(First of two parts. The second par
t of the interview will appear next week)
By Franklin S. Prosnitz
PBN Editor
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Name: Vincent A. Cianci, Jr.
Occuption: Mayor of the City of Providence. Sworn in to sixth term in January. On Sept. 23, he will become the longest sitting mayor in the city’s history.
Backround: First elected mayor of Providence in 1974, at the age of 33, winning reelection in 1978 and 1982. Elected again in 1990, and reelected in 1994 and 1998.
Education: Bachelor’s in government from Fairfield University; Master’s in political science from Villanova University; and law degree from Marquette University School of Law.
Age: 58
Family: Divorced, the father of one daughter, and has two grandchildren.
Residence: Providence
MAYOR VINCENT A. CIANCI, JR. in one of the city’s prime attractions Roger Williams park.
PBN: Even if the show Providence doesn’t air another week, the city has gained considerably from the amount of publicity Providence has received.
CIANCI: This couple that was just in here said they just drove in from New York and there were Providence signs all over New York. They’re in California, and in other cities. Plus there have been all kinds of national promos. Let’s keep our fingers crossed. I’m not about to concede it’s not a good show.
Even if it’s the worst show on TV it will last a good deal of time. NBC put 25 million bucks in the show. It can’t mean they are going to shut it off in two or three episodes. I’m a big booster of the show. In fact, I’m even in it. If it’s that bad maybe it’s my fault. I’m in the ninth episode.
Tell me about this New Cities. I’ve read what you propose, but it lacks substance. Is the meat there yet?
The meat has to be put in. Back in 1974, when I was running for mayor the first time, one of the big campaign issues that I raised was that the waterfront was desolate, it was ugly, it was aesthetically displeasing. And I said we had to do something about that. I hired Lester Millman. Paid him $5,000 to do a plan. Just haven’t gotten around to doing it. But now we’re ready to do something like that. We’ve rebuilt many parts of the city. We’ve become tremendously involved, in my opinion, in a renaissance. We’ve saved theaters and rewritten the quality of life for the city of Providence. Our self esteem is way up. I know we have other problems we have to correct, which are just as important or more important, such as education, because that’s an economic resource for the city.
But let’s look at our land mass. Driving north on 95 from Warwick you look to the left and see South Providence with Lifespan and Women and Infants and wonderfully restored places. To the right you’ll see desolation and ugliness. You’ll see tanks and pilings in the water and you’ll drive for 1.3 miles and see nothing but displeasing sights. Maybe you can accept that it is displeasing because it is giving us such economic prowess. But when you look at the numbers and have it analyzed, that’s not true either. Three miles of waterfront with less than 100 jobs and less than $2 million in tax revenues to the city.
Now you go to 95, and just as the railroad tracks separated us 25 years ago, and we had a whole desolate area of train yards and ugly parking lots and ugly buildings, that Chinese wall separated us, (now Route 95 separates us). By relocating those tracks underground, relocating the rivers, we now have what is known as Capital Center, a tremendous economically forceful part of the state. That new shopping mall would have never been there without the relocation of the rivers. Just as that wall separated the city so we couldn’t do Capital Center, Route 95, although very much a part of our economic necessity and a road of commerce, still separates us. Its pollutants permeate the atmosphere. A quarter of a million cars go by there every day. It separates us, Downcity, from neighborhoods, and separates us in many other ways – culturally, demographically, racially, many ways. If we can cover that or connect it, we can ecologically make our city environmentally safer, and can make the city connected and reweave it
and re-knit it, west to east. That affects three neighborhoods we’re trying to rehabilitate and we’ve done a good job at it, but we need to do more — Federal Hill, the Armory district, and West End.
