Residents upset over revised Gano Gateway

SAVE GANO: Fox Point Neighborhood Association Executive Secretary John Rousseau during a recent protest. The association is trying to get the state to restore up to $1.9 million to create a new "Gateway" to Providence in this area of Point Street and Gano Street. / PBN PHOTO/ MICHAEL SALERNO
SAVE GANO: Fox Point Neighborhood Association Executive Secretary John Rousseau during a recent protest. The association is trying to get the state to restore up to $1.9 million to create a new "Gateway" to Providence in this area of Point Street and Gano Street. / PBN PHOTO/ MICHAEL SALERNO

The route to Providence’s East Side from Interstate 195 eastbound requires a narrow, hairpin-like turn before hitting a stop sign at Gano Street. If drivers take it too fast, they can stray easily into other lanes.

At the stop sign, the drivers heading to East Side neighborhoods, including Fox Point, Wayland Square and College Hill, drive past weedy lots beneath the elevated highway.

It isn’t exactly a glorious introduction to some of Providence’s most storied neighborhoods.

And it isn’t what the R.I. Department of Transportation had promised, when the movement of I-195 left a temporary set of accesses to the highway.

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John Rousseau, executive secretary of the Fox Point Neighborhood Association, the area where Gano Street enters I-195, said the entrance to his neighborhood now looks more like a “dump” than a gateway.

“You have a lot of complaints, that getting off the interstate here, it’s just a dump,” he said.

The original state plan would have redesigned the area and eliminated the hairpin curve, under a $2.9 million project called the Gano Gateway. New parking would have been created underneath the highway, along with landscaping and bicycle path connections.

As with other community gateways – a design feature that welcomes visitors and orients them in a new space – the gateway was intended to integrate transportation choices in the neighborhood, including bike lanes and pedestrian paths, while serving as an opening to the historic residential neighborhoods.

Well-known gateways in other Rhode Island communities, and other Providence neighborhoods, include the arch over Atwells Avenue, symbolizing the entrance to Federal Hill, and the iconic Narragansett sign at the traffic circle in Narragansett, recycled from the original Narragansett Beer brewery.

The idea is to present an entrance, through aesthetics and function.

By comparison, one of the primary entrances to the East Side of Providence is a confusing jumble of intersections and roads, with a stop sign at Gano Street that perennially backs up traffic onto the highway exit ramp and around the access road to India Point Park.

Sharon Steele, a Providence-based real estate broker who sat on the community-based committee that helped to develop the original design, said the development of a gateway at Gano Street impacts all the East Side.

“Given where it is, it is the first thing that people see that really is the entrance, to the bikeways, to India Point Park, to the whole Hilton Garden Inn neighborhood,” she said. “It is the other side, literally, of the I-195 project.”

The original plans for a Gateway design were completed in 2011. They were revised this summer, after RIDOT officials pulled about $1.9 million from the Gateway budget to start the Providence Pedestrian Bridge, where bids came in higher than expected.

The pedestrian bridge project has moved forward. The $16.97 million contract for that project was awarded in September to Holyoke, Mass.-based Daniel O’Connell’s Sons.

The Gano Gateway project has a revised state design and a substantially smaller budget. Dissatisfied, several Providence residents organized, as the Save Gano Gateway Coalition, to press for a resolution. Advocates include representatives of the Fox Point Neighborhood Association and the College Hill Neighborhood Association, Rousseau said.

The revision proposed initially by RIDOT would extend bike lanes and landscaping through the area. But the revision would leave intact the 90-degree turn, and provide no real change in the traffic pattern, Rousseau said.

He wrote directly to Gov. Gina M. Raimondo, and recently learned that RIDOT would meet with the coalition members in early November.

Through a spokesman, the RIDOT leadership has indicated it has heard the concerns of the community about the changes to the Gano Street project, and “remains open to working with them.”

Rousseau is optimistic. “I do feel like they’re trying to work with us,” he said.

Steele also is confident the state will restore funding and complete the original design. She is president of Building Bridges Providence Inc., a nonprofit that advocated for completion of the pedestrian bridge connecting the I-195 lands.

The appearance of the land underneath the I-195 bridge, the 90-degree turn and the constant traffic are unacceptable, she said.

“The solution is find the money,” Steele said. “There is no backing off.” •

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2 COMMENTS

  1. Its not the hair pin curve that’s got people up in arms, its the hair ball design of it! including the on ramp for 195 East Bound from Gano. Why couldn’t they just keep it simple like it was before. The whole design is backward. With so many higher educated genius’s in Providence……. Brown builds the Nelson Fitness Center and eliminates a parking lot. Lets think about that; parking was already a major problem. So lets eliminate a couple hundred spots and increase the demand for parking. Way to go Brown…… Very smart.

    But then…… the traffic is terrible at the Butler / Waterman intersection. So what do they do? Create a dog park and add a lane of parking, which is all good and fine. But to achieve that, they had to eliminate one lane of travel on Waterman; AGAIN, making a bad situation even worse. Again, GENIUS!