by Vikki Warner
Angelo’s account of PennHenge’s utter neglect in recent years made me morbidly curious as to what other surprises awaited us. I felt, viscerally, all of those bad years then; when I entered the house I smelled abandonment, and once you’ve noticed that scent, it’s not easy to forget. In every puckered spot on the plaster and every cracked floorboard, I saw a symptom of the inattention that had long resided here, and I wanted to fix it all, to restore the house to a gleaming past I had fabricated for it.
Around the same time as Elvin and Caroline’s arrival, Ben and Daria, the Bostonian artist/graphic designer couple, gave me their notice. They were breaking up and moving—separately—to the West Coast, one to southern California and one to the Pacific Northwest. James and Ben weren’t meshing all that well in their new print shop, and they too were ready to cut ties. “Guess the house killed that!” James and I joked as they prepared to move out. The tenant carousel continued to turn a bit too quickly for me, but I was new to the game then, and beginner’s luck was with me.
That summer, among other jobs, I worked selling vegetables at a farmer’s market once a week in downtown Providence. Riding my bike home with twenty dollars and a tote bag full of leafy splendor, carrot greens brushing my neck, sniffing the cooling evening air, pinned me like a dagger to Providence. I was feeling out my lucky freedom, learning how to move within it.
One sunny afternoon at the market, a guy sauntered up between the bunches of radishes and started chatting with my coworker, saying he was looking for a place in town. Something about the way Nick approached and the way he spoke, in combination with his dark hair and obscure band T-shirt and dirty jeans and the general air of summery farmer’s market fleshiness, made him electrically attractive to me. This was a novel delight considering my tattered relationship with James, which was enfeebled but soldiering on. Nick and I had a smiling, easy conversation, interrupted at intervals by customers holding out bunches of kale. It was thrilling. It had been a long time since I had felt such a charge.
Being a champion hider of love interest, though, I kept this sudden flush to myself and switched to business mode, asking him what he was looking for (cough) and how soon he could move (ahem).
Within a few weeks, Nick carted in his books and guitars and jars of herbs and more pairs of dirty jeans. He fashioned his apartment in true anarcho-hippie style: simple furniture, neat unfinished wood shelves full of very smart books, a desk at which he drew and wrote letters to far-flung anarchist friends, plants everywhere. A sort of sun-warmed, mellow glow fell upon the place.
Nick and I became friends instantly. That was another surprise. There was little need for us to figure one another out, to gauge pros and cons, because we just got along, no adjustments required. Not one to seek complications, I kept the attraction on the back burner of a stovetop in another dimension. I wasn’t in love with him; I only needed to avoid accidently falling onto his penis. There had been no clues toward a mutual attraction, so it seemed we could keep it simple.
Nick worked at a coffee shop and a record store, always under the table. He wanted to be untraceable: no authority would know he existed. He didn’t vote, had no credit cards and no bank account, and stayed out of the burgeoning trappings of social media. He sat tight and stayed focused on what was in front of him. He had a romantic notion of the road and a deadly serious respect for freedom and anonymity. But he was also funny, an expert in good-natured razzing grounded in truth. He liked precision; he liked his world just so, an old man in training.
With Nick, James, and another friend or two, I’d frequent the witchy little herbal apothecaries that used to exist in Providence. We’d go in search of herbal medicinals: kava, mallow, St. John’s wort. We’d gaze at the crystals, read the runes, and sniff the incense. Nick bought herbs for tea and tincture making, brought them home to end up in brown dropper bottles for quick flicks under the tongue.
There was a dignified simplicity to having Nick in the house. He quickly became the best tenant yet: considerate, loyal, caring, a tinkerer who was happy to make repairs. He took responsibility without acting like he owned the place. We often left the house in Nick’s charge when we went away; we knew we could trust in his conscientiousness. I also may have deeply sniffed his laundry on occasion as I removed it from the dryer to make room for my own. And every once in a while I’d imagine a situation in which he and I might find ourselves locked in a closet, or the basement, or some other confined space.
He could be the model tenant in every way, and still I would picture him as something else entirely.
The Wolf of Penn Street
As the sweet summer unfolds and I inch the windows open, guzzling the newly languid, heavy air of warm weather, the first few startling booms seem like an anomaly. But all through June, the sounds of sputtering, sizzling, and blasting ramp up, getting closer together and then overlapping, until the night of the Fourth of July, when James and I count the seconds of quiet between the fireworks and rarely get past three. The spent bits pelt the roof and the sidewalk, ding off the siding, and land in the driveway. There is a gleeful fury to this takeover of the streets. I complain; I cannot think. To me it sounds less like celebrating and more like simulating the sounds of a warzone. I thank luck and accidents of time that it’s only the sound of warfare that I’m forced to tolerate; then, as night passes into morning and the flashes and blasts slow down, I drift into a sweaty besieged sleep worried that a flaming projectile is going to come through the open window. I dream that the house is quickly filling with large insects that I must brush off the walls and sweep in wriggling piles off my bed.
