Remembering the South Providence Neighborhood Center

Published in Design & Development, Heritage & Preservation.

On Thursday, Oct. 24, the Providence Department of Planning and Development and the Providence Redevelopment Agency held the first of three community engagement events to gather input from residents on the future of 246 Prairie Avenue. Roughly 50 years ago, an earlier era of local engagement made the Urban League of Rhode Island’s old headquarters into the “South Providence Neighborhood Center” it once was.

In October 1971, 50 people packed the Providence City Council chambers to debate the future of South Providence’s struggling Martin Luther King Shopping Center at 246 Prairie Avenue. Members of the Model Cities Citizens Planning Committee, a resident council elected to guide the administration of federal funds in South Providence, called for rehabilitating the shopping center to support businesses from the neighborhood. Others saw the center’s commercial potential as limited and instead suggested that its structure offered an opportunity to test a new concept in urban policy: a neighborhood center.1

When the South Providence Neighborhood Center opened with the Citizens Planning Committee’s approval nearly five years later, its new tenants were optimistic about the building’s future. Errol Hunt, then the director of the Urban League of Rhode Island, called it a “beautiful new building that’s a part of our community.”2 The dedicated, centralized space for a daycare, senior center, health clinic, housing aid, and job assistance represented public investment in South Providence and its residents.

Less than 50 years after the opening of the South Providence Neighborhood Center, the building that once housed it will be demolished. Knowing the aspirations that this center once held can inform the site’s reimagining.

A National Movement

Hunt’s optimism represented a national movement of federal and local investment in neighborhood social service centers. In  a speech in Syracuse, New York in 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson called for “the establishment, in every ghetto of America, [of] a neighborhood center.” As a result, the federal government pumped unprecedented social service funding into largely urban communities of color impoverished by decades of job loss, white flight, and urban renewal. 3These services, including daycare, employment assistance, educational programs, and healthcare, required dedicated spaces in which to operate.

Civil rights organizations like the Urban League played a major role in this development. Before the federal government’s involvement, these groups had long provided such services alongside settlement houses and religious organizations. In the early 1960s, figures like National Urban League leader Whitney M. Young Jr. and Martin Luther King Jr. seized the opportunity offered by the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Taking advantage of liberal leadership, such figures pushed the federal government to take on anti-poverty aid as part of a broader fight for civil rights. The suite of domestic programs that resulted — the War on Poverty — created much of the social welfare state that exists today, including Medicare and Medicaid, food stamps, Head Start, and Americorps.4

The neighborhood center was conceptualized to concentrate all of these new social programs in one place, closest to those that needed its services most. Fourteen test cities began building neighborhood centers in 1966 as part of the federal government’s Neighborhood Center Pilot Program. Then in the late 1960s and early 1970s, neighborhood centers proliferated by leaps and bounds in part due to a larger, more widespread federal program, the Model Cities Program. Model Cities sought to pair the resources of the War on Poverty’s social programs with funds for physical construction in over 150 neighborhoods, Providence included. 

At the core of Model Cities and other War on Poverty-era programs was the idea of “citizen participation,” the concept that local residents would guide the projects these programs initiated. In Providence, a group of residents elected from the “model neighborhood,” an area bounded by Broad Street and I-95, made up the Citizens Planning Committee.5 This committee oversaw the development of social programs and building projects based on their understanding of local needs. However, the power that such citizens held was highly variable. A federal official surveying multiple programs visited Providence to find city staff “informing” the committee of its plans rather than providing them with the technical expertise to truly participate in their creation. 6

However, the inventive projects produced in many Model Cities programs demonstrate that it still provided local residents an unprecedented degree of civic power. In Pawtucket’s program, a group of teenagers convinced the city’s Model Neighborhood Council to purchase the state’s old Ferry Newport. With the help of the Rhode Island School of Design Community Design Center, the teens turned it into a floating youth center devoted to the arts.

The South Providence Neighborhood Center represented a similar approach. The Willard Shopping Center it replaced had long stoked the neighborhood’s ire, even after attempts to rename it in honor of Martin Luther King. As part of Providence’s first urban renewal project, its construction had displaced as many as 200 families. In 1968, local youth protested its lack of Black employees — out of 55 staff members, only five were Black in a Black-majority neighborhood with significant unemployment.7 Years of protest pushed white-owned businesses out, but without new investments for refurbishment, the Black-owned businesses that took their place struggled to refill the space.8

At this same moment, social service providers were straining in borrowed space. The South Providence Drop-In Center, a youth-directed space later called the Soul Center, was working out of a storefront across Prairie Avenue.9 The Model Cities Social Service Center, a multi-agency office led by social worker Henri Lopes, had been working out of a former Knights of Columbus building on Mystic Street since 1970.10 The Urban League was headquartered in an office over a mile away in Downcity.11 Model Cities’ proposal, rehousing the services that held up the community in the shopping center that held it down, offered a sense of justice.

