The inside of the Simple Pleasures building, located in Richmond Square on the East Side, resembles the kind of quirky, eclectic shop you might see in a Hallmark movie — especially during the holiday season. A variety of hutches and display tables, all different styles and colors, are jigsawed together and decked out with the winter stock: handmade hats, gloves, and scarves; a basket full of tin-foil-wrapped chocolates imported from Europe; plenty of wintry-looking porcelain bird figurines; and one of shop owner Mary Moore’s favorites — German carved-wood spirits. Thanks to a small collection of embroidered balsam pillows on the central display table, the seasonally appropriate scents of pine trees and cinnamon hang in the air.
“I guess you could say we have eclectic taste and like interesting things,” Moore says. The RISD graduate has been running the shop for a little over 30 years, enduring freezing winters and sweltering summers in this barebones shack on the riverfront, where Waterman Street ends in the east. For most of that time, her daughter Alice has worked right alongside her. “She was child labor,” Moore laughs.
Underneath brightly colored swathes of fabric and decorative felt garlands, the building at 6 Richmond Square is surprisingly rugged with its uninsulated brick walls, original dark-wood ceiling beams, and raw metal details — even one of the display tables in the center, underneath a vinyl tablecloth, is a plain iron slab. It came with the building when Mary Moore and her then-business partner first started renting in the early ’90s. For such a small structure, 6 Richmond Square holds over a century’s worth of history inside its two rooms.
Before it was Simple Pleasures, this shack was called Mahoney’s Forge, and it was one of the longest-operating blacksmith shops in the city. Maps of Providence first indicate a structure nestled in the northeastern corner of Waterman and East River streets as early as 1882 — but that shack appears to be even smaller than what remains today. Instead, according to maps and building permits housed at the City Archives, the existing structure seems to be part of a once 5,000 square-foot building, built by Irish immigrant Daniel Mahoney around 1896. Sometime between 1926 and 1937, parts of the building appear to have been demolished, leaving behind the 1,000-square-foot shack that is now home to Simple Pleasures.
Mahoney, born in County Cork, Ireland in 1864, moved to the United States as a 17-year-old with his mother. He first learned blacksmithing in Cambridge, Mass., and later opened his own shop in Providence after he married and began having children. He and his forge weathered the great transition from horses to cars, and his business — largely based around horseshoeing in the early days — evolved accordingly. The building became a fixture of the far East Side of Providence, often referred to in newspaper clippings as “the old stand by Red Bridge,” — a drawbridge that no longer exists, which extended Waterman Street over the Seekonk River into East Providence.
Mahoney’s Forge operated into the 1960s, with Daniel Mahoney Jr. as its blacksmith after Dan Sr. died in 1940. As the forge phased out horseshoes — they shod their last horse in 1926 — Dan Jr.’s focus shifted to making weather vanes, railings, door handles, latches, and other metal accessories. His work decorated buildings all over Providence, from the door handle on his own building to a weather vane on top of the Firemen’s Mutual Insurance Co. building on South Main Street. In a feature story on the shop back in 1954, Providence Journal writer George Hull described the energy inside:
Mahoney is not so preoccupied with today’s business concerns that he won’t reminisce on request, and an aid to this is a little book his father kept when the latter started the shop the year after Daniel Jr. was born… From its pages, faint echoes — the ring of the anvil, the stomping of a heavy horse, the hiss of a hot shoe dipped in black water. And there are odors — of the forge, the horse, and the hoof in contact with the still steaming shoe. (Providence Journal, April 21, 1954)
During its more than half-century run, the forge saw the construction of many of the buildings that comprise Richmond Square today — and the demolition of many that do not. It witnessed the decadeslong expansion of the American Ship Windlass Co., a ship foundry across the street, as it grew from a single building to a large complex on both sides of East River Street. The small shack also survived the great fire that destroyed part of the foundry in 1904. It witnessed the development of Richmond Square and the demolition of the bridge it had so long been associated with in 1977.