Independence Day. July Fourth. It’s been almost two years since James and I moved into the house. It’s become familiar, this routine of paying the mortgage and sweeping the floor and coming home from the coffee shop to make soy meatballs and pasta. Finding James at his desk, facing the wall, drawing and scratching his head. Guessing that he watches porn after I go to bed. Not talking about much. Not knowing how our relationship will end, but knowing that it should. Holding on because I don’t want to be alone; not realizing that I am already alone. The booming summertime onslaught sucks any negative space out of the house; along with the trapped third-floor heat, it makes the air too dense for thinking. I subsist on ice chewed from a giant plastic cup, drape myself over the couch, make frustrated sounds.
The fireworks begin again in the early afternoon of July 5. I’m unable to function. Using my last measure of energy, I gather myself up and decide to meet the fray head-on. A bike ride. I get on my squeaky red eighties Fuji and whisk my way around the neighborhood. There is always this, I tell myself. Breeze and space and people moving around. Street trees swaying. The houses all opened up, people in their driveways or on their front stoops. The fireworks are still startling, but my own movement makes the sound feel less confining. A little of the tension melts off. I grip the handlebars less tightly, start to smile at the kids. I think about how we all ended up here.
Federal Hill, this ragged cluster of streets just west of downtown Providence, once grew too fast, then shrank too fast, and then grew back rather crookedly. Hosting 125 years or so of too-close human habitation, without adequate oversight or upkeep, can do that. The place has a shocked look, like the punches of recent history came too quickly to react.
Having originally been settled by English and then Irish immigrants, Federal Hill’s population trickled upward in the late 1800s, when Italian immigrants began to arrive. By 1950, having hosted three surges of immigration, Federal Hill was suddenly home to over fifty thousand Italian Americans, who were now stacked and tucked into every available space. Families and landlords built and subdivided ever more houses, closer together, to contain them. On the first level of many triple-deckers, brick storefronts showcased family-run businesses—produce merchants, butcher shops. That year, at the peak of the immigrant boom, 20 percent of the city’s population was shoehorned into this little neighborhood of three hundred acres, having quickly urbanized
the land to the extreme. The Hill was an insular hamlet where one could get just about anything one needed to run a household, where the fruit and vegetable market was the beating heart of the community, and where irrefutable closeness and hostility connected the families, the New World version of an Elena Ferrante novel.
The growth and the decline of the neighborhood were equally swift. The congestion and heavy industry were too much, and people followed the general national trend, moving out to the suburbs in droves. The neighborhood lost a third of its population by 1960. The local mill economy was slowing, and factories were diminishing their workforces or moving out of town. Young Italian Americans were going off to college and moving into professional careers, not working in factories as their parents had. Several mild suburban towns saw entirely new neighborhoods of tidy, single-family ranch houses spring up, which the city-weary happily christened with Sunday gravy and fat sweet sausages frying in cast iron. These neighborhoods seem fairly hellish and samey and depressing to me now, but back then—such a luxury! No more urban grime and noise. It must have been a huge mark of success to have one of these homes, plenty to eat and a new car in the driveway.
People also sought suburban quiet because of the torment of the Mafia. A core group of connected men ran the neighborhood and oversaw mob activity in New England and beyond from a little storefront on Atwells Avenue, the Main Street of Federal Hill. The whiff of organized crime was subtle but constant, and unmistakable; just going out to get soap for the wash, for example, a lady could easily stumble upon something she wasn’t meant to see. Playing nice with this crew was undoubtedly a big part of getting by in the Hill—and an enormous source of stress for those who even hinted at pissing them off. Not that they couldn’t find you out in the suburbs, had you run afoul of the rules, but at least you’d be less likely to get caught in the crossfire. You wouldn’t have to be at ground zero, absorbing the mayhem every day.
Though the mob’s ironclad hold over the neighborhood has weakened substantially in the last thirty years, with deaths and indictments at the top of the chain, the mythology of this unsavory past has imprinted itself on the local psyche, morphing into a chuckling nostalgia and a collective overlooking of the heinous historical details. The mob is now relegated to a new status as feeble sideshow tourist attraction—a local sandwich shop called Wise Guys Deli does its logo up à la The Godfather; its motto is “Leave the gun. Take the sandwich.” Hence, Atwells Avenue today: a strollable menagerie of Italian American food, “quirky locals” with heavy accents, and bars—some sleek and expensive, others carrying distinct possibilities for witnessing a stabbing. You can take your grandma here for her birthday lunch, or you can come here with your buddies looking to get loaded and grab ass. You can get a nice veal parmigiana, or you can get weed, coke, heroin. Assaults, stabbings, and shootings come in waves, although the city has revoked nightclub licenses to curb the violence; zoning changes in the past couple of years have curtailed the expansion of the bar scene as the city tries to funnel Federal Hill business back to more innocent entertainment: burgers, hookahs, and good ole Italian food.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the Hill hollowed out. White people in the Hill were resigned to coexisting with the mob, but once people of color started to move in, they couldn’t get out fast enough. The remaining people with money left, fleeing to the beckoning suburbs. The Hill was becoming a place of transience and absentee landlordism where cheap apartments turned over once a year or more. Once-bustling houses, now aging poorly, went up in flames or were torn down by the city. Others went into disrepair and were abandoned. Thirty years later, we’re still climbing out of that same pit. The neighborhood reinvents itself—but timidly, and on a tight budget.
