The Moshassuck River. Photo by the author.
I get very confused about how things connect in the North End of Providence, my home city. It’s not that I find myself getting lost, as can happen along the narrow, meshwork streets of pre-WWII neighborhoods to the south like Federal Hill, Olneyville, or even parts of Smith Hill. That kind of confusion stems from an overabundance of possible routes.
The long river on the left side of the map is the Woonasquatucket. The small curl of river in the center is the Moshassuck, which actually originates in Lincoln, nearly nine miles north of Providence. FaustGT, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
In the industrial North End, by contrast, I find myself getting routed, because most diversions from the big main roads hit eventual dead-ends. Things don’t connect, because the district’s several thruways and highways act like so many border walls, in contrast to many older parts of the city, where there are a half dozen ways to arrive at any one destination.
This is a landscape of ancient valleys and rivers. But the rivers, especially, get lost in the built overlay. Who would know, for example, that the West River flows in a ditch behind a Stop & Shop? Or that, for a sneeze’s-length of time on I-95, you are driving over the buried Moshassuck River?
Not all of the city’s waterways are so forlorn. The downtown waterfront along the Providence River attracts visitors from around the region with its linear parks, pedestrian bridges, festivals and public art; along with recent efforts at habitat restoration for native plants and fauna. The nearby Woonasquatucket River, once a dead zone, has also become a cherished site for surrounding communities with its public parks and trails. Dams have been cleared by the Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council, and fish are returning to spawn in the river’s waters for the first time in centuries.
The West River, by contrast, carves through the North End little noticed. With scarcely any points of public access, it weaves invisibly beneath high-speed roads and industrial property lines, at certain points reduced to a culvert. In the no-man’s land between two highway ramps off Branch Avenue, it converges with another, similarly small and embattled river, called the Moshassuck, which takes its name from the Narragansett word meaning “where the moose drink.” Maybe they’ll come back someday, those moose, but they have long been gone from the banks of these rivers.
The West River. Photo by the author.
“The underground” is a term that Rosemary-Claire Collard and Jessica Dempsey adopt for forms of life and labor that are necessary to the continuance of capitalist societies, but kept off the ledgers, as it were, “recognized as useful, but unvalued.”1 In the realm of human labor, the authors apply the term to “the unwaged work of social reproduction,” especially as performed by women.2
But the concept can also be used to understand the work provided by ecosystems themselves, ecosystems that form “a national/international infrastructure needed for liberal capitalist operation.”3 This can include everything from the carbon sequestration provided by forests to the food crop pollination provided by bees. While other rivers that powered the state’s industries for decades are now celebrated as sites of restoration and recreation, the urban wetlands of the West River and Moshassuck have become an underground.
Historian Richard White wrote of the Columbia River that it is “at once our creation and retains a life of its own beyond our control.”4 In the case of the Moshassuck and West Rivers, humans tried their best to deny them those lives for most of the nineteenth century and some of the twentieth, harnessing both waterways as power sources and provisional sewers for a sprawling system of mills and mill villages. In doing so, they literally worked the rivers to death. Bleacheries, textile mills, slaughterhouses, and sewage outflows choked and toxified their waters. As one journalist remarked of the Moshassuck in 1916, “none but a tin fish with a double coat of non-corrosive paint could live in it.”5
It must have been hard not to notice what was happening to the rivers in those years, not only because they smelled awful, took on the colors of dyes, and flowed with blood, but because the life and labor of the whole district oriented to them, for better or worse. But the city turned away from the rivers, at first gradually, with the decline of industry, and then decisively, at the hands of officials and planners. It hasn’t turned back.
Much of the old North End, where the Moshassuck and West Rivers run, was razed and leveled in the late 1950s. The city’s 1946 “Master Plan for Land Use and Population Distribution” declared that new industrial sites should be established “in the valley bottoms on land now largely occupied by bad housing,” a strategy meant to kill two birds with one bulldozer: the flight of industry and the “blight” of low-income, multi-racial neighborhoods.6
Development Area D-7, as a slice of the North End was known in city planning documents, was home to about 3,000 residents occupying 500 buildings on 50 acres.7 The neighborhood was working class and multi-ethnic, with residents including Irish, Poles, Italians, and by the 1950s, African Americans.8 To justify the displacement of so many people, the Providence Redevelopment Agency cited the neighborhood’s “difficult topography,” “irregular street pattern,” and “social inadequacy,” that last point referring to higher-than-average rates of tuberculosis, “illegitimate births,” and “general public assistance cases.”9
The staff of the Providence Redevelopment Agency discuss the West River redevelopment site over coffee and cigarettes, October 1960. Providence Redevelopment Agency Collection, Photos of Office Personnel, Providence City Archives.
