Yesterday, we finalized the sale of the historic Shakespeare’s Head building (1772), located at 21 Meeting Street in the College Hill Historic District, to Civis Foundation for operation by the Center for Reflective History, a new nonprofit organization established this year to uncover, preserve, and explore the social histories associated with the building over two and a half centuries. PPS has owned the property since 2015. When we initiated a Request for Proposals for its purchase in the spring of 2024, we learned that the building’s first owner, John Carter, enslaved two people in the house. PPS paused the sale and commissioned local public historian Traci Picard to produce a research report last summer. She found that two enslaved African-American women lived and worked in the house for nearly twenty years: Ingow and her daughter Fanny. Ingow and Fanny were manumitted in 1789, but Fanny remained onsite as an indentured servant until the age of 18. In addition, an enslaved man named Primus King, enslaved by Benjamin King of Newport, worked in the house during the Revolutionary Period. He may have been involved with the printing operation, although details are still being discovered. Picard will continue to research the legacies associated with the site in her role as Project Historian for the Center for Reflective History. The Center for Reflective History team will spend the next two years developing plans for the house and garden, which will likely include exhibitions, public programs, educational activities, and platforms for civic dialogue. Programs will bring the experiences of the buildings’ diverse occupants to life in ways that contextualize and reflect the relationships to labor, immigration, gender, class, housing, financial institutions, and economic hardship - among other resonant topics. Preservation work is not just about saving buildings – it is also about research, storytelling and creating new connections with the past. We are proud to have played a role in bringing the lives of Ingow, Fanny and Primus out into the light, and look forward to working with the new Center in the years to come. (fb)

As part of a swath of improvements coming to the Woonasquatucket River Greenway, the City is planning to install a pedestrian bridge near Sims Avenue to allow walkers and cyclists to more easily traverse the river. The bridge could be a game changer for busy weekends at Farm Fresh, when people may need to park on the other side of the river, and will hopefully allow for greater connectivity in the area. The bridge would connect Farm Fresh to the Waterfire Arts Center parking lot. Approvals for the project were granted in 2022, while Mayor Jorge Elorza was still in office. The bid went to contract, and the bridge was prefabricated by Contech Engineered Solutions. The project had an initial (ambitious) completion date in mid-spring of 2023. So now, two years since that deadline has come and gone, where’s the bridge? The completed bridge has been stuck in a facility in Virginia due to an error made by the project manager, according to the Providence Redevelopment Agency (PRA). The design of the bridge did not account for an underground utility line that would have been disrupted by the bridge as it was planned. Micropilings for the bridge “would have interfered with an underground utility line,” said Nicholas Cicchitelli, PRA secretary and director of real estate for the city, at the PRA’s meeting on May 20. This created “the necessity of redesigning that and putting the project on hold for eight months and counting.” Read more: https://ppsri.org/a-pedestrian-bridge-for-sims-avenue-is-ready-to-be-installed-across-the-woonasquatucket-why-is-it-stuck-in-virginia/ (fb)