. How do we move social and civic engagement to what's next? Not the incremental stuff, run a charette,have an open meeting policy, put a citizen services portal online. What will truly energize people to plug in, and to create new social environments with each other that are authentic?

Old and young are creating their own social structures that work for them. Retirees are moving to active senior communities. Mothers are using online discussion groups for support and self-expression. 40 year old guys are forming custom (dare I say - hackable) Harley clubs.

Our neighborhoods and cities must keep up, and leapfrog to what's next.

Providence City News: David Gonzalez, AS220 Rhode Show

2007-05-24T23:03:00.000-05:00

From the City News interview series...

My City: AS220’s Rhode Show Coordinator David Gonzalez Fosters Young People’s Life Skills Through Art

This summer, when “Celebrate Providence” makes its way back into your local neighborhood parks, a handful of the City’s most talented performing artists will be on hand to showcase their best work. Among them, The Rhode Show, the youth performance troupe from AS220 led by 28-year old David Gonzalez.

Formerly housed at the Broad Street Studio on Norwich Avenue, The Rhode Show (comprised mostly of young people from the Rhode Island Training School) has made its way back in to AS220’s downtown headquarters on Empire Street.

At the recording studio, Dave takes City News behind the scenes to talk hip hop, their new CD project, and the importance of young people’s voices.

What is the Rhode Show and how did it come about? Who is involved in it?

The Rhode Show is a performance troupe dealing with young people age 20 and under. Like Broad Street Studio, we work with kids that are incarcerated in the Rhode Island Training School, which is the youth adjudication system in Rhode Island. We also work with kids in DYCF care and then kids in the community.

The funding then came from the Word! Movement from the Department of Health, so they were this anti-tobacco performance troupe, going around doing little skits and plays about just anti-tobacco things, which was pretty cool and interesting at the same time.

I was transitioning out of the Broad Street manager position here and I wanted to do the performance arts projects. So they made me the performance arts director and one of the programs was the Rhode Show. From that point, I tried to change it to more of kids creating their own universe and fighting against evil businesses that attack young people.

It was a very vague stretch and I tried hard, but then I started realizing that the AS220 mission itself was very alternative and very anti-corporate. So kids doing art for art’s sake was what the Rhode Show turned into – like young people educated about art and doing various art projects.

A big part of my endeavor is also the re-claiming of the hip hop culture, trying to get the kids to go back to the elements which is the rebellion stage of hip hop. Put all that together and we have a performance troupe that we sell as an earned income model for Broad Street Studio. Broad Street Studio teaches a lot of workshops and we’re very grant-oriented for funding and we’re trying to change some of that to some earned income from kids’ CDs and products of the arts.

And have you started to develop some CDs for the Rhode Show already?

(Dave hands over a CD).

So, those (the CD compilation) are three projects altogether. The Rhode Show, in the past, has done collaboration with Festival Ballet. It was good. It was fun. It was interesting.

We wrote a couple of pieces to Sebastian Bach. We sampled Sebastian Bach, made hip hop pieces out of it, got some really really dope stuff. One of them on the CD is a young girl that came from the RI Training School into the Rhode Show, made this piece called “Her Last” and it really exposed the ballet audience to a subject matter they didn’t even think about hearing. It was really cool. Three shows sold out so we were really excited about it.

How do the kids in the Rhode Show get selected to be part of it?

There’s an audition process and anybody who’s interested in the Rhode Show automatically gets accepted if they audition. So there’s no rejection or anything like that.

One of things about the Rhode Show is that you have to be here all the time. There is no taking off. So if you can’t come, we ask you to leave and wait until you can make the commitment.

Tell us about some of the projects that you have done or are doing. What is the general subject matter of your performances and how does that get crafted?

When we first started off, the Rhode Show created this concept directly for the Arts, Culture and Tourism department. We created this concept called “Add-A-Lessons,” (derived from the word Adolescence) which is the third thing on the CD. “Add-A-Lessons” was this combination of youth issues brought up by young people through hip hop.

We wanted to cover everything that everyone has ever discouraged or disregarded because of age-ism, like thinking that kids going to school isn’t as important as someone going out to get a job. As a matter of fact, you see that some of the troubles and obstacles that are in school are very relevant to a young person’s development, which is more crucial than getting a job sometimes.

So we wanted to express some of this stuff. We wanted to express violence in the community, racism in the community, socio-economic status – all these things we just wanted to get out there through a young person’s perspective.

When we go to conferences, it’s thirty-year old white women that are in the education system that are talking about our young people’s development. Those are the majority of the people that go to these conferences about education. None of the young people get to speak and we wanted to make an entire CD speaking to them.

When we started realizing who was hiring us, we noticed that the same conferences that don’t have young people are the same conferences that wanted us to showcase for like twenty seconds and then go. So we wanted to take advantage of the opportunity and make an entire performance just for those conferences. And we called it “Add-A-Lessons.”

So we did an entire body of work with that mentality. It’s like, if we had three minutes and you had something to say to someone, someone who can change something, what would you say? That was the whole concept of “Add-A-Lessons.” Your voice is important and your art is extremely important. We can’t get too far from that because that’s just the work of AS220 in general, is that young voices are important and young artists are the joint!

When we start projects, I really try to get inspirations from two things. This time, it’s been Jean-Michel Basquiat just because in his paintings, the amount of chaos in an organized canvas made sense to us. The other artist is Jurassic Five. Those are our two influences this year. To blend the mentality of ‘all is one.’ So take those two things and we should be creating something new.

Why is the Rhode Show valuable to the young people who are in it? Why is it beneficial to both them and the community at-large?

A former Rhode Show member, 18-year old Alex Baptista, who is visiting from college, joins Dave at the studio. He is asked by Dave to respond to the question.

Alex: The benefit of something like the Rhode Show on an artistic level gives a lot of kids a chance to one, have a lot of respect for the recording process ‘cause I know personally I had no respect for the whole music-making and writing process at all before coming here and meeting someone like Dave who pretty much lives and swears by it. So, I guess one thing you do is you really respect what it means to be an artist and it’s not just some turn that people just kick around, and it’s not something you do for fun. People really use this stuff to survive off of. That’s one beneficial thing I got off it.

On a community standpoint, it really makes people realize the power that a lot of young people have. I know that a lot of the people that were really holding it down were a lot of the young people that were really tenacious about it. And they want to do it and they really want to give back to their communities. This is the way they choose to do it.

Dave, what do you hope your participants will take away when they get involved in the Rhode Show?

It’s very much different agendas for different principles of the program. One is that we are a transitional program for the kids coming from the RI Training School – (as well as) for kids in DCYF care, and then kids from the community that just hear about us from AS220. But our main population is the kids in the training school. We go in and I teach two workshops and also have three 1-on-1s with young people in the RI Training School weekly, with the hopes that that sparks some kind of flame for them to come down here.

Through that, my entire objective is (to develop) life skills through arts. To me, there’s no difference between making a beat and filling out a job application. There really isn’t. It’s the dedication you have in yourself in completing something. Knowing how to finish something is the most important part.

One of our mantras is ‘the person who focuses longer, wins.’ Really trying to get them to understand that everything you do is a focus game. How long can you participate in something and completely be there. It’s very Buddhist-Zen in that we want them to be here, be an artist, and try to validate your artistry. Like don’t say, ‘I’m not a writer,’ when you’re writing. If the kids can understand the principle of that concept, then I think that life skills just come – why do you have to set your alarm in the morning and wake up, why do you have to keep a book of all your dates and calendars, why do you have to go to the things you say you have to go to. I think then if you can really understand that, then I think that’s our entire purpose of being at Broad Street Studio.

Now there’s the other side – which is the business aspect. With AS220’s campaign to resist corporate music, and just hearing how corporations have taken advantage of young people, hearing the young kids reclaim or learn hip hop and make it evolve, shutting off the radio and creating their own world (will allow) us to get them to learn how important their voice is, and that we really have something – something that’s completely unique. Something that’s like traditional old school hip hop with young people’s views and perspectives.

Where is the future heading for the kids of the Rhode Show?

Where I think, in ten years, where AS220 wants to be, is that these young people can live off their art. This is the most important part for me that they have a real tangible means of living off their writing, or their beat-making, traveling through their writing, traveling through their beat-making.

Why do you this work?

This is all Umberto Crenca’s imagination. When I was going from college to college, you know he really saw something in myself that I really didn’t capture yet. And he offered me a job and now it’s this amazing thing. Bert’s aura is something that attracts me to this place.

And I was living off the arts and spoken word and hip hop myself, and he vaguely asked, ‘can you teach kids how to do this?’ And my ignorant self said yes. I didn’t know what I was doing in life then, but helping create the beginning of Broad Street Studio definitely got me invested in the project.

Imagine saying that we aided the process of incarceration by creating an art transitional program. Kids won’t have go to their parole officers, they’re going to their drawing classes – that is cool beans! And that if you don’t paint or draw, that’s how you get in trouble – that’s really dope stuff right there. That mission right there is worth it.

The other part is, I’ve learned so much on AS220’s dime, why give it up? I didn’t know how to record, I didn’t know how to create a studio, and they’ve supported me in learning that process. And that’s a very small part of what I’ve learned here. Learning how to handle myself in a professional manner too.

