Broad Street Stories
What do heritage markers look like in a predominantly immigrant neighborhood? What if the neighbors were the ones to answer this question?
Freelance design for City of Providence Arts, Culture & Tourism in partnership with Rhode Island Latino Arts. Funded by National Endowment for the Humanities, National Trust for Historic Preservation, Rhode Island Council for the Humanities, Rhode Island Foundation, and Rhode Island Commerce.
Who first asked this question?
Bronze plaques are abundant in such an historical city, but for all it’s American heritage, there is also a magnificently rich history of how people arrived in this country after independent, through the industrial revolution, and thought the changes in neighboring countries. When the question of plaques in the historically immigrant area of southern Providence was raised, one city department pushed back, proposing that property ownership and famous residents were likely not what was needed to tell a compelling story there.
After a successful search for funding an a nonprofit active in the neighborhood to organize the work and pay the team, I was recruited to facilitate workshops with local stakeholders to arrive at insights about the built environment. The intent was to activate neighbors interested in design to make material decisions about installations. Things did not go according to plan.
How did the project start?
After a year of public engagement and a change in nonprofit partner / overall project structure, the team landed on the concept of low fidelity posters to communicate interesting or provocative information about the neighborhood.
The team spent hours landing on the information categories, and discovered that what was assumed to be fact was actually layers of rumor and opinion. We leveraged every resource from libraries to archives to online hobbyist websites to assemble a collection of information that the neighborhood to could read int order to dig into the heritage topics listed on the posters.
Each visual element in the poster was cited on our project website, as was the variety of archival resources that tracked or validated the heritage statement on each poster.
How did the project pivot?
After the initial push we forked the project into two teams, on focusing on physical installations in public space, the other on creating tools to encourage more participatory heritage projects in the. future.
Public call for artists and fabricators to respond to an open ended vision of public heritage
Adding urbanism and heritage toolkits to the library collections for k-12 audiences and their elders.
Building two companion playbooks on creating participatory heritage projects, one for neighbors and the other for nonprofits.
The work concludes summer 2025.
