Time to De-pave the LandscapeBy Jane Holtz Kay Architect William Warner doesn't look like the Robert Moses of de-paving. With a wry wit, a down-to-earth manner, and a devotion to urban detail, the architect of Providence's Waterplace Park lacks the imperial stance of the powerbroking New York Moses who launched the auto age or the Biblical heft of a Moses who could part the asphalt. Notwithstanding this altogether agreeable tendency to the understated versus the autocratic, Warner's transformation of a half-mile swath of hardtop into a canal and walkway has created what some call the "Venice of New England" in this small older city: not only a place of grace and energy but a model for asphalt removal and urban renewal in the nation. Last summer, a generation after his plans to unearth two buried Providence rivers produced this canal, Waterplace Park's success in stitching together a city once severed by the highway prompted a final de-paving venture here. The launching of the Old Harbor Plan, Providence's $270-million, 10-year project, to complete the downtown's waterway's final push to the sea. By moving interstate-195 and freeing some 45 acres of downtown area and shore land, the city will gain greater access, recreation and renewal, and less hardtop.
Though de-paving projects like Providence's are rare, erasing highways has an honorable history. Successes go back to the early seventies when Portland, Oregon, rejected a highway and built a riverbank park. At the same time, Boston defeated the infamous inner belt, originated the highway transfer fund, and took the money to build the spectacular Southwest Corridor. (Today, of course, the city's Big Dig paves-or excavates-the way to take down its Central Artery.) As the century ends, San Francisco is re-designing land released by stopping the Embarcadero's elevated highway. In Louisville, Kentucky, the half-mile Ohio River waterfront makeover, opened last summer, boasted the dismantling of an exit ramp from Interstate 64 to make a walkable link to the city. Add to these, a Denver parks restoration that has pickaxed roads in three parks along the 10-mile South Platte River Project to preserve its corridor for open space and habitat. Consider the South Bronx where the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, Nos Quedamos/We Stay Committee and neighborhood activists are looking to decommission the l.25 mile Sheridan Expressway and add its 28 acres to a restored Bronx River waterfront park. And the evidence of first steps to de-paving the planet seems promising. For all these initiatives, Providence's before-and-after landscape can still claim the nation's most heroic makeover, the most "ambitious new architecture and engineering project in the nation," says Ann Breen, co-director of the Waterfront Center, an advocacy group in Washington. A "before" shot of the city would scan a brutish landscape split in two: at the crest of the city, would stand the palatial McKim, Mead and White marble state capitol; below, the historic brick downtown. In between, would spread an impassable wall of rail, road and parking deposited by 1950's-style urban renewal that buried two rivers to hardtop the space with highways. In the early 1980s, the state proposed a plan that would have repaired the highways but left them in place to choke the city's core. Dismayed by that prospect, Mr. Warner proposed his own. His vision was to jackhammer the asphalt that split the city and restore the waterfront. To do so, he would re-rout the two rivers, the Woonasquatucket and Moshassuck buried by the highways. The city signed on. "Daylighting" is the phrase used by those who release creeks from culverts. But "city-making" would better describe the architect's labors. Using available transportation funds from the federal railway Northeast Corridor Project to improve the rails and &\federal highway (FHWA) moneys to re-connect the roads and unearth the river (strange grandparents!), the city metamorphosed. Mayor Vincent "Buddy" Cianci and two influential senators, Claiborne Pell and John Chafee, had their share of clout in the project. Earlier versions of his ideas had floated in the air, but "it was his vision," says Edward Sanderson, executive director of the State Preservation Commission: his energy to seam the city and create the brick and cobblestone promenade, the amphitheaters, the resting places along the canal; his selectivity, political adeptness and commitment to tend to his own garden. Walking or boating in the newly created park along the canal's still waters or passing under a procession of 12 bridges one is hard put to imagine the former dreariness of this place before Warner peeled off "the world's largest bridge" in this once-forsaken downtown. And on a rainy Earth Day when the walkway's soggy pear trees looked down on an assembly of equally drenched waterfront advocates at the Waterfront Center Conference on "Parks, Pathways and Public Realm," these touring officials attested to both the new outlook and the draw of his results as they followed in Warner's wake. More than a ribbon of water, Waterplace is a tour de force: a curving waterway of lagoons, street lights, steps, platforms for benches a restaurant and small rotundas. Jampacked with stone and brick walls, intercepted and organized with steps, the pedestrian passage is a rich one. The palette is large, the architect's way of design traditional, neither thinly de-constructed nor post-modern clunky. A potpourri of artifacts and street furniture curve along the river's path and connect to the urban streetscape at every link. Bridges and paths fan out into plazas before the Rhode Island School of Design or dissolve into the buildings of the city they straddle, connecting the