And I’ll stay here until the kids don’t want me anymore.

If you happen to catch The Rhode Show at your neighborhood park this summer, perhaps you’ll want to bring more than a beach chair and a cool drink to the outdoor performance. There is a deeper message to be taken back for sure, but you might have to come with an open mind and listen real carefully.

The youth of the Rhode Show, including Dave, will have worked tirelessly to cook up some food for thought about the everyday life issues affecting them today. And maybe, we can all catch a glimpse of what’s in store for our future.

To learn more about the AS220 Rhode Show, go to www.as220.org or call 467-0701 and ask for Dave Gonzalez. Log on to the ArtCultureTourism website to get updated schedules and performances for this summer’s neighborhood performing arts initiative.

Spring Blooms in the Hackable City

2007-05-24T22:05:00.000-05:00

Good weather is here, and the hackable events are poppin'. A quick rundown:

Providence Open Market: gotta love how the organizers of this outdoor market [downtown | local vendors | Saturdays] are using the online discussion forums of Urban Planet (see Hackable Places, below left) to communicate to the public, get feedback, and decide what changes to make to this new community experiment. Very smart.

New design for the Waterfront Park: have to give the city props for holding an open competition for the park design, and opening the final designs up for public feedback. Now that the winner has been picked, it deserves its own post, which I'll accomplish later.

ProvFlux 2007: personifying hackability in the art world, ProvFlux "brings together artists, theorists, urban adventurers, and the public to share their visions of what the city can be, and to take action to make it a reality. It is a completely free, unjuried, and 100% participatory event." Run by the Pipsters, which stands for a whole bunch of things, simultaneously. These folks are crazy (in a good way), I think they may be my first Hackable City interview.

Hackable City makes local press

2007-05-22T22:34:00.000-05:00

Out of the blue, I got a call from Providence Business News last week to talk about Hackable City. Working past my fumbling attempts at describing the concept of hackability as applied to an urban community, David Ortiz wrote a good article on the blog and some of the other hackable stuff happening in Providence.

Having said that, I haven't gotten any emails or comments since the paper came out, so perhaps it was unintelligible after all.

Read on for the full story, if you don't have a PBN account to access the article.

Allan Tear is trying to make Providence “hackable” – in a good way.

Tear, an innovation consultant whose firm, Aptus Collaborative, organizes projects for the Business Innovation Factory, has launched a Web log dedicated to exploring ways in which unlikely groups of people in the city are collaborating, forming social networks and seeking to participate in city planning and economic development.

The blog, “Hackable City: Providence,” advocates the notion that open-source philosophy – a movement in the IT industry away from closely guarded, proprietary software and technology platforms toward open, collaborative ones that “hackers” are encouraged to improve upon – can be used to understand social and economic trends occurring in Providence.

Tear said he launched the blog in March to help brand Providence as a bastion for creative-economy types, among other things.

“What I’m really attempting to do is to start documenting … how groups are beginning to work together, and starting to actually create templates that other people can use,” Tear said. “In the technology arena we’re seeing people like Providence Geeks; there’s the stuff that the Business Innovation Factory is doing with the NGen Network. In planning we see a lot of neighborhood groups starting to come together to exchange ideas and actually share best practices and team up working on things like the Providence Plan, the I-195 redevelopment.”

As an example of the “hackable” culture being created in Providence, Tear cites artists and industrial designers from The Steel Yard teaming up with technology experts from Providence Geeks to purchase a 3-D printer and link it to a milling machine at the Steel Yard, enabling both groups to do personal fabrication and rapid prototyping from computer designs and drawings.

There is now a tension within Providence city government, Tear said, between a push to become more “hackable,” or open and inclusive, and a pull to maintain traditional hierarchical and bureaucratic mechanisms of government.

The tension can be seen in the unfolding of the Providence Tomorrow neighborhood planning process, which Tear said was initially intended to be far more inclusive than it has been.

“I think we see the beginnings of some processes which could have some more community ownership,” Tear said. “But actually underlying them, I think, the structures that are running those processes still haven’t quite figured out how to let that happen.”

Regardless of how inclusive those planning processes turn out, an increasingly collaborative and innovative social environment is emerging in Providence, driven by artists, academics, students, entrepreneurs, technology geeks and members of the nonprofit sector, Tear said. The connections they are making may not be front-page news yet, but soon they may have major impacts on public policy and corporate innovation.

“I think that inevitably those people are going to continue to share information, make unusual connections, find ways to reuse what they do in one part of their world into another,” he said.

Tear, 36, a native Midwesterner, moved to Providence’s East Side from Atlanta five years ago. He has become a leading member of the Summit Neighborhood Association, bringing his “hackable” approach to neighborhood organizing.

Under Tear’s direction, the group has created how-to guides for residents seeking to organize block parties, tool exchanges, gardening clubs. One guide focuses on how to resolve disputes with local merchants over traffic, signage and other typical neighborhood issues.

Tear is now revamping the group’s Web site to make the guides available online.

“We’ve moved successively from a model where the neighborhood association’s job was to raise issues and to fight and to be sort of an advocacy group to one that actually builds these little tool kits to give to neighbors to build social capital on a street-by-street level,” Tear said.

“These are codes for social, neighbor-to-neighbor engagement,” he added. “Often you never get above that level of energy that actually starts to create a community, so we’re lowering that barrier to doing this.”

Can You Hack Providence Public Schools ?

2007-05-20T22:28:00.001-05:00

I dance with Providence Public Schools a lot. As a parent of a first grader in a mainstream elementary school. As an internship mentor to a freshman at the MET alternative high school. As a volunteer participant ranging across PTA meetings, the facilities master plan, and the East Side Public Education Coalition. I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about how a hackable education environment would look and feel, and whether its possible from the public school system we have today.

If something in our city and society were to be hackable, to be own-able and edit-able and open to the wisdom and the contribution of the larger community, the education of our youth would be an obvious first choice. But schools carry with them 100 years of tradition, and that tradition doesn't include parents as co-experts and contributors.

So lets start a dialogue, about how students, parents and the community can be invited to "plug in" to the school system, to the life of the classroom, the customization of the curriculum, and the support of the kids.

What should a hackable education look like? How would the "architecture of participation" work? Who should hack - students, parents, community members, teachers?

Are there good examples of education hackability out there in the public or private realm, at a school or even a classroom level ? Can those examples take root in other places? Can they scale ?

How do we get past the can't/won't/shouldn't sclerosis that grips the system ? How do we prove or be accountable to standards as the federal government demands (or do we)? How do we make a hackable education work for as many families as possible ?

I have more questions than answers - this is a problem for the wisdom of the crowd !

Wunderkind from Facebook talks Hackability

2007-05-19T08:56:00.000-05:00

"There's an intense focus on openness, sharing information, as both an ideal and a practical strategy to get things done"

A quote from Mark Zuckerberg, the 22-year old CEO of the internet phenom, Facebook, on redefining "hacker" caught my eye. For those of us who haven't spent time with Facebook, it is making a jump from the place that college kids used to define their online identity, to the place where professionals, groups of common interest, and high schoolers manage their identities and connect with each other. It feels so much more purposeful, less random, than MySpace to me.

Anyway, Zuckerberg was riffing on how "hackability" is really harnessing the power of a larger group, giving them a sense of shared ownership, and enabling them to authentically shape the raw material of a place/technology/community into something that is of value both to them, and the communities they belong to.

"What most people think when they hear the word 'hacker' is breaking into things."

Zuckerberg admits to being a hacker--but only if he's sure you understand that the word means something different to him. To him, hacker culture is about using shared effort and knowledge to make something bigger, better, and faster than an individual can do alone. "There's an intense focus on openness, sharing information, as both an ideal and a practical strategy to get things done," he explains.

The article on Facebook in Fast Company here.

Providence City News: Taylor Ellowitz, Southside Community Land Trust

2007-05-18T08:42:00.000-05:00

From the City News Interview Series...along the same lines of the entry on the NY Sun Works sustainable urban farming project, urban gardens in Providence have been quietly flourishing in the background. However, as property values rise and the affordable housing bond drives infill development, less vacant lots will be available for urban farming, forcing us to think more "out of the lot".

City Farm Manager Rich Pederson and SCLT’s Outreach & Development Director Taylor Ellowitz talks with City News about the value of buying from and sharing goods with your neighbors.

How did the Annual Plant Sale come to be?

Taylor: It’s been 26 years since a group of Brown graduates, who lived just behind where the city farm is now, took this abandoned property and, along with the Hmong residents that lived in this neighborhood, began preserving the land for growing food. When they first began, they operated a microgreen business and would sell their produce to local restaurants.

Over the last four years, the plant sale has really grown. It started at about 400 people to about 1,400 in attendance last year. It’s a big fundraiser for us and helps support our programs.

How does it benefit the SCLT?

T: It raises money for our education programs. We’re funded partly by grants and individual donations, so we really rely on the plant sale to help subsidize our programs.