Inside the South Providence Neighborhood Center

The South Providence Neighborhood Center opened on Aug. 25, 1976, designed by the firm of Robinson Green Beretta and funded by a $665,541 grant from the Providence Model Cities Program. 12The Harvey Clements Senior Center occupied one space, as did an office of the City’s Planning Department tasked with housing neighborhood residents. Space for the job, family, legal, and education counseling services formerly provided by the Model Cities Social Service Center was planned as well. The Urban League’s own new headquarters in the building housed 30 staff that operated housing, education, employment, health, and consumer rights programs in addition to a Spanish service bureau. 13

Another of the center’s tenants, the Allen Berry Health Center, spoke to a parallel movement in healthcare reform. One of several community health centers established in Providence by the antipoverty agency Progress for Providence, it offered low-cost family planning, prenatal care, dermatology, podiatry, nutrition, and preventive medicine to nearly 9,000 families amid a larger national movement for accessible, community-based health. The new space brought the center into one new larger facility from its three separate former storefront locations, quadrupling its patient capacity.14

Finally, the building offered seven classrooms, a playroom, and offices for Temple Head Start.15 The free federal daycare program provided low-income families with childcare, a costly need that benefitted children and parents alike. Once established, the program created a rippling impact. At its opening, the daycare mainly aimed to serve the neighborhood’s existing families, but when Providence welcomed its first Hmong refugees barely a decade later, it became integral to their community while they got settled.16 Temple Head Start created a special classroom environment to help the children acclimate to a strange new home. 

Still, the South Providence Neighborhood Center’s goal to provide multiple services in one space was short-lived. At the end of Model Cities, Providence gave the building to the Urban League to manage, one example of how War on Poverty programs often relied on non-profits to administer social services, and in return, such non-profits relied heavily on public funds.17 When Model Cities ended, declining funding led to friction between organizations. In 1981, Head Start accused the Urban League of overcharging on rent and moved out in 1988.18 Another 1981 disagreement between the City and the community activists who led the Harvey Clements Senior Center led to the senior center’s eviction, which its elderly patrons protested by staging a sit-in.19 Urban League Director Errol Hunt later said he worked seven and a half days a week just to keep his own organization afloat.20 When the League moved to sell the building to pay off its debts in the 2010s, the City took back control of the building’s future.21

Preserving Space for Social Services

The South Providence Neighborhood Center is not the first remnant of the War on Poverty that Providence has lost: the no longer extant John E. Fogarty Building represents another version of the same story. The Fogarty Building, then known as the Public Welfare Building, opened in 1967 to house the State’s Department of Human Services. Its location among corporate offices and its Brutalist architecture — the style of major corporations and civic spaces of the time — expressed high regard for the work of social welfare. Likewise, its glass lobby overlooking the density of Downcity rather than the loftiness of the Capitol area symbolized a commitment to the accessibility of services. Neighborhood-based centers like South Providence’s furthered this mission by bringing service work even closer to the publics they served. 

In a new economic climate 30 years later, the Fogarty building’s central location was its downfall. The Department of Human Services moved out in 1997 when then-Mayor Buddy Cianci Jr. began courting the Sports Museum of New England to take the site, capitalizing on its proximity to the Providence Civic Center and the Rhode Island Convention Center.22 The museum never materialized, but after a stint as a school, the city sold the property in 2005 and its new owners demolished it in 2017. 

Yet, cities that provided greater post-Model Cities support than Providence give insight into what the South Providence Neighborhood Center might have been. The Chicago Model Cities Program used its Community Service Centers as opportunities to provide Black architects and contractors with major commissions and jobs. There, centers like the King and Garfield Community Service Centers, both designed by National Organization of Minority Architects founding president Wendell Campbell, remain significant community spaces decades later.23

In Seattle, where the Model Cities Program dispersed neighborhood facilities by program, these facilities seeded significant institutions, including the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center and the Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic, both housed in former synagogues.24 From its founding, the Odessa Brown Clinic collaborated with Seattle’s Black Panther-founded Carolyn Downs Clinic and eventually moved into a new purpose-built building together, making Downs the only Panther-founded clinic still in operation.25 

As such a case shows, saying goodbye to a building does not always signify disinvestment from the motives it once symbolized. When the Allen Berry Health Center moved out of the South Providence Neighborhood Center in 2011, its doctors said that they had outgrown the center’s cramped, poorly lit spaces and that moving to a new location enabled the center to quadruple its patient capacity.26 The move was supported in part by a section of the Affordable Care Act that funded community health centers, representing that the departure from a site can help maintain an organization’s mission.

The Fogarty site does not represent such maintenance. Though Cianci’s first tourist-centered development plan fell through, a Residence Inn ultimately took Fogarty’s place in 2019. This site, which once trumpeted the value of serving the state’s neediest communities, now instead courts outside visitors of financial means. 

