1984

Never mind
February 8
Bill Van Siclen infers that some city planners may be as thick as a brick.

A blue-ribbon panel, comprised of downtown building owners and real estate developers, has recommended that Westminster Mall be turned back into Westminster Street -- this a scant four years after $5 million was spent to brick over the street and seal it off to traffic. Saying that the mall no longer "meets the retail needs of the 1980s," the Westminster Center Commission proposes "[re]opening Westminster Mall to vehicular traffic" and the "opening and widening of streets crossing Westminster [Eddy, Union and Mathewson] to achieve maximum curbside parking and access consistent with public safety."

One's first reaction to the report is probably to ask why there aren't a few city planners twisting softly in the breeze. The mall appears to have been a monumental mistake: the bricks are hard to keep clean, the benches aren't especially comfortable (or much to look at), the area is all but uninhabitable for four months of the year and nobody seems to like the teenagers from nearby Classical High School who hang out on the mall in the afternoon.

Buddy's long goodbye
April 25
More than a year passed from the fateful night at Mayor Cianci's townhouse to his sentencing. Larry Sterne and Bill Van Siclen told the story.

The sometimes stormy, sometimes charmed political career of Providence Mayor Vincent A. "Buddy" Cianci came to an abrupt end Monday morning, as Superior Court Judge John P. Bourcier sentenced the Mayor to a six-year suspended prison term at the Adult Correctional Institution. The sentence came one month after Cianci pleaded no contest to two charges of assault -- one a felony, the other a misdemeanor -- on Bristol contractor Raymond DeLeo. The assault took place March 20, 1983 at Cianci's rented townhouse on Providence's East Side.

As with so many other aspects of the case, the Mayor's sentence caught most observers by surprise. Indeed, the cluster of well-wishers, city employees and reporters that jammed the hallway outside Superior Court's Number 2 hearing room appeared genuinely surprised by the severity of Judge Bourcier's ruling. Saying that Cianci should not be allowed to walk out of the courtroom "without feeling the sting of judicial sanction," Bourcier gave the Mayor a five-year suspended sentence for the felony assault and one year for the misdemeanor. The sentences will run concurrently, meaning that the Mayor will remain free on parole for the next five years.

Slow burn to crescendo
July 5
The Schemers were the first non-Boston band to win WBCN's prestigious Rock 'n' Roll Rumble. Scott Duhamel captured the moment.

Thursday night, a sweltering, overcrowded, pulsating Metro, both double sets by Rumble finalists Dub 7 and the Schemers over and (believe it or not) like a big-time wrestling match, the assembled are all called out onstage to await the final results:band members, 'BCN jocks, judges and anybody else who imagined they were involved. Minimal yadda-yadda, then the announcement -- Schemers on top -- and searching the stage I found Matt Koomey outdoing his ever-present onstage grin, Emerson Torrey beaming out a six-year look of satisfaction and the always irrepressible Jimi Berger leaping about three feet high, fists clenched as if he'd scored that championship touchdown. But where in the world was [Mark] Cutler? The acknowledged Schemer leader, chief songwriter and onstage spark plug was scrunched somewhere down in the back of everyone, virtually invisible because, as he later told me, "I didn't want to either win or lose on stage."

There they go again
July 11
Fred Lippitt, Keven McKenna, Joe Paolino and Emmanuel Torti were in the running for mayor of Providence. Larry Sterne and Bill Van Siclen were underwhelmed by their "debate."

The four-way mayoral debate sponsored by Channel 10 last Friday night was a thoroughly disappointing affair, especially if you'd tuned in hoping to hear a reasonably intelligent discussion of the campaign issues and the candidates' positions on them. Only the first few questions were answered with any degree of coherence. The rest were answered with such a strange mixture of looniness and ill humor that the candidates often wound up looking more like they were auditioning for remakes of Horse Feathers and A Night At the Opera than discussing workable public policy.

Perception? Reality?
July 18
The capital city seemed a tad schizophrenic to outsiders. Larry Sterne and Bill Van Siclen read between the lines of a Globe piece.

The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine ran an interesting piece on Providence (and its fallen leader, Buddy Cianci) last week. The gist of the story was that the troubles besetting the former mayor are to some extent mirrored by the troubles plaguing the city itself. Where some residents see Cianci as the greatest thing since sliced bread, others see him as dangerously out of control and a threat to the city's continuing revitalization. And where some people think Providence offers all the comforts of a big city with few of the inconveniences, others think of it as a strange place where convicted felons score well in public opinion polls, and traffic signs refer to traffic circulators that don't exist.

