Providence: University Town

by Dexter Vincent

Providence’s colleges and universities provide opportunities to their thousands of students and to the broader community, plus they are often cited as engines of economic activity for the city. Seven institutions of higher learning are located here: Brown University, The Community College of Rhode Island [...]

Postal Service

by Nini Stoddard

Providence received postal notoriety when the first automated post office in the United States was built here. The 13-acre facility was completed in 1960. It incorporated the first automatic, high-speed sorting, facing, and cancelling machines as well as three miles of conveyor belts that moved [...]

Voting in Providence

by Dexter Vincent

2024 is shaping to be a supremely important election year, and all eyes are on the Presidential race.  Providence, long a deep-sea-blue city, will almost certainly vote Democratic.  Though  the city as a whole has a fairly homogeneous party alignment, each ward differs greatly in [...]

Women’s Wellness

by Dexter Vincent

Women have always been socially disadvantaged compared to men – with lower representation in politics despite higher turnout rates, lower salaries in the same fields, sole burden of childbearing, and the lion’s share of child-raising. The Women’s Fund of Rhode Island has created an interactive [...]

Special Library Collections

by Nini Stoddard

Providence boasts over a dozen Special Collections libraries, so classified because of their unique research holdings. These institutions collect and preserve rare, unique, and primary source research materials. The earliest Special Collection was created in 1836 from the combined libraries of the Providence Library Company [...]

Providence Scorecard

by Deborah Schimberg

It’s hard to find facts and figures specifically about Providence.  Often, the state bundles Providence together with Pawtucket, Central Falls, and Woonsocket into “the urban core”.  And the federal government has created Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSA) which are geographic regions with relatively high populations and [...]

Take That, Rome!

by Dexter Vincent

Oxford Economics, an economic forecasting and analytic company created in partnership with England’s Oxford University, publishes an annual Global Cities Index. They recently published their 2024 index, in which they ranked 1000 cities around the world according to 27 indicators across five categories. Little Providence [...]

First and Future Health Labs

by Nini Stoddard

Providence boasts a number of Firsts in the Nation. We’ll be featuring a few on occasion. Here is our first of the firsts: In 1888, the first municipal health laboratory in the United States was established in Providence. Charles V. Chapin (1856 –1941) was its [...]

Our City’s Food System

by Jonathan Howard

The commercial economy provides most of the food we need through a complex system of meal providers and grocery stores backed up by a behind-the-scenes economy of food producers, processors and distributors. However, many people simply cannot meet their full food needs within the commercial [...]

Theatres

by Nini Stoddard

With the official closing of the Columbus Theatre on Broadway on June 9, one can hear the sad sighs of “ah, yet another theatre closes.” Indeed, how many theatres in Providence have closed in the last 50 or 100 years? Over the century, Providence theatres [...]