City Farm is also an educational site. We hold adult programs and children’s workshops throughout the summer. We have about 200 children who are sent from various community groups like the YMCA, Project Outreach, and the Boys & Girls Clubs. One of their summer activities is to come to the farm.

But in large part, the plant sale also meets our mission because we’re able to provide people in the city with plants and food for their backyard and window boxes.

It’s also just a great community event, a lot of fun, brings people together, with live music – it’s just a very festive event!

Rich, what is your role as the City Farm Manager?

Rich: I work in the greenhouses. I prepare the farm for the two farmers markets that we sell food at – Parade Street and Hope High School.

When are those starting up again?

R: Parade Street farmers market opens June 19 and Hope High School starts June 9.

Great, what else do you do?

R: I work with volunteers. I teach classes, both formally and informally. We teach at conferences on topics like community/public service. I work with college and high school students at the farm with a sweat equity approach.

Why do you choose to do this type of work?

R: I really like the people I work with. I really like working outside with plants. I’ve been here for six years now. I feel like my work brings to neighbors in the community the opportunity to share knowledge and uses for their own benefit.

Tell us about the selection of plants this year.

R: Thousands of plants have been started here. I estimate about 15,000 mostly medicinal and culinary herbs, and annual and perennial flowers and vegetables. People in the community donated a substantial amount of the perennial plants. It’s kinda’ interesting that people are giving their time and their plants instead of going to larger places like Home Depot. This sale keeps the money in the community and it’s supporting a local cause.

So what would you like guests to take away with them from the sale, other than a plant?

R: A lot of different things. In the modern practices of agriculture, a lot of the literature being done today talks about agriculture being local. It reminds us that food can be grown in the local communities. With regard to the plant sale, for example, people are getting the opportunity to bring home and grow their own food. I really like the idea that people are taking care of their own gardens.

I also feel that the spirit of the plant sale is in the gathering of communities and gardeners, who are celebrating spring, celebrating the Southside Community Land Trust. They go home with a plant but they come to congregate, catch up, meet, and ask questions. It’s pretty exciting.

In your opinion, what makes your plant sale unique?

R: Well the Mayor makes a special trip to every plant sale we’ve had so far! We also have live performances by local area musicians who come because they support the land trust. But also, just the idea that we’re doing ‘city farm,’ ‘urban agriculture.’ – the world is in opposition here but we’re fusing ideas together to recreate space.

Where do you see the future of city farms, or urban agriculture, heading?

R: Right now, we account for 1,000 people in Providence growing their own food in some way. We want 10,000 people to do that. I’d like to see more city farms, more Gano Street gardens, doing more work. I’d like to think that we’d have more garden clubs, more after school programs with school gardens. I’d like to see more green space in the city designated for areas growing food. I’d like to see a City Farmer, or a specialist become a real position in the city, a real resource for residents and neighbors to go to. I think that would be awesome.

T: We also have a great coalition of about twenty-eight organizations, everyone from the SCLT to housing development corporations to nonprofits and health organizations – that make up the Urban Agricultural Policy Task Force. We are all coming together to promote urban agriculture and all of these organizations believe that their mission can be forwarded through urban agriculture.

The City Farm is located on the corner of West Clifford and Dudley in South Providence. The 15th Annual Rare and Unusual Plant Sale runs this Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. To learn more, visit www.southsideclt.org or call 401-273-9419.

HIOW: New York Sun Works

2007-05-16T12:57:00.000-05:00

New York has been doing some heavy lifting on sustainability. Given that cities consume 75% of the world's energy, it would only seem to make sense, and its good to see Bloomberg and NYC leading the charge here.

New York Sun Works has created the Science Barge, which combines environmental education and sustainable agriculture. I'm not very fond of the name, but the underlying idea is pretty cool. The barge is a zero-carbon hydroponic farm, producing local organic produce in the city.

Urban gardens have been around forever, but they compete for space with for-profit development or affordable housing, and often lose.

But local food production is a hackable idea, truly something the community can own, modify, and share. In the industrial era it made sense to separate production from distribution, but local and distributed methods of producing life's staples are seeming wise in the emerging energy/sustainability economy. Fuel costs and weather instability are driving produce prices through the roof, and much of that produce can now be produced locally using new techniques for much less money.

Cities aren't exactly agricultural epicenters. Food and water are shipped over hundreds, even thousands of miles to reach urban areas, and that consumes a massive amount of processing and transportation fuel, which in turn contributes excess carbon dioxide to Earth's atmosphere. Traditional agriculture, too, consumes energy and large amounts of water, and despite the popularity of organic food, toxic pesticides are still in wide use. And since the world population is continuing to grow rapidly, Caplow explained, it's going to get worse. "As our city grows with new people and new buildings, it will place increasingly huge demands on the countryside for food, for power, and for water," he said to the crowd.

New York Sun Works estimates that there is enough roof space in NYC for roof gardens to supply all the food needs of New Yorkers. This is a bold statement, given that it takes an area the state of Wyoming to do so, but I'm impressed they did the math.

This barge is a metaphor for us and for the future of this planet," said Adrian Benepe, the parks commissioner. "We can float together, or we'll surely sink together."

It leaves me with a strong impression that a little creativity and entrepreneurial activity could see a network of roof gardens take root and flower.

Elements of Hackability

2007-05-14T23:37:00.000-05:00

WARNING: Conceptual abstracts about hackability lie within this post. Don't read further if that sort of stuff makes your head hurt.

Dan Hill is a guy who knows a lot about a lot. An interaction designer out of London, he spends his time at the intersections of the web, music, architecture, and digital media...with a bit of European football thrown in for good measure. He writes about it all very eloquently at City of Sound.

While researching what had been written so far about hackability and its application beyond technology, I was really impressed by a post he'd put together in 2006, exploring the concept of hackability through architecture and urban planning, in addition to product design. It really swims in the abstraction, but is a great read if you are into that sort of thing.

For brevity, here is his list of the qualities of adaptive design, which overlap how hackable environments would be created.

Think of platforms, not solutions - overbuild infrastructure, underbuild features
Build with an architecture of layers; enable fast layers to change rapidly (learning); slower layers enable stability
Create seamful experiences, based around behaviour not aesthetics; often includes modular design
Undesigned products, or rather not overdesigned; to invite the user in, to encourage evolution
Define vocabularies, or basic patterns of interaction
Leave space to evolve (if physical/spatial, build with modular shapes which can extend easily)
Enable users to manage the at-hand information and interactions; the surface layers
Create an aesthetic of ongoing process (this could engender trust)
This process implies that the designer provides support, engagement over time etc.

Read the full post here.

HIOW: Virtual Providence

2007-05-11T13:02:00.000-05:00

I've never been much into Second Life and the other alternative worlds that have caught fire online of late. My current passion much more about how the web can support and enhance our pavement-level interactions, which often get short shrift to the virtual world. Last week at the Providence Geeks confab, I saw a project that brings those things together.

The folks at Eyegloo are working on recreating downtown Providence in Second Life, the most wide-ranging and immersive of the current 3-D online worlds. We saw some early versions of walking (and flying) around Providence, including the Biltmore, the completed Westin, and the Convention Center.

Why is this more than a parlor trick? A couple of reasons:

Virtual Providence blends the virtual with the real, creating a parallel place where visitors and citizens can interact with not just the city that is, but the city that will be. Real interactions can cross that secondlife-streetlife barrier, initially to promote commerce - see, spec and build your new condo at Waterplace, by interacting with the architect and development company ! Visit the new restaurant on Federal Hill, browse the real menu, and have a virtual meal ! But if the City takes hold of this, you could imagine virtual town halls, online tours of alternative visions of the waterfront, or even rapidly developed school designs, based on feedback from a neighborhood or online meeting the night before.

Which leads to the second compelling element of Virtual Providence, open source extensibility. Because Second Life has developed its own language for modeling and creating visual 3-d worlds, anyone could extend Virtual Providence. Summit Neighborhood Association, who are working on re-visioning North Main, could build a Virtual North Main based on the community vision of what could be. Providence Public Schools, Ai3 architects, and East Side Public Education Coalition could build a working version of the Nathan Bishop the community is demanding.

A few other points, one optimistic, the other troubling. Optimistic: the technology underlying Second Life has enormous promise to stand traditional community planning and visioning on its head. Although architects and planners would claim an iterative, collaborative process, the limitations of arranging public meetings, funneling feedback, and creating architectural renderings that are "professional" has forced a linear, filtered, overly mediated approach. A virtual world where you could build out, alter, or present multiple versions in a few hours or days in response to community feedback would blow up the process of community planning and development as we know it. These versions would be visually immersive, and much more evocative than the "perspectives" and "overlays" of today's architects and urban planners. The first city (and architect/planning firm !) to harness this effectively will dramatically alter how planning works with the public, for the better.

This brings up the troubling point: inclusiveness. Even though Virtual Providence is less of a fantasy geek's paradise than, say, Dracula's Castle (another Second Life "island"), it still is the purview of the young and the wired. Income and age continue to play an enormous role in the digital divide in Providence and around the country, and we continue to approach the challenge clumsily, with brute force solutions. An online community that narrows the social environment conversation even further will promote no interesting connections, and create no buy-in.