The dotted line
July 18
Late riser Bill Flanagan got the scoop when the Biggest Little's working-class rockers joined the Scotti Bros. stable of artists.

I got out of bed to answer the phone Saturday afternoon and a voice said, "Billy, John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band have signed a record deal."

"John," I said, speaking for all Rhode Island, "it's about time."

Beaver Brown's Eddie and the Cruisers soundtrack album has been eating up Billboard's LP chart, debuting at No. 164 and leaping to 70 in its second week . . . Cafferty and the boys have made an album hotter than the film that spawned it.

"After all these years," Cafferty sighed. "We hung on long enough! Who knows what's gonna happen from here, but at least we're gonna get a chance."

A glimpse of the future
July 18
Larry Sterne and Bill Van Siclen peeked into the crystal ball, and some of what they saw has come to be . . . .

Anyone who enjoys an intriguing blend of science fact and science fiction should make a point of visiting the Providence Waterfront Study display on the third floor of the Arcade. Sponsored jointly by the Providence Foundation and the Rhode Island Committee for the Humanties, the display features a scale model replica of the Providence waterfront, circa 2000 A.D., as envisioned in the Waterfront Study report prepared by the architectural firm of William D. Warner and Associates.

Among the long-term improvements Warner and company have proposed are:

* A fleet of water taxis to take people from "Water Place at CapitalCenter" to Davol Square, "on to the Hovercraft and Ferry Terminal at Fox Point" and then on to India Point Park.

* A second fleet of "rubber-tired trolleys" to "service the same points, along with the mall and Kennedy Plaza."

* Three or four new helicopter landing pads "at both the Capital Center Park west of the Railroad Station and the new Dyer Street and Fox Point parking garages." (The existing landing pad along the Providence River is to be "relocated because of pedestrian conflict.")

*A 100,000-square-foot NewEngland Regional Marine Trade and Exposition Center, 300-room hotel, 400-car parking garage and Oceanographic Center and Museum in Fox Point.

* A host of new residential and commercial developments up and down the Providence River, from Capital Center to the southern tip of the Port of Providence.

* Boating on the Providence and Seekonk rivers, along with "clean, sandy new river bottoms."

The price tag for all this, the study estimates, is a mere $45,000,000.

By a hair
August 8
After a few weeks of bluster and bumbling, the mayoral election was over. Larry Sterne and Bill Van Siclen analyzed the results.

Acting Mayor Joseph R. Paolino, Jr. won the closest mayoral election in the city of Providence in 73 years last week, and he did it almost in spite of himself. As the election results showed clearly enough, his once substantial lead over independent candidate Fred Lippitt had virtually disappeared by the time the polls opened on Election Day. In fact, as more than one Lippitt supporter observed while the machine vote count was being completed Tuesday night, there is reason to think that the former House Minority Leader might have walked away with the election had the campaign dragged on much longer.

It's my party . . .
October 17
Bill Van Siclen spoke with the only vice presidential candidate to call Pawtuxet Village home.

There is, apparently, no simple way to pick a Vice President. Gerald Ford was Ronald Reagan's first choice in 1980. When Ford said no, the Reagan campaign turned reluctantly to George Bush. After all, Bush had coined the term "voodoo economics." Four years later, Walter Mondale spent several months screening big-name Democrats before settling on Geraldine Ferraro. Along the way, he toyed with New York Governor Mario Cuomo and mayors Henry Cisneros of Phoenix and Dianne Feinstein of San Francisco.

Even the fledgling Citizens Party, the progressive political coalition founded by environmentalist Barry Commoner in 1980, had its troubles this year. Their presidential nominee, feminist author Sonia Johnson, found herself dissatisfied with the prospects being put forward by the party hierarchy. So she called Dick Walton for advice. Walton, the author of books on American foreign policy (Cold War and Counter-revolution:The Foreign Policy of John F. Kennedy) and the oil lobby (The Power of Oil) and a resident of Warwick, Rhode Island, was only too happy to oblige.

"I said you might as well pick whoever you damn well please," he remembers saying. "It wasn't until sometime later that I realized she intended to follow my advice by asking me to run for Vice President."

1978 | 1979 | 1980 | 1981 | 1982 | 1983 | 1985 | 1986 | 1987 | 1988 | 1989 | 1990 | 1991 | 1992 | 1993 | 1994 | 1995 | 1996 | 1997 | 1998 |