The West River Industrial Park, designed to attract corporate interests that demanded easy access to highways, was the first development of its kind in New England.10 It took the city five years (1956-1961) to clear the area, fill the old cellar holes, “regroom” the land and sell off the massive new parcels to buyers including Westinghouse, Intelex Systems, Mack Trucks, Inc., and several other companies. Most had relocated from other parts of the city and would have likely have moved away were it not for the availability of these newly-emptied parcels. With this in mind, the city declared West River Industrial Park a resounding success.11
It was thus that the district’s narrow streets, mills, tenements, and railroads were made to give way for what is there today: a sprawl of low-rise buildings, big-box commercial strips, parking lots, and two highways, Interstate 95 and Route 146. The West River Industrial Park literally paved the way for this new landscape. Those who built it paved over wetlands and hemmed its namesake river into hidden trenches and culverts. Ironically, in so doing, they finalized industry’s long-in-coming break from the working waterways.12
A groundbreaking ceremony for Clifford Metals. West River Industrial Park, circa 1961. Providence Redevelopment Agency Collection, Clifford Metals Groundbreaking Ceremony, Providence City Archives.
Sixty years later, the built environment still turns away from these waterways, and the circuits of daily life, for most people, do not connect to them. In terms of necessities like food, clothing, and shelter, they just don’t matter much, or so it would seem. We are more connected to Indonesian palm oil farms, Brazilian soy fields, Canadian tar sands, and countless other elsewheres than to these rivers that only register, for many, as thin blue lines on GPS maps.
In these parts of the city that orient to highways, the landscape, as habitat for humans and nonhumans alike, remains an afterthought. And yet, these old working waterways keep doing work, whether the humans who depend on that work notice it or not.
These rivers absorb and flush stormwater from the surrounding hills and valleys. Their wetlands cool surrounding streets, absorb excess carbon, mitigate flooding, and collect trash. They provide medicine and herbs, and they might one day again become a source of food.
Near the West River. Photo by the author.
Their invisible banks also provide shelter for people with nowhere else to go. Along the rivers’ edges, these days, are so many traces of human occupation—tents, clothes, books and even baby toys. Everywhere beyond the sight-lines of surrounding streets, the city’s wetlands are a haven for residents who have become “outcast surplus,” to borrow another of Collard and Dempsey’s terms, amidst a chronic shortage of affordable housing that is region-wide.
This is an underground that keeps providing services even when those who depend on those services have driven it underground.
Speaking for myself, it’s easy to lock into that blacktop world of convenient, quantifiable things. A kind of default niche, it’s where most of my daily needs are met, and it wraps around the globe. I know how to navigate it, how to read its geography of traffic lights, painted lines, squared entrances, and aisles, in contrast to the wild spaces in between, where I feel more alive but profoundly ignorant, clumsy, and a little lost. I may not like going to the local strip mall; I may rage over its cheerful denials and wastes, but after so many years of reluctant returns, the built environs of consumer society have become my habitat.
The Moshassuck River. Photo by the author.
And yet, it’s not everything, nor has it devoured everything, nor could it. There are whole hidden worlds pressing into this one. On walks with my partner, we have seen hawks, blue herons, usnea, turkey tail mushrooms, wild grapes, and many other life forms that I cannot name. There are bluejays, crows, kingfishers, falcons, hawks, osprey, otters, muskrats, turtles and frogs in the beleaguered North End.13 They live near auto salvage yards, freight yards, dollar stores, and drive-thrus, and because we are preconditioned not to see them, they are easy to miss.
Robin Wall Kimmerer writes that “restoring land without restoring relationship is an empty exercise. It is relationship that will endure and relationship that will sustain the restored land. Therefore, reconnecting people and the landscape is as essential as reestablishing proper hydrology or cleaning up contaminants. It is medicine for the earth.”14
Decades of advocacy have proven that some measure of wetlands restoration is possible, and thanks to groups like Friends of the Moshassuck, that work has already begun. The question, it seems to me, as someone who has recently joined in these efforts, is whether and how the underground—that realm of forgotten natures—and the aboveground—that realm of necessary goods and wages—will finally weave together again. Is it possible to bridge across these fragmentary, codependent worlds, rather than choosing falsely, as with worlds past, which to sweep away?
The Moshassuck River. Photo by the author.
- Rosemary-Claire Collard and Jessica Dempsey, “Capitalist Natures in Five Orientations” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 28,no.1 (2017): 78–97.
- Collard and Dempsey, 89.
- Collard and Dempsey, 90.
- Richard White, The Organic Machine: the Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: Hill & Wang, 1995), 109.
- “Transplanting the Moshassuck,” Providence Journal (Providence, Rhode Island), July 9, 1916: 3.
- City Plan Commission, “Master Plan for Land Use and Population Distribution” Publication 4 (Aug. 1946), 3.
- West River Industrial Park, Official Redevelopment Plan, July 12, 1956 (Providence, RI: The Agency, 1956), 17; Dante Ionata and Merrill R. Bailey. “Renewal: Winners and Losers,” Providence Journal, March 5, 1973: 6.
- Ionata and Bailey, 6; “Proposed West River Project May End Immaculate Conception Parish,” Providence Journal, December 18, 1954: 22.
- West River Industrial Park, Official Redevelopment Plan, July 12, 1956, 17-18.
- Ionata and Bailey, 6.
- Joseph L. Goodrich, “Industry is Fast Filling West River Sites,” Providence Journal, December 11, 1960: 18.
- Ionata and Bailey, 6.
- For extensive footage of creature sightings, see Greg Gerrit’s Youtube channel, “Moshassuck Critters.”
- Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Women, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 338.