esplanade to the town. "Porous," Warner calls the linkage, spilling into the city easily. The longtime Providence architect handles the extremes of scale deftly, from the super-scale plan to the complex hand-sized details of bronze railing, a patterned brick bridge, ornate sewer covers or historic panels. With dry humor and attentiveness to details, he has deployed not only artistry but political adeptness in coaxing urban niceties from municipal and highway authorities not known for encouraging the fine points of design. It's "multi-modal," Warner uses the buzzword that secures funding from transportation officials. By touting multi-modal capabilities, i.e., places that allow many modes of movement means not just the road, the adroit architect could secure federal financing for the amenities of walkability not just the eternal driveability. "William the Conqueror" is a nickname acquired for these skills. Warner describes his 12-person office not as an "A & E" firm, i.e. architecture and engineering - but as an "A & LA" one--architecture and landscape architecture. His attention to the waterfront grounds is obvious: Daffodils dappled the banks in between the river-grass plantings on my visit, weeping willows and oaks traced the banks, and the other natural local plants show a sensitivity to the region. Beyond the finishes, Providence artists have made Waterplace park a gathering spot in summer months when "Water Fire," offers a show of cloaked gondoliers in black mufti gliding silently from fire to fire, illuminating brazier after brazier to light the evening's dark. This spectacle and civic happening draws Providence's academic and blue collar constituency to the waterfront. The next phase of the project will enhance the edges of the harbor basin. This austere, industrial area with its oddlot buildings will have a more "earthy" look, says Warner. The rocks sustaining its banks ("riprap") will remain. A boardwalk will allow walkers to pass by and docks will encourage boats. A heritage museum is also in the works to accompany Warner's earlier addition to the power plant, a handsome structure with massive black ducts and well-composed glass windows emblazoned with red and green. Efforts to clean the polluted river and connect the city's poorer neighborhoods with a bike path will enable them to share the benefits and link to the larger region. While Warner's Waterplace Parks seams together the Downtown and television's "Providence" gives the city cachet, the $435 million, l.3 million square foot Providence Place opened this summer between the canal and the capitol adds less to the city's urbanity. Spanning a long city block, bigger than the Brown campus, this aloof shopping and entertainment complex turns with a giant glass atrium "Wintergarden" is a mall-like intruder in the painfully-wrought cityscape. Dominated by a massive 4,000-car garage, plus three new downtown hotels and a convention center could drain customers from a beautiful but less-than-bustling Downtown and threaten the encouraged elsewhere by plans for artist and residential housing Downtown. Indeed, this structure raises questions as to whether Providence can build on this walkable, public space as the city heats up and more conventional developers push for more enclosed, car-oriented modes. It also invites the larger question: can urban America learn from Waterplace Park? Can use this opportunity for rolling back a hard-topped past judiciously? Even as Kansas City, Missouri, enhances its handsome system of historic greenways, it expands its interstate through the city. While Camden, New Jersey, enhances its waterfront, Trenton, succumbs to a retrograde road widening of route 29 by the Delaware River. De-pavers must run doubletime to outpace the road-motion machine. Nor does simply lifting asphalt produce utopian architecture. The Louisville park by landscape superstar George Hargreave is sterile. His formalistic art-on-paper performance--here a triangular "Parisian" park, there a waterfall, nowhere (hardly) a waterside seat--is cold and arbitrary, a far remove from Louisville's richly-textured Olmsted parks that hew to river and land. Meanwhile, environmentally-attuned Bostonians await the release of the 27 acres above the Big Dig to the auspices of the Turnpike chief James Kerasiotes with apprehension. Still, if results vary, the impetus grows. The urge for that green (or blue) relief made manifest in the last election when 240 communities placed open space issues on the ballot and more than two-thirds passed, reflects a new constituency for such initiatives. If sprawl to the fringes of the metropolis is the problem, reconstructing the urban core is the solution. Those struggling to save America's cities could learn from Providence's de-paving. Versions of this article were originally published in the architecture column of the New York Times, July 25, 1999 and in Conservation Matters thereafter.
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The change taking place in the suddenly trendy town fits into a national train. More than a triumph of architecture over asphalt in one New England city, Waterplace's string of lagoons reflects a national impulse to dig up the concrete flatlands left by half a century of hardtopping. American cities have begun to look at the waterfronts and other downtown neighborhoods flattened by highways in the fifties and 60s. Today, as many of these roads end their useful life, and funds for road work are in the offering, the chance to grace or calm these places, not just resurface or expand them, could stimulate a softer, greener landscape and cityscape. Rivers once seen as prime candidates for highways could become locales for downtowns seeking to restore rather than re-pave.