And though the Mahoneys never lived in the forge, it still bore witness to their growth as a family. In the mid-1910s, Dan Jr. had a short-lived career as a professional football player for the now-defunct Providence Steamrollers. Around the same time, Dan Sr. managed to become the Democratic candidate for Ward 2 City Councilor; though the Voters’ League recommended his more experienced Republican counterpart, they still described him as “an honest, well-meaning man with a good reputation.” As teenagers, siblings Mollie, Helen, and Thomas Mahoney participated in their share of local plays with the St. Joseph’s Alumni Club — often with a Daniel Mahoney on the violin (it’s unclear whether this would have been their father or their brother). Meanwhile, oldest child Annie was professed to the Sisters of Mary convent under the name Theresa Marie, becoming a prominent nun and Catholic school teacher.
Dan Jr. semi-retired from blacksmithing in the 1960s. He passed away in 1976, and the forge was left vacant for over a decade.
“When we came, it was locked up like a time capsule,” Mary Moore said. “There was a rocking chair, his gloves, a can of beer. It was like he just walked out one day and never came back.”
The handmade and imported products that now fill Simple Pleasures seem like they’re from a different universe than the horseshoes and door latches that populated Mahoney’s Forge. But really, the heart of what’s happening in 6 Richmond Square today is not so different from what it was 100 years ago: The products still represent craftsmanship, and the father and son behind the construction of the building have been replaced with a mother and daughter.
The Mahoneys’ business evolved as their industry did, and the Moores have wrestled in recent years with competition from large online retailers like Amazon.
“Everything’s going in a chain direction,” Alice said. Their business has already changed a lot from when it started 30 years ago. Mary said they used to sell a lot of flowers, back when you could only get them from florists or specialty shops; she reflected on when she used to drive up to Boston to buy flowers wholesale.
“Now everybody can buy whatever they want at the supermarket,” Mary said. “Trader Joe’s prices are amazing.”
In addition to the rapidly changing nature of the retail industry, the Moores have also faced the unique challenge of the property’s changing ownership, particularly over the last couple of years. Though the building is small, the largely undeveloped riverfront property it sits on is not. The mother and daughter have stewarded the building through several different owners over the last 30-plus years.
Development of the land is complicated by required environmental remediation: The northern half of the property — now a small forest — was an industrial site for years. Additionally, the quick-witted Mahoneys also had a gas station on the property after horseshoes became irrelevant, further contributing to potential contaminants. Perhaps as a result of all the remediation required, Mary said that with each new landowner looking to build, the money always seemed to dry up along the way.
The most recent owners, Dustin Dezube and Kevin Diamond of the Providence Group, seem undaunted by the obstacles to developing the land. Back in October, the pair submitted a proposal for a 326-unit residential building to the City Planning Commission with requests for parking and dimensional variances. The proposed building would stretch from lot line to lot line — on top of where Simple Pleasures is currently located. In fact, the plan featured no mention of 6 Richmond Square, leaving the Moores to wonder whether their livelihood will be demolished.
Some commissioners and residents who testified at the hearing criticized the plan for being vague. “The current design of the building pretends that Richmond Square doesn’t exist,” Nina Tannenwald, one of the co-presidents of the Wayland Neighborhood Association, testified at the meeting. “Richmond Square is full of these antique buildings: The Waterman Grille, the office building, the Simple Pleasures old building, and the red mill buildings, and you don’t see those in the plan. The current design is completely disconnected from the square it will be associated with.”
Still, other residents emphasized the city’s need for more housing — even luxury condos, as planned for Diamond and Dezube’s 27 East River Street building.
One commissioner, Charlotte Lipschitz, was hesitant enough about the lack of details to vote against the proposal. Ultimately, the rest of the Commission voted in favor and Dezube and Diamond received conditional approval for their variance requests, requiring them to conduct community outreach and submit another preliminary plan further down the line. Those details have not yet materialized.
In an email, Dezube said that they had returned “to the drawing board and are working on redesigning a number of the concerns that were raised,” but have not yet directly addressed the fate of the little historic shack at the eastern end of Waterman Street. After Christmas this year, when Mary and Alice pack away their silver and gold tinsel for the season, they will be left wondering whether it is the last time they stash their Christmas decorations away.
By Keating Zelenke / Mary A. Gowdey Special Projects Fellow / kzelenke@ppsri.org