Here lies an opportunity. Our attempts to bridge the digital divide have focused single-mindedly on equal access and foundation skills: computers in libraries and schools, wireless for all, Windows training for seniors. Recent research in learning shows that learners, of any age, can be started out further up the scale of complexity than we previously thought, interacting with an interesting and exciting application rather than laboring on the underlying theory. Lets invest in facilitation of new groups into something like Virtual Providence - immigrants, seniors, working poor - giving them something exciting, visually compelling, and emotionally relevant. Sounds better than Excel skills anyday.

Providence City News: Beth Charlebois, Neighborhood Park Services Director for Providence

2007-05-10T09:44:00.000-05:00

From the series of City News interviews...

My City: Neighborhood Parks Services Director Beth Charlebois: “Neighbors should feel ownership, a sense of belonging and community, and happiness”

As the sun makes its way into town, more and more people are spending time outdoors. At lunch hour, downtown becomes a sprawling outdoor cafeteria where workers and tourists alike are enjoying the gifts that nature offers this time of year. For Beth Charlebois, the City’s director of neighborhood park services, it’s sights similar to these of neighbors enjoying the one hundred and twelve neighborhood parks all over Providence that inspire her work.

She meets up with City News at the Korean War Memorial on South Main Street and talks to us about why she believes park spaces help to bring people together.

What do you do as the director of neighborhood park services? What does your department do?

I’m in charge of the 112 neighborhood parks in the City of Providence, all the parks except for Roger Williams Park. I oversee an average of fifty-plus employees in the summertime. We also oversee the North Burial Ground for regular maintenance and special projects.

I also work with neighborhood groups, the Mayor’s office, and other city departments in trying to get constituents involved in neighborhood parks.

I’ve been in this position for three years. After a reorganization of the Parks Department took place, this position was created with that reorganization.

Our department deals a lot with groups. It’s very interesting because the issues are never the same. But it’s rewarding as we are doing more in-house projects throughout the neighborhoods.

Since you’ve been in the position, what changes have you seen or made in the last 3 years?

Part of the reorganization involved the crews. We have a crew that handles small parks, which are parks that are an acre and under, which then enables other crews to concentrate on bigger parks. Just by doing this, it has enabled the rotation of services to increase. It has helped to up the services, allowed us to respond more often, and the maintenance of parks has improved.

Projects that may have gone out to bid in the past are being handled in house, like planting bed work, as well as work on the playgrounds. It saves the city money and it gives us a chance to do something that makes a difference in how the space looks. That makes our parks workers feel good about it after and feel proud of what they’ve done. It gives workers a chance to do work outside of their ordinary scope.

What do you want neighbors and visitors to experience when they come to one of our neighborhood parks? What information would you like them to have that they might not know about?

I think park spaces are really important parts of the city, not only visually but also as community-building opportunities. I want neighbors to feel comfortable to utilize it, to feel safe, and to respect their spaces as part of their own. That’s what we try to build more with neighborhood groups.

What do you I want them to experience? To feel more ownership, a sense of belonging and community, and a good feeling, a sense of happiness. I want the parks to be places they can visit anytime and feel a part of.

Even though we maintain and clean the parks, it’s really for the neighbors. We try to work with them all the time. It doesn’t make sense to me to do something that the neighbors aren’t going to want.

Where do you see the future of the neighborhood parks going?

I see community building. I see the community coming back into these spaces more often – for example, through activities like the Arts, Culture and Tourism department scheduling concerts, functions, and special events in the neighborhood parks that bring people out.

We encourage neighborhood groups to be involved. Be our stewards – which could involve anything from calling us to inform us of graffiti, or organizing a neighborhood park clean up.

There was a time when people didn’t spend time in their neighborhood parks, but that’s turning around and shifting where people are meeting with each other in those parks. I see the parks becoming again a vital part of the community.

As the interview wraps up, I ask her if she knows which neighborhood park is the City’s oldest. She places a call to her colleague at the Parks Department, Bob McMahon, to confirm that downtown is the home to the oldest neighborhood park in Providence. Abbott Park, which predates Roger Williams Park completed in 1938, is nestled on the grounds of the Johnson & Wales campus. The newest neighborhood park, Clements Park, was completed in 2004 and is located on the corner of Clements and Dudley in South Providence. By the fall of next year, a nine-acre park on Alleppo Street in Olneyville will be completed.

HIOW: OpenPlans for Community Organizing

2007-05-09T15:53:00.000-05:00

The Open Planning Project, which had alpha-launched several months ago, looks like its getting to its next state of maturity with OpenPlans. Sort of a wiki for community planning and organizing, it offers some good tools for building community projects using online tools.

OpenPlans aims to transform social activism by providing tools that connect people and enable them to share ideas, stay organized, and act collectively to effect change.
Whether you are advocating for public space or working towards better schools, we hope you use OpenPlans to make your community a better place. Our tools help you create or contribute to web sites, share files, upload photos, manage mailing lists, and manage task lists.

City News: Phil McKendall from La Prima Caffe

2007-05-03T12:48:00.000-05:00

From the City News series of interviews...

Phil McKendall is no novice when it comes to the grueling hours it takes to run an 80-hour a week, nose-to-the-grindstone operation as a restaurateur. Before setting sights on the Broadway area of Providence, he made his way through some of the most exclusive kitchens in downtown.

But for the past five years, with the award-winning La Prima Caffe as his home base, Phil has quickly become an active neighbor in a thriving, upbeat Broadway Avenue business district. With an eye for 100% excellence, he talks to City News about the inner workings of his “small big business.”

How long have you been in business?

I’ve been in the restaurant business for 25 years. My older brother is a chef, graduated from Johnson and Wales in 1978. We opened up a family business called The Admiral’s Galley and I worked there in high school. When my brother retired, he took a job for the State, and I ran my own catering business after that called North End catering. I ran that for about 10 years in the 90s then I opened up La Prima in downtown on 96 Fountain Street for about 2 years.

I had to shelf La Prima from 1996 to 2001 while I became an executive chef for the Civic Center for 2 years then a captain at Capriccio’s after that. In November 2001, I opened up La Prima on Broadway.

What do you like most about doing business in this neighborhood? Why did you decide to set up shop on Broadway?

I fell in love with the location. I thought it was a nice scenic hot spot. I knew that it was going to be busy during the day. Nights would take some work. We started with an 18-seat restaurant and expanded to 40.

Is there a difference from when you were located downtown?

I think I was ahead of the curve. Back then it was kind of sparse downtown. You gotta’ really bring enough to survive. You have to be a small big business.

Okay so what do you specialize in?

We specialize in regional, continental Italian cuisine – anything from great sandwiches to hot and cold Tuscan salads, real nice pasta dishes – the whole gamut, the whole Italian experience.

In 2003, we were voted Best Pasta Fagolie by RI Monthly’s Best of.

What’s a fagolie?

It’s a pasta and bean dish.

And your personal favorites?

The tortellini di filippo with pink alfredo sauce. Nana’s meatballs. And I like the chicken franchaise and the fried calamari.

Were you always a good chef?

I thought I was very good until I started working at Capriccio’s! There are some big influences in my career – my brother Stephen, master chef Nino D’Orso, and Vincenzo Iemmo, the owner of Capriccio’s.

What makes your caffe unique?

It’s a blend of old time recipes and jazzy new flavors. It’s true authentic Italian food. I’m a purist in that way. And we mix in a jazzy atmosphere. I think it’s a good match. It makes for a good environment. Most people really enjoy it. I also feature different artists on the wall. We do art openings every couple of months.

What’s your philosophy as a business owner and chef?

You really never stop learning, but with a good foundation you really can expand. You commit everyday to being excellent all the time. As one of my (friends) used to say ‘you’re only as good as the last plate you serve.’ The everyday experience has to be 100% all good all the time.

It’s also a family effort. If everybody is working hard together, you usually get good results.

Since you’ve opened on Broadway five years ago, describe some of the changes you’ve seen in the neighborhood.

I’ve been an active neighbor. We want to improve the area and the neighborhood, not just for myself but for my customers as well so I stay active. With the help of Councilman Lombardi, Representative Costantino, at the time Senator Caprio, Representative Jabour, and of course Mayor Cicilline, we signed a petition to get a $200,000 seed grant for historic lighting on Broadway. I’ve also planted about 80 trees on the street and initiated a project for the Steel Yard cans to be placed on Broadway. So, I’ve been busy!

Why do you think these things are important?

Because the better the neighborhood gets, the better it is for the business owners, our customers, and the neighbors. I want it to be brighter and safer for everyone. Can you imagine when the historic lighting comes here; you’ll get to see how beautiful Broadway really is. We have some of the most beautiful houses in this street.

Where do you see the future of this neighborhood and your business going?

I’d be looking to grow in the future. I think Broadway’s future is very bright. Hopefully I can stay here for a long time.

To see Phil in action (and if you visit La Prima, you’ll probably be greeted by him at the front counter) the restaurant is located at 205 Broadway Avenue, or go to www.laprimacaffe.com.