The other area is where the Woon-asquatucket River is, behind the mall. There’s nothing going on there except desolation – the farmers’ market, unkempt buildings, awful sites, low self esteem. That affects the neighborhoods of Olneyville, Hartford and Valley. That used to be the industrial might of Providence. All the mills were there. Now if we reclaim that river – and we have the money to do that, you’ve got $16 million set aside, $10 million from the federal government, $3 million from the Trusts for Public Lands and $3 million from the bond issue from the city – that’s $16 million to reclaim those Brownfield mills to put bike paths, to reclaim the river. The Wassermens have the redevelopment rights to where the cold storage is across from the Farmers’ Market. They’re going to redo that into a Pike’s kind of marketplace from Seattle. By using the river you can reclaim what used to be the industrial might of the city and turn it into something important. You’re talking about hundreds of acres. Very few people get displaced. It’s only about 1 1/2 percent of our tax levy and it occupies a tremendous amount of very worthwhile space.
How do you fund this, and what specifically should go there?
I’m proposing a vision here. I didn’t say it was locked in stone or concrete. This is what leadership is about. I’m no guru. I’m saying no one is talking about this. I’m the mayor. We’ve got to start talking about this. What goes there? A lot of things could go there.
How do we fund it? The university, the hospital community certainly could be part of it. Perhaps we could talk to them. And I’m only talking out loud, perhaps we could share some of that land on the water with them. They could do research projects, build an aquarium. We could build commercial buildings. Non-profits could be part of that. For their piece they could come in with a bond issue, all the universities, hospitals and share in that. And we wouldn’t charge them taxes on the land because of the economic generation that those buildings would bring.
In addition we could probably go after some of those oil companies that have been polluting that area for years. Now I know (U.S. Sen. Jack) Reed said there’s no EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) money, but I believe there is. We have a very good relationship with EPA. We’re the poster boy for them all over the country, with our EPA programs.
I said the area around the Woon-asquatucket is prime for redevelopment and that connects to Waterplace Park, so that’s just a natural extension of Downcity and marries the neighborhoods.
As far as the over 95 — of course that’s a dream. Of course you’ve got to be a dreamer. Of course you’ve got to be a visionary. That’s how Capital Center started. That’s no different from what they did at the Mass Pike to create Copley Plaza. They just covered (it) over and created Copley Plaza. There’s nothing unique, no pride of ownership. There’s no originality with me. It’s covering over an interstate that separates us. It’s a road of economic necessity and commerce. I believe it ought to be maintained and improved. We have air rights to that and I don’t think we need to block our whole city. That’s where I’d like to concentrate new activities for new stuff in the future.
The Providence Port went out to private development some years ago. Has that not worked?
That has worked, but it hasn’t worked as successfully as it should have because I don’t think they put the right investment there. I’m not saying take the whole port. There’s no reason why ports should be ugly. I’m not really talking totally about that piece. I’m talking about the piece that has those ugly oil tanks. Now if Pfizer ever would locate here, they wouldn’t want that LNG tank here.
Providence has been denied its waterfront for years. When we were the industrial Mecca that we were, we were always the creators of this industrial enterprise, and this industrial infrastructure for this entire region. At the time, I guess, we had huge populations. We could afford that largess. We could build water systems, universities and libraries. Fund all these things. But now because lifestyles have changed, demographics have changed, people are moving out. We now have property values that have lowered because of these areas. As a result we don’t have the economic punch to provide the educational opportunities for our children, which really is important to us, because when you want to locate companies here, the education system is an economic resource and a determinant of whether companies come here. That’s why we have to restructure how we fund education.
This isn’t a downtown thing. This is a neighborhood thing. It’s the neighborhoods of Valley, Hartford, Olneyville, Federal Hill and the West End. Those are the areas that really need assistance, and we could go in there a redo streets and we could redo houses and I’ve done it for 25 years. We’ve got to connect it, that’s the answer.
We’ve got urban pioneers in these neighborhoods. They’re fixing houses, they want to live there. There’s the quality of life they see in the urban setting. Two things concern me, the schooling and the connection of those neighborhoods with the Downcity. It’ll improve the quality of life and improve their viability for the future. That’s the dream. When, how, who? If you don’t have the vision and you don’t start – this might not be finished in my mayoralty, it may not be finished in my lifetime. It may never happen. If we don’t start it, or think about it, or talk about it, I know it will never happen.