In South Providence, local leaders have called for a commitment to keep the neighborhood center’s site in service of the neighborhood.27 The city’s community engagement meetings, starting this month, are an opportunity for residents to shape the site’s future as the South Providence Citizens Planning Committee once did fifty years earlier.

  1. Bruce DeSilva, “Is Shopping Center Causing Blight Or Vital to South Providence?,” Providence Journal, October 29, 1971. ↩︎
  2. John E. Mulligan, “Lingering Memory of Vandalism Won’t Break New Center’s Spirit,” Providence Journal-Bulletin, August 25, 1976. ↩︎
  3. Lyndon B. Johnson, “Remarks at Columbus Circle, Syracuse, New York,” https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-columbus-circle-syracuse-new-york.
    ↩︎
  4. Sylvie Laurent and William Julius Wilson, King and the Other America: The Poor People’s Campaign and the Quest for Economic Equality, First Edition (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019), 7; Dennis C. Dickerson, Militant Mediator: Whitney M. Young Jr., 1st ed. (University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 255. ↩︎
  5. “Model Neighborhood Is Divided Into 14 Representative Districts,” The Prairie Schooner, June 1970, Doorley Papers, Box 2, Folder Model Cities 1970, Providence College Archives & Special Collections. ↩︎
  6. Sherry R. Arnstein, “A Ladder Of Citizen Participation,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 35, no. 4 (July 1, 1969): 218, https://doi.org/10.1080/01944366908977225. ↩︎
  7. Fraser Smith, “South Providence Youths Challenge Adults to Action-Nonviolently,” The Providence Journal, April 10, 1968. ↩︎
  8. Doane Hulick, “Conversion Job Sought at Center,” Providence Journal, November 4, 1975. ↩︎
  9. “Afro Arts Talk,” Providence Journal, February 1, 1969; “The View From the ‘Soul Center,’” Providence Sunday Journal, March 24, 1968. ↩︎
  10. Merrill R. Bailey, “New Center Brings Help Closer to the Distressed,” Providence Evening Bulletin, October 2, 1970. ↩︎
  11. “Urban League of Rhode Island,” n.d., NAACP Providence Rhode Island Branch Collection, Box 5, Folder 11, Providence College Archives & Special Collections. ↩︎
  12. Hulick, “Conversion Job Sought at Center.” ↩︎
  13.  Mulligan, “Lingering Memory of Vandalism Won’t Break New Center’s Spirit.” ↩︎
  14. Mulligan. ↩︎
  15.  Mulligan. ↩︎
  16. Phil Kukielski, “Mysteries of English Unraveled Quickly by Pre-School Laotians,” Providence Journal-Bulletin, January 29, 1980. ↩︎
  17. Claire Dunning, Nonprofit Neighborhoods: An Urban History of Inequality and the American State, Historical Studies of Urban America (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2022), 128–30. ↩︎
  18. Barbara Carton, “Preschoolers Seen Benefiting by Head Start’s Lasting Effects,” Providence Journal-Bulletin, January 19, 1981.; Thomas J. Morgan, “Head Start Looks to Expansion of Program Acquisition of S. Providence Site, Allocation of Funds Spark Move,” Providence Journal, October 12, 1988. ↩︎
  19. Martin J. Funke, “Center Eviction Blamed on Politics,” Providence Journal-Bulletin, October 15, 1981. ↩︎
  20. “Interview with Rev. Errol Hunt,” Speaking of Rochester (Rochester, New York: WXXI Public Broadcasting), American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), accessed October 10, 2024, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-189-63fxpvmw. ↩︎
  21. W. Zachary Malinowski, “League ‘Appears Insolvent,’” Providence Journal, February 22, 2014. ↩︎
  22. “City Journal,” Providence Journal, October 5, 1997. ↩︎
  23. “Groundwork for the Future: King Community Service Center” (Model Cities-Chicago Committee on Urban Opportunity, 1976), Social Science Reference Collection, Chicago Public Library. ↩︎
  24. Mark Krasovic, “Black Arts/West and the Ironies of Development in Seattle’s ‘Other America,’” Planning Perspectives 39, no. 1 (January 2, 2024): 105, https://doi.org/10.1080/02665433.2023.2291219. ↩︎
  25. Louis Appel, “With Dignity: The Birth and Spirit of the Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic,” 1999, Seattle Room, Seattle Public Library. ↩︎
  26. Felice J. Freyer, “The Doctor Can See You Now,” Providence Journal, August 16, 2012. ↩︎
  27. Amy Russo, “A New Future – How Providence Plans to Revitalize Old Urban League of RI Site,” Providence Journal (RI), December 20, 2022, Access World News – Historical and Current. ↩︎

By Jeremy Lee Wolin / PhD Candidate, History & Theory of Architecture / Princeton University School of Architecture

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