Hackable City Debuted

2007-04-27T10:04:00.000-05:00

At last night's OSHEAN community forum on Society and Technology 2015, the Hackable City blog was publicly launched, ready or not ! by Jack Templin, a fellow traveler in the Hackable City conversation.

Immediately I realized he'd upped my level of responsibility to this blog, and I'd better double down and get it rolling beyond its current nascent stage. Stay tuned for more content, a deeper conversation, and some interface improvements.

OSHEAN is maintaining a blog on the threads of discussion from last night's event, which had great energy and a sense of the possible.

City News: Barbara Fields, LISC Senior Program Director

2007-04-26T20:30:00.000-05:00

From the City News interview series...

My Community: LISC Senior Program Director Barbara Fields: “a safe, affordable home is the starting point”

The Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) came to Rhode Island a little over a decade after the Ford Foundation formed the first national organization in 1979. The organization describes itself as “a creative and financial resource for community-based organizations that transform distressed neighborhoods into vibrant and healthy centers of life, learning, and commerce,” and they have lived up to it in Providence. LISC has invested millions of dollars in grants and loans since 1991 that have helped to create affordable housing, commercial and community space, and child care facilities here and throughout the State.

The organization’s current senior program director, Barbara Fields, has been with LISC for sixteen years. On Wednesday, April 25, she joined other affordable housing advocates and sponsors at the 2nd Annual Celebration of Housing Breakfast and talks to City News about the ways that LISC links affordable housing to the overall development of stronger, healthier neighborhoods.

How does LISC help create affordable housing in RI? And how does this benefit neighbors in our City and State?

LISC’s mission is to work with community-based organizations and other community partners to build strong healthy neighborhoods. Affordable housing is a core part of our work. We have worked with community organizations throughout the city to provide low cost financing and technical know-how to get housing built that serves working families and residents.

For example, we work with Olneyville Housing Corporation to provide high risk financing in the early phases of their development. We help make sure that the housing that gets built complements and connects to other activities in the neighborhoods.

We also invest in building strong community organizations that can continue to serve the various city neighborhoods, and we provide technical training and assistance to groups to help them design and develop homes across the city.

Beyond affordable housing, what other efforts does LISC undertake to serve communities?

About 50 % of our work is in Providence but also we serve communities from Woonsocket to Newport.

We invest in childcare facilities, commercial and retail facilities, for example. We invest in working with community policing. We work with the city to improve recreational opportunities.

We see the neighborhood as our customer as we work with a variety of community partners to make stronger neighborhoods. We broker relationships and build active partnerships. We try to influence policy and increase resources. We work with banks, local corporations, state, federal and local government, community residents to design strategies to build healthy communities.

In your opinion, what makes up a healthy neighborhood?

The physical revitalization of a neighborhood starts with affordable housing. Having a safe affordable home is the starting point for families to go out and contribute to the local economy and for children to access educational and recreational opportunities.

Basically we are embarking on deepening our investments in the community. We are doing this in the following ways:

- To increase family income and wealth through home ownership and skills development

- To connect to the regional economy

- To expand community knowledge and access to educational opportunities

- To build and support healthy environments – which includes public safety, access to green grocers, recreational opportunities, and appropriate transportation.

In the last 3-5 years, what are some of the changes you’ve seen in communities and neighborhoods growing in Providence?

One of the things that we are seeing in housing is the expansion of mixed-use development - seeing ground floor and commercial space with residential space above or next-door.

We are seeing a really comprehensive approach to building our neighborhoods. We are seeing mixed-use done in scale. People are talking about making a difference in the neighborhoods in a multi-use way - by having places to shop, building safe schools and recreational places, and more.

The other change we have is a city government that is working to support this growth across the board. We are seeing a systemic and institutional approach to support these new opportunities. Five years ago, I didn’t have a relationship with city departments. We have relationships across the board now. We build partnerships - that is our strength.

What role do you see LISC playing in the future of our neighborhoods?

Our plan is to highlight our role as an intermediary that brokers relationships and to strengthen and expand our partnerships. I think LISC will deepen its investments in neighborhoods by working to connect the various elements that we believe contribute to strong, healthy and sustainable communities.

The RI LISC office is located at 229 Waterman Street. To learn more about their programs and services, you can visit www.lisc.org/rhode_island.

Hackable Idea Of Week: Learning 2.0

2007-04-02T12:46:00.000-05:00

Its Monday, and I already have my Hackable Idea of the Week ! Check out this article at Wired, on how a library IT director put together a grassroots technology learning program for her staff.

When the IT director at North Carolina's Charlotte & Mecklenburg County public library began training staff in the latest web technologies, she lured reluctant participants with bribes -- a free MP3 player and the chance to win a laptop.

Six months later, the program they developed is the real prize. Learning 2.0, developed by public services technology director Helene Blowers, has become a surprise grassroots hit, available for free on the web and adopted by dozens of other libraries around the globe.

...the success of Learning 2.0 shows that the human problem of retraining workers is often being tackled from the ground up.

Recognizing that librarians need to know how to participate in the new media mix if libraries are to remain relevant, Blowers challenged her 550 staffers to become more web savvy. Using free web tools, she designed the program and gave staff members three months to do 23 things.

They created blogs and podcasts, tried out Flickr, set up RSS feeds, learned about wikis, uploaded video to YouTube, played with image generators and Rollyo, and explored Technorati, tagging and folksonomies.

I love several things about this:

its an open source learning modality, supported by technology, but really about learning the new tools for societal engagement

it employs creative destruction of accepted professional training - a training company wins a contract, schedules a class, teaches ABC, which are outdated as soon as the class finishes, and charges an extortionate amount

its re-usable ! we need the same thing for non-profit leaders, public school teachers, health workers, and everyone else at the front line of our civil society

Providence City News: John Pesaturo, Silver Lake Little League

2007-03-30T15:58:00.000-05:00

From the City News interview series...

My Neighborhood: Silver Lake/Olneyville

Every year, John Pesaturo, Jr. gears up for his annual romp through a spring’s field, but he’s not surrounded by rows of young daisies, daffodils, or tulips. Instead, he’ll find himself tending to about 300 young little leaguers that range from five to sixteen years of age, a handful of coaches, many doting parents, and of course, some loyal fans. John, a resident of Olneyville and the West End for 27 years, has been the president of the Silver Lake/Olneyville Little League for about six years now. He recounts the more competitive, somewhat exclusive years of his own youth as a little leaguer for the Federal Hill Dairy club, and takes pride in the fact that today’s league welcomes virtually every young person who wants to play. In the end, championship title or not, every one gets a trophy.

How long has the Silver Lake/Olneyville Little League been in existence?

56 years.

How long have you been the president of the league?

6 years.

What about the sport of baseball attracts you and why did you become involved?

I first became involved when my son who’s 21 now, played Mighty Mights when he was 15 and progressed through the senior league.

What attracts me to the sport? One, the love of baseball and two, I just love working with the kids. At least the kids are off the streets. In that neighborhood, we have lot of single parents. We have children from Olneyville, both Manton and Hartford projects, and the rest come from surrounding Silver Lake neighborhoods.

This is something that keeps the kids busy and active and out of trouble. I really enjoy seeing the kids have fun. When you see a kid get his first hit, and see him with a smile on his face, that’s just gratifying in and of itself.

All in all, I think it’s just the sport. Everyone enjoys it. Baseball seems to run the longest season. The enjoyment of it, being outside, and the kids having fun are really what attracts a lot of people to it.

Your league has recently been awarded a Dexter Donation grant by the City. How will this award benefit your league?

Well, because we’re 100 percent self-funded, the Dexter grant will help us with needed equipment. The registration fees and sponsorships only go so far. Our players receive uniforms and they keep them. Also, we hand out trophies at our annual banquet.

Tell us about your league. What makes it unique? Why do you stand out?

I think what makes the Silver Lake/Olneyville Little League unique is that I have my T-Ball director Paul Grande, who has been with the league over 50 yrs. There are kids that have played for him came back and coached for us. My vice president and player agent has been with the league over 20 yrs. Both their kids played with the league and one of them coaches with his father.

Our coaches come from many different professions – Providence Police officers, Cranston prison guards, meat counter supervisor at Stop & Shop, car salesman, retired city workers, and even a nurse at Miriam Hospital They all go through a background check, and are CPR certified. Many of them have been there for three to five years.

Another thing we do is that we don’t turn any kids away. If they don’t have the ability to pay the registration fees, we work something out. If we get too many kids, we just make another team. Some way, somehow, we’ll make a way for them to play. I don’t believe in turning kids away. That’s important.

The other thing that makes us stand out that I know from talking to other league presidents is that every kid in our league gets a trophy. A little trophy goes a long way. It makes the kids feel good. I think that if one kid gets a trophy, all of them should get one.

Did you play in a little league as a kid?

Yes, I played at the Dexter Training Grounds for a team called the Federal Hill Dairy … that’s a long time ago!

How has the sport changed in the City since you played?

I see more kids involved with it. I see it being less of a competition and more to have fun. That’s what I see. Back then, you had to try out and if you weren’t good enough you didn’t make it. Today, we don’t turn kids away.