The way many Rhode Islanders tell it, the post-Mafia years saw the Hill become a “bad neighborhood,” full of “drugs and crime,” though really, who could argue that a place terrorized for decades by everyday brutality hadn’t been a bad scene all along? One type of lawlessness paves the way for its successor. But local lore says that in the old days, the neighborhood policed itself; if you stayed clean you had nothing to worry about. You simply let these guys carry out their nasty business all around you, pretending not to see a thing. These days, long-dead mob bosses are eulogized as having hearts of gold, their brutality only a minor personality trait among their good deeds benefiting average families around town.
When I moved into my house, a friend said, “Hey! You moved to Penn Street? I saw my first dead body on Penn Street in the nineties!” He wasn’t joking. My mom monitors the news, helpfully letting me know each time someone on the street commits a crime or is released from prison: “Did you know you have a murderer on Penn Street?”
PennHenge, built just as the Italian population was really starting to swell, has stood through it all. This beleaguered house is still here, home to a number of people the original occupants of the house would likely find strange and scandalous. It existed through the heyday, the boom, the rapid decline, the years of Mafia rule, the neglect-ridden latter twentieth century, the recent recession, and now—improbably—here it is, ever so shyly dipping into a new century of who knows what. These days, there are only around eight thousand souls living on the Hill—less than one-fifth of the neighborhood’s former girth—but it’s a well-mingled mix of families, students, and just plain people from a healthy array of ethnic, racial, and economic backgrounds. This level of diversity seems to be accidental—it’s probably caused by a combination of factors: proximity to downtown and the colleges, a high ratio of multifamily to single-family houses, and a fairly stable number of owner-occupants who doggedly hold on to their houses. And even if I stumbled onto the neighborhood also by accident, that’s a quality that keeps me here.
Just about every surface in Federal Hill is coated in either concrete or vinyl siding. Vacant dirt lots and neglected patches of scruffy grass make up the difference. Knowing little first-hand about the good old days of the neighborhood, I’m free from wishing for them. Instead, I enjoy our current location on the continuum of history: we may be on the far side of glory, but there’s something profound about living with the phantasms of the past, the empty faces of boarded-up houses calling us to make something of them once more. I used to see just the trash and the graffiti and the dog shit, and think this place might be a lost cause. But the more I interact with it, the more the neighborhood shows me that it may not be clean or beautiful, but it is a valid home. It is a place of fortitude with an undercurrent of unlikely kindness, a connectedness, where you can look people in the eye and say hello and they put everything aside to engage with you somehow.
Moving constantly—always seeking out a new home, a new city, a new job or lover to pull up roots for—is a state of being that alludes to upward mobility. It’s akin to our culture’s obsession with busyness and the pervasive inkling that we are only worthwhile when we are producing something. Moving a lot, whether between neighborhoods or cities or regions, signals that you are a seeker. You are not content to take what’s placed in front of you, because you are a mover. Staying in one place—staying at rest—is to our modern minds sad and unambitious; it’s a thing you do when you have nothing else to do.
But being a stayer means making a commitment to sit your ass down and wrestle with the realities of your chosen location; it means you face all of that and get discouraged and maybe bored, but you stay anyway—sometimes by choice, sometimes not—and in time you start to see through to the heart of it.
The opportunity to craft solid, long-term friendships—to get deep with one’s community—is the single biggest benefit of being a stayer. I’ve heard new Providence residents remark with surprise that they see the same people everywhere, over and over, and that such a social setting takes getting used to. “You know, small town problems,” they say, as if it’s a liability. But I love it. I know that I can post up at a coffee shop and see a dozen friends. I step out of the house every day knowing that I’ll run into someone I really want to see
, and possibly someone I don’t. But the best part is, it’s a time to interact without organized socializing. I don’t need to present myself.
Providence is a small city, delineated into diminutive neighborhoods, and delineated further by our own visions of it; most of us who live here see “the neighborhood” as the street we live on, and everything else within about a three-block radius. Basically, if I can’t see it from the third floor of my house, it’s not in my neighborhood. Adjacent streets can be polar opposites; within a two-block radius from my own home are big, opulent single-family historic manors with landscaped grounds, as well as hulking, vinyl-covered apartment dwellings dotted with graffiti, porches sagging, shingles coming loose, going unrepaired year after year.
With its buildings generously twenty feet apart, Federal Hill forces disparate lives closer together. This is its beauty: my immediate neighbors are an elderly Italian couple with a fat little butter-colored terrier, a sweet, tight-knit Guatemalan family, a young Asian couple with a Shiba Inu, a Cape Verdean landlord whose multiple houses are always under construction, and some friendly, partying white kids a few years post-college age. Considering we’re packed like freeze-dried coffee, we get along well. We don’t bicker like they do out in the suburbs; nobody, in fact, has time for that. We all live our lives within our meager squares, and we let others do the same. Sometimes we even talk to one another through our jagged chain-link fences.