We are lucky enough to have lights at our ball field. Some who don’t are limited to the amount of games they can play and teams they can have. I also remember that there was never a banquet, and because of it, the only team that got a trophy was the winning team.

What do you see or envision for the future of your league?

I’d like to see the girls division grow, as well as the older boys division.

How would you encourage more girls to play?

I would encourage them to come and try it. You make new friends, and they can go on and compete in the All-Stars, where they play against girls’ teams all over the state. It’s a way to promote good competition and learn sportsmanship.

If you want to see John in action this spring, the Silver Lake/Olneyville little league ball field is located on Killingly Street, just around the corner from the Neutaconkanut Recreation Center. The season runs from May to August and registration is held until April at the Silver Lake Community Center at 529 Plainfield Street. For more information, you can call John Pesaturo at 270-6739 or click here to send him an email.

Hackable Idea Of Week: TrustedPlaces

2007-03-30T15:43:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine in the U.K. has invested in a mobile user-created content company called TrustedPlaces. They are just up and running in the U.K. mainly London. I love their idea. Members use their phones to capture pics of local places that are "trusted", good food, good service, good atmosphere, good stuff. They can then write a review via mobile, or when they return to their computer, on the "trusted place". The trustedplaces.com site does a bang-up web 2.0 job of displaying the places, tagging, reviews, average ratings, trusted places nearby, other fans, etc.

Members (Trusted People) can then use their phone to get a place forwarded to them, look up the nearest trusted place, find nearby places, search for a tag, and so on.

I love these simple apps that use the (mobile) web to support our real world pavement level needs !

Pawtucket Emergent

2007-03-28T15:04:00.000-05:00

I always find Pawtucket to be interesting. The idea of "Pawtucket" in the online world feels full of raw energy and potential, brimming with possibility. Its always so at odds with what I feel when I go to Pawtucket. But perhaps those two realities are slowly drawing closer, and the internal passion held by Bucketeers will express itself in pavement-level vibe.

Two upcoming events speak to that promise, as Pawtucket hacks its way to a new identity. The first, Planning Pawtucket: Designs and Dreams for a Once and Future City is held by PADS at The Grant. Its an exhibition of urban planning work meant to "broaden thinking, illuminate ideas, and generate discussion within the community as it undergoes initiatives to reshape the downtown and plan for future growth". Similar to the New Your City initiative, it provides a novel and reflective chance to reflect and envision, without experts driving the bus.

The second is the RI Statewide Historic Preservation conference. Normally I wouldn't log this as a very hackable event, but it feels like the active new urbanists and the green building folks are injecting something new into the conversation this time.

Planning Pawtucket:
Designs and Dreams for a Once and Future City
April 6 - 27 @ The Grant 250 Main Street, Pawtucket, RI
Opening night Friday, April 6 from 6 PM - 8 PM

Something Old, Something Green
RI Statewide Historic Preservation Conference
Saturday, April 14, 2007 @ The Pawtucket Armory

New Your City: Kids Can Hack Too !

2007-03-27T14:54:00.000-05:00

Check out this very cool project by Secret Door Projects called New Your City. Set up in cooperation with the Fox Point public library and the support of several local art funding groups, New Your City allows kids and grown-ups to envision their city by building a scale model with cardboard, string, glue, and other found materials. Unfortunately the website is down now, but the concept is still very good.
Built in 12 sessions across the month of March, the project combines tangible creation with conscious reflection on what a "city" means. Too bad the construction is over, but it will be on display for a while at the library. It struck me how much more visceral and real this felt, compared to the Providence Tomorrow charrettes run by the Providence DPD and their consultants. Perhaps because the creators were mainly kids, who don't come burdened by agendas, or perhaps because the process didn't march in lock-step to a template of urban planning "success" ?

I hope the artists do it again next year, and maybe we should fund them to do some community planning, rather than the "experts".

Providence City News: Bonnie Nickerson, Providence Tomorrow city planner

2007-03-22T13:34:00.000-05:00

From the City News interview series...

My City: Providence Tomorrow

This week, City News catches up with city planner Bonnie Nickerson, who is also a resident of Washington Park, to get the inside track into how a community comes together to form a neighborhood.

What goes into planning a neighborhood charrette? And what role are you playing?

The citywide charrette that took place in the fall set the stage for this first of ten neighborhood charrettes, which are slated to take place over the next two years. Using the input that resulted from the citywide charrette, we updated the interim comprehensive plan, which is now available for review on our website.

In the plan, we talk about the citywide vision and identified neighborhoods that need further study. We looked at areas that are mostly stable, and those that are most likely to grow and change. From a planning standpoint, aspects like Character, Height, and Density are things that need to be addressed in the neighborhood level.

What steps have you taken to get neighbors involved?

We have a project team that is made up of people from the neighborhood. For the upcoming charrette for example, we have Fran Murphy of the Washington Park Community Center (where the charrette will be taking place), members of the City Council, and representatives from various city departments who have come together to brainstorm about outreach and to come up with an outreach plan.

In addition, there are a number of stakeholders who we rely on to give input. In this case, residents, neighborhood businesses on Broad Street, Eddy, and Allens Avenue, businesses in the Industrial Park, businesses in the Port of Providence, Johnson & Wales University (who has a campus in the neighborhood), the Parks Department (given that Roger Williams Park is located in South Elmwood), schools, families that access the community center, the Casey Family Services, and church congregations.

Every resident in the Washington Park and South Elmwood neighborhood was sent an invitation with a schedule in the mail. Posters were put up in neighborhood businesses, as well as in places like the elderly housing complex Park West, at Laundromats, - all kinds of places. Personal letters were sent to businesses and phone calls were made to organizations. Also, Casey Family Services and the Washington Park Community Center sent out invitations to people who utilize their services.

Certainly, much has been done to get the word out.

Yes. One of the special outreach activities we’ll be doing involves all the fifth graders at the Alan Shawn Feinstein Elementary School on Broad Street. On Friday, March 23 in the afternoon, we will be engaging in an activity with the students called “Box City.” The exercise will include a full floor-sized model of a section of Broad Street (from Miller onto their school) using different sized boxes to represent businesses, houses, etc. The students will be asked to devise a vision of what they’d like their street to look like. We’ll be talking to them about city planning and each of them will receive a certificate from the Mayor stating that they helped to plan their neighborhood.

Each student will receive an invitation to the charrette to take home and kids who bring a parent to the charrette will receive a prize.

That sounds like a great way to get the kids in the neighborhood school involved in the planning process. Why would you encourage Washington Park and South Elmwood residents to attend the upcoming charrette for their neighborhoods?

I would encourage them because they have an opportunity to discuss with their neighbors and with other people that they don’t come in to contact with every day, a vision for what they’d like their neighborhood to be, and to talk about issues that are important to them.

In turn, they get to inform us of bits and pieces that need change, that need help, places that need better pedestrian crosswalks for example, ideas on how to improve the look of the streets in their neighborhood.

The reason this is important is because we’re going to take all the input they give to develop a neighborhood plan that will help guide future city activities related to planning.

If there was one event throughout the week that people won’t want to miss, it’s the one on Saturday (3/24). There are two sessions and people can come in the morning (8:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.) or in the afternoon (1:00 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.). What we’re going to be doing is asking groups of people to gather around a blank map of the neighborhood. They will be give five topics to think about. With a half hour spent on each topic, using color markers and stickers, they will be given the opportunity to map out their ideal neighborhood.

The topics are:

1) Circulation (bus travel, bus stops, transit, biking ways, walking, car travel, key intersections, and parking)

2) Land Use (for example what kinds of businesses do they want to see that aren’t there now, mixed uses, etc)

3) Character (what do they want their neighborhood to look like? Building height? Density both residential and commercial. Streetscapes)

4) Neighborhood Amenities (parks, “tot lots,” other recreational opportunities)

5) What’s missing?

What do you hope to get out of the charrette?

I hope that a lot of people will come because if we get a lot of people then we know that we will get good discussions going and that we will get a lot of good input from the neighbors. If people come, it will be a real success and we expect to get better results out of it.

As a resident of Washington Park yourself, what do you like most about your neighborhood and where do you see it going in the future?

The thing I love most about it is that I can walk to Roger Williams Park. I have two dogs and I’m there almost everyday. It’s close to downtown. For me, my commute is minimal.

Washington Park is basically a waterfront neighborhood. There is a lot of opportunity to link the resident part to the waterfront. Like Save the Bay is right inside the neighborhood but right now, there’s no real link to it. To me, that’s one asset to build on.

Providence City News: Scialo Brothers Bakery

2007-03-15T13:43:00.000-05:00

From the City News interview series...

My Business: Sisters Scialo of Scialo Bros. Bakery

When Luigi Scialo migrated to Providence’s Federal Hill ninety-three years ago, he brought with him the rich traditions of his Italian heritage. For almost a century, residents and tourists alike have embraced the most notable contribution that he made to the City of Providence when he, along with his brother Gaetano Scialo, built and ran the Scialo Bros. Bakery on Atwells Avenue.

Today, two of his daughters, Carol Scialo Gaeta and Lois Scialo Ellis, are the proud owners and legacy-keepers of this beloved family business. And while both of them had successful careers before taking on Luigi’s bakery -- Carol was a medical secretary and doing catering on the side and Lois was a public school teacher -- their customers just would not let them close shop when they inherited the business from their father after his death in 1993.

At the onset of the Feast of St. Joseph on March 19 (St. Joseph is also considered in some traditions to be the Patron Saint of Pastry Chefs), City News catches up with Carol and Lois, “the Scialo Sisters,” for an informal history lesson about Italians on Federal Hill, women entrepreneurs, and the sweet origins behind the coveted zeppole.

How long has Scialo Bros. Bakery been operating in Providence?

LOIS: Our dad, Luigi Scialo, came to Providence from a village just outside of Naples in 1914 before World War I. He was the youngest of thirteen children. In 1916, together with his brother Gaetano (the baker), they opened and ran a bakery. The bakery came to Federal Hill in the mid-1920s. When his brother returned to Italy, dad became the sole owner until his death in 1993. He was 103 years old.

Dad had two older children from a previous marriage. In the 1938 hurricane, his first wife and their youngest child were killed.

Two years later, he married our mother, Assunta, who grew up in Federal Hill, and they had three children, Carol, Susan, and me. We all grew up in the tenements upstairs from the bakery. And the bakery was our playground.

CAROL: We only worked in the front of the bakery because back then it was a man’s world. All the bakers were male.

Tell us about your family’s tradition and legacy on Federal Hill.

C: When we were growing up, a lot of the Italian families were living in tenements just like ours when Federal Hill was truly a neighborhood and not just a business district. But now, it’s a real neighborhood too.

L: Yes, do you know where Route 10 runs now? There were rows of tenement housing there back then. Venda Ravioli was the 5&10 Cents Store.

After World War II, major changes affected the way of life here. A lot of the families started to move out. The availability of the automobile, the GI Bills for college – caused a lot of people to move out of the Hill and into the suburbs.

C: We were included in that mix. Our family moved to Warwick.

L: But mom and dad worked here. We were all expected to be here during the holidays and during busy times. Even though we were all married, had children, had careers – the expectation is that when it was busy in the shop, you were here to help in the family business.

When our parents passed away, each of us (the 3 sisters) inherited a piece of the bakery. And so we had to decide what to do with the business.

C: We decided that we were going to sell it. But the deal with the buyer didn’t work out.

L: And prompted by our customers who, when the word got out that we were closing the bakery, started writing us letters, calling us on the phone, and asking us, ‘Where are we going to get our cookies now? Our zeppoles?’ So, we took a step back and decided to rethink things through.

C: We applied for a business loan. With it, we were able to redo a lot of things in the store, and make some needed repairs.

L: Our youngest sister decided not to join so we bought her share of the business and formed an LLC and took out an SBA loan. Back then, women weren’t encouraged to run their own businesses. But through a lot of hard work, we managed to attain a loan.

C: And, after we finally got things organized we had a smoke fire in one of the brick ovens out back.

L: Carol and I weren’t in the shop at the time but the workers called the fire department. When the firefighters came, they flooded the ovens with water and we sustained some water damage throughout the shop.

C: It was the best thing that could’ve happened to us because it forced us to regroup and make further needed improvements to our business. It took us a year to get back on track and we closed the business from June 1993 through April 1994. Also during that time, things started to really happen in the City. Waterfire came to town and the Renaissance was beginning to happen.

L: And so here we are!

Other than the long history and legacy of your father’s business, which is now in your care and ownership, what makes you stand out from the rest?

C: A lot of bakers do the short-cuts. We try to do it the way dad did it because we want our product to be different. We want to be a specialty bakery.

L: We also do it because we really enjoy it!

C: Every Christmas we might be banging our heads against the wall, but you know, I would be baking at home anyway even if I wasn’t doing this now. And all of our kids have baked and helped us at one time or another.

So how do you celebrate St. Joseph’s day?

L: By working very very very hard to satisfy the masses!

C: It’s a fun holiday though. And plus there’s really only one item that gets produced en masse and that is, of course, the zeppola! (Zeppole is the plural form.)

Every St. Joseph's Day, sisters Lois (left) and Carol (right) are swarmed with orders for traditional Italian fried doughnuts, zeppole.

What goes into the Scialo Bros. Zeppola?

L: We make them from scratch.

C: We do sell them all year long – the baked ones. (The traditional one is fried and gets sold during St. Joseph’s Day). We use pure vanilla in our cream.

And I noticed you have two kinds of crème filling?

L&C: Yes, yellow pastry cream and ricotta.

C: The ricotta one was my recipe.

L: Other bakers will sometimes do pre-made ingredients, whether it’s the shell or the cream. There aren’t a whole lot that make their zeppole from scratch.

So how many zeppoles do you sell during St. Joseph’s?

L&C: Thousands!

Do you know where the zeppola came from?

L: It differs from region to region, but I believe it’s a Southern Italian tradition, where most of the people who migrated to Rhode Island came from. You’ll find that people have different ways of baking their pastries, some stray from the traditional ways, others don’t. Like the wandies for example – some dribble them with honey, others sift powdered sugar on top.

C: We’ve also done a few of our own new recipes at the bakery. When our dad ran the place, we had the jimmycakes, the zuppe ingles, the cassato. Now, we also offer a double chocolate cake, a white chocolate cake with pineapple, tiramisu, and so on. We’ve been busy devising new pastries.

In your opinion, do you think that appreciation for the Italian heritage remains strong in Providence today? If so, why?

L: Absolulety! The best evidence of that can be seen in the movie that John Raben did called, Italians on Federal Hill! {Lois shows a picture of her and her sister on the cover of the video, which is also sold at their bakery.} I think that when people come to Providence, Federal Hill is truly a destination for them.

C: In fact, we give tours of the bakery now. We give our guests dessert, some coffee, and a demonstration of how to bake bread. We charge $4.00 per person.

L: Yeah, the tour companies have called on us to participate. We’ve had corporations, garden clubs, and senior citizen groups come.

C: Food is really big thing.

What about your Italian heritage and culture are you most proud of?

C: This whole thing. This, right here. I think food brings people together.

L: Yes, and being able to carry on a family tradition and maintaining the same high standards that our dad set for us all.

In some communities, St. Joseph’s Day doubles also as a kind of father’s day celebration to commemorate the work of Joseph of Nazareth, legal father of Jesus Christ. But the most popular tale, in some parts of the United States, depicts St. Joseph as the hero who brought rain in the midst of a severe drought in Sicily during the middle ages. In gratitude, the Sicilian people would prepare a big feast in his honor.

In a way, the Scialo Sisters – and their extended family – have established their own widespread tradition originating in Providence that allows so many people not only to carry on the ritual of feasting during St. Joseph’s Day, but that also honors the legacy of their dad, Luigi.

Whether it’s the ricotta or the yellow crème zeppola, Carol and Lois still bake all their breads and pastries in the same impressive brick oven that their father and his brother baked in almost a century ago. And while some aspects of the business underwent minor facelifts, and new pastries have been added to the menu, the Scialo Sisters stand proudly by the traditional Italian recipes they inherited from the original Scialo Brothers.

Providence City News: Mary Ellen Flanagan, RWP Botanical Center

2007-03-04T21:00:00.001-05:00

From the City News interview series...

This week, City News had the pleasure of taking a first look behind the scenes of the soon-to-be-unveiled Roger Williams Park Botanical Center. Taking us on a tour of the new facility was Mary Ellen Flanagan, a six-year city parks landscape designer, who co-masterminded the revitalization of this 40-year old local attraction.

Surrounded by glorious palm trees, a spectacular Moon Gate Wall, and the beginnings of what will be a Mediterranean water feature, the Botanical Center includes two new greenhouses towering at 6,000 square-foot each and in the future will greet visitors with 6 acres of outdoor gardens. Two old greenhouses, which are approximately 4,500 square-foot each, will be home to outdoor classroom and lecture spaces, as well as exhibit spaces for plant enthusiasts from all over the City and State.

Mary Ellen takes us through the spectacular results of this perfectly manageable, perfectly scaled center for all things green and grounded.

In your opinion, how does the new Botanical Center at Roger Williams Park benefit our City’s neighbors and greater public? What new features will it have that the old one didn’t?

This is definitely a great project for the City of Providence, a perfect scale, very manageable, and it’s paid for. For the public, it’s big enough to have that ‘Wow!’ factor, but it’s not too large that it becomes a burden for the city and the parks department to run. Having another great attraction for visitors, in addition to the zoo (and other amenities at Roger Williams Park), I think will be welcomed by the plant enthusiasts who come back to learn something totally different every time, by the school children and their teachers who stop by throughout the year for educational field trips, and by our many partnering plant and garden groups who will have a place where they can meet and teach the public about what they’re so passionate about.

It also provides an education component that we’ve been looking for. We’ve always had a number of school groups that have walked through the greenhouse, and now, we will have an opportunity to conduct more educational programs at the new Botanical Center. Schoolteachers were looking for this, too. And now it’s really formalized – the programs for schools as well as for the general public. I think that in and of itself is a wonderful opportunity for teachers.

What role did you play in designing the new Botanical Center? Describe the thought process behind the design.

I worked with the Parks Department team – Fred Holman, who is a landscape architect, primarily did the exterior, overall site. We also worked with John Izzo, the engineer, and Jim Shepard, the greenhouse manager. Of course, Alix Ogden, the Parks Superintendent, and Bob McMahon, the deputy. We all worked on the overall design of the new Center. One of the important things we discussed as we planned out the space was the flexibility of it all. We wanted the ability to move plants around for seasonal exhibits, as well as for our partnering plant groups to display their shows in on a rotating basis. There will be certain features, like our collection of carnivorous plants and our orchids that will be permanent fixtures in the display room. In the end, there will be thousands of plants displayed in the Botanical Center.

I was responsible for the interior design, which includes the Moon Gate Wall that is sure to be a showstopper for visitors to take photographs in and send to friends as a memento of their time in Rhode Island. There’s also the Linear Pool, which is flanked by a Mediterranean-style water feature. And again, I helped in the overall concept of the Center, as we debated over constant color choices. In fact, they call me the Color Queen around here!

How did you decide which plants to use?

When I was choosing plants for the new greenhouses, I was thinking about the schoolchildren of Providence – in terms of what they can or will be able to relate to when they visit. So I decided to use different kinds of fruit trees like citrus, bananas, there’s a coffee tree out back, pomegranate, and fig trees. Of course, there are our palm trees in the Conservatory, too. And I asked myself then, what about these palms can the children relate to? So, we have some with very good names like – the fishtail palm, and the fox tail palm, and the old man palm. So, that’s what I thought about as we were designing this environment.

Were you able to keep any of the plants from the old facility?

Keep in mind that the original green house was built in the 1960s, and yes, in fact, we have a 40-year old cactus that was replanted in the new greenhouse from the old greenhouse. About sixty percent of the plants in the new center are new but the rest of them are the bunch we rescued and replanted from the old greenhouse.

And what’s your favorite plant?

Oh god, do you have all day?! I think … Fragrant plants – nothing is better to me than fragrant plants. The Osmanthus fragrance fills the greenhouse with this citrus-like perfume smell. And I placed it right by the door to greet visitors.

Tell us about those groups who come and volunteer, or have been a part of this effort.

Our partner groups are so instrumental in shaping how this Center has evolved. They helped us understand what their needs were – both in educating the public and showcasing their plants. So they communicated to us their logistical needs for the space, and we took into consideration all the shows that they do, and adequate classroom space – both indoor and out – so that people can come in and study these specialty plants. And there are tons of people that attend these shows and they are all extremely excited about this project. Groups like the Rhode Island Orchid Society, the Rhode Island Carnivorous Plant Society, the Rose Society – which is the institute that has been taking care of the Park’s Victorian Rose Garden off Elmwood Avenue, the Rhode Island Wild Plant Society, the Rhode Island Nurserymen & Landscape Association - a group that will be involved in helping plant the outdoor gardens of the Center, the Hosta Society, the Bonsai Society, the Federation of Garden Clubs, and the Master Gardeners of the URI Cooperative Extension program.

We are partners with the URI Co-op Extension program and through this partnership, we have hired a Volunteer & Education Coordinator to facilitate the programs and the volunteers for the Center. This partnership will also allow us to bring a more scientific bent to the programs we will do, whereby we can bring in different experts throughout the year to conduct lectures and such for our visitors.

Is there anything else about the new center that people should know about?

In addition to the education and exhibit components of the Center, this space has also been designed to allow for groups to rent the facility, or parts of it for special events, weddings, etc. So, it’s rentable space that will bring in revenue to the City. The Conservatory will be available to rent in the near future, and we will also be having an event tent towards the entrance of the outside garden. The Center also has 6 new restroom facilities and a catering area for the events. There’s a gazebo adjacent to the event tent that is facing the lake on the water that could surely be used for a wedding ceremony. I think that’s going to be very popular.

We do have a Parks Department Event Coordinator who currently manages the rental of the casino and this person will also help coordinate events that may happen here at the Botanical Center. In fact, people are starting to book their events now.

Providence City News: Interview with Adam Gertsacov, Director of Bright Night

2007-03-04T20:42:00.000-05:00

From the City News interview series...

My City: Adam Gertsacov, Director of Bright Night

Adam Gertsacov adopted an almost dying New Year’s Eve tradition for Providence four years ago and together with teams of supporters and volunteers, scaled it down to a manageable degree, and turned it around into something bolder and brighter.

Billed as an “artist-run, arts-oriented New Year’s Eve Celebration,” Adam seems most fit to be at the helm of it all, because when he’s not busy being the jack-of-all-trades for the festival, he makes a living as a performer, a professional clown to be exact. But it seems that juggling is more than an art form for this professional, it’s also a very important skill to have when you’re leading the City’s best, brightest, and most talented performers for what is the first major event of every year.

In the midst of grabbing a quick bite, answering phone calls on his cell phone, doing a show in the morning, Adam takes a moment to talk to City News about the inner workings of Bright Night Providence.

Tell us about how the tradition of First Night evolved into Bright Night.

First Night, as an idea, started in Boston in 1985. It was designed as an alcohol-free event that celebrated the arts during the New Year. The next year, it started in Providence through a bunch of local artists getting together. Slowly, it became an organization with a half-a-million dollar annual budget. Around the millennium, in 2000, the organization was starting to experience some financial hardship and in 2003, there was discussion of shutting it down. Doris Stephens, then the director of First Night, called a group of artists together to talk about what could be done. Well, many of us didn’t want the City to go dark in the New Year – so we raised money and got support from the City and the State to make it happen. Around mid-September of 2003, I presented a scaled-down version of First Night at one the Mayor’s Night Out events. I was number three in line to see the Mayor (next after a taxicab driver), and the Mayor seemed very interested in the proposal. He recommended me to Paul Brooks and Cliff Wood, and eventually, we received a $25,000 donation from the City of Providence. From October 15 through December 21 of that year, we managed to raise $80,000 all together and were able to hire 125 performers to perform at 20 venues all over the City. Bright Night was born. At the last minute, after much work, we also managed to get fireworks. During that first year, nothing was burned down, no one was killed nor maimed, and we didn’t lose our shirts! We paid our artists more than what they were contracted for and I’m happy to say that everyone got a fair wage that year.

In your opinion, why is it important to keep this tradition going in the City of Providence? How do residents and tourists benefit from it?

Bright Night draws people from everywhere to see the festival. It’s excellent publicity for the City. Last year, the festival made it in the Wall Street Journal, and the fireworks were featured on CNN. Providence -- and Rhode Island -- has such a wealth of talent. It’s my job to create the best community festival possible.People are entertained, amazed, and delighted by what’s going on. The hotels, restaurants, and parking garages are full and people come down for that one night. Twenty-five years ago, Providence was desolate except for one night: First Night. But when you think about the fact that Waterfire was a project that grew out of First Night in 1994, you can really see the kind of impact this festival has on the City. Waterfire alone has really changed the face of Providence and has put it on the map.There’s a will in the City to make this happen – I wish I could say that it’s just me that gets it all done, but it’s not. It’s the City, the corporations, the volunteers, the artists – it takes all of these people to make this happen.

After four years of steering this event, you must be very excited as a professional clown to have a circus as the main act this year. Tell us about what’s in store for that show.

This year’s main act is an adaptation of some of the best national and international circus act superstars. One main act is usually chosen from out of state. We try to look for acts that appeal to families and adults. We’ve had great acts in the past, for example last year’s Passing Zone was featured in America’s Got Talent.But, I’ve always wanted to do a circus act. And a friend of mine from Ringling was doing Cirque Du Jour. We started talking and putting together names, and came up with a list. This year – we will have a Russian Quick-Change Act, a Tight Wire Act, a Clown named Adam Kuchler who just came back from Germany and does an amazing juggling performance with cigar boxes, and also a Contortionist.It’s a show that’s guaranteed to knock your socks off and if you’re not wearing socks, look out!

What’s your favorite part of the festival?

One of my favorite things is watching people watch the fireworks. Knowing that we are making 20,000 people happy all at once is gratifying. I also get to hire and work with some of Rhode Island’s best artists.

If you could remind audiences one or two things to do or not to do while they’re participating in Bright Night, what would it/they be?

Donate to Bright Night! But really, the most important thing is to have fun. It’s impossible to see everything, so just have a good time and don’t be afraid to see something you might not normally see because you might actually enjoy it.For example, one thing that is unique to Bright Night is the Matthewson Street Labyrinth. It’s a tradition where guests can walk around the labyrinth and meditate and think about what’s in store for them personally for the New Year. It’s a nice thing to go to away from noise and crowds.

What are you going to be meditating about?

My hope is that it doesn’t rain on New Year’s Eve! I would also say that I’m already thinking about how to make things bolder, brighter, and better for the next year.

Where do you see Bright Night going in the future?

I really try to create the largest festival I can afford. We guarantee admission to all of our shows at a 8,400 maximum capacity. I don’t want to see it grow much bigger, but to grow slowly in a way that makes sense and doesn’t risk everything. I’d also like to start an endowment so that Bright Night is guaranteed to take place forever.