1989

Drugs 101
January 5
When the Providence Police started the Special Investigations Bureau back in 1987, one of its directives was to "feel out" just how much of a drug problem there was on the city's South Side. By 1989, PVD was a major center for New England drug trade. Sean Flynn reported on the police's early innocence.

One day back in the early summer of 1987, Inspector Urbano Prignano eased his unmarked Providence police car to a stop at a South Side intersection. A kid, maybe 15 years old or so, stepped off the corner, walked up to the car and looked at Prignano. The radio crackled with police talk. "Hey," the kid said. "You wanna buy some crack?"

Naked eye
January 19
Tina Barney, a Rhode Island photographer, had a lot going on during the early part of 1989. She had just been featured in American Photographer magazine, had a one-woman show going on in Santa Monica, CA, and was/is on permanent display in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Fran Middendorf discussed why Barney was so hot.

When one thinks of larger format photography, one imagines the monumental vision of Ansel Adams's studies of Half Dome at Yosemite. In Barney's work, this same vision captures the photographer's comfort and familiarity with the sitters. How else could one ask someone to pose for a minimum of four hours and still have them look au naturel?

Labor pains
March 16
Though start-up unions tend to have enough trouble getting respect from big business employers, the Rhode Island Carrier's Association -- made up of the kids breaking their backs for a pittance to deliver the Providence Journal-Bulletin -- couldn't even get the paper's attention. Johnette Rodriguez took sides.

It would seem that the ProJo is afraid to confront its own ethical past in the present dilemmas of the carriers. The paper prefers, instead, to perpetuate a myth of "dedication to service" by young kids, and to hand out a measly $12,000 in scholarships a year from their $40 million-plus profits.

What is love?
March 23
With the concept of "date-rape" just being born, area colleges began to realize they might have had more of a problem with sexual assault than they had known. Pam Steager asked the question, "Was it a date or rape?" in her piece, "Rape on Campus."

Students, university police, and other members of the academic community are increasingly concerned with campus security and the nature and extent of rape. Although some of the rapes on campus are committed by strangers, as seems likely for the much-publicized assaults at Brown last fall, the majority of assaults (85 percent, according to a recent survey) are perpetrated by someone the victim knows, often a fellow student.

Hate my way
May 18
Even before events like Ruby Ridge brought it into the foreground of the nation's consciousness, the White Separatist movement was growing in Providence. Joe Bargmann spent some time with a PVD separatist gang, the Right Side Army.

Often products of dysfunctional middle- or working-class families, they are part of a generation of white adolescents facing downward mobility. Angry, disaffected, and in search of answers, they have instead found scapegoats -- to wit: non-whites, whom they hold responsible for a host of social ills; and Jews, who, to their minds, represent big government and big business.

Babies making babies
June 15
With the teen pregnancy rate rising nationwide, 3246 Rhode Island teenagers got pregnant in 1988. As the nation wrung its hands over its lost youth, Deborah Schimberg tracked the daily difficulties these new teenage mothers had to confront.

Motherhood "isn't easy," teenage mother Barbara Christal says. She gets up at 6 a.m. in order to feed and dress herself and Tamiesha, now two years old, and get her daughter to day care before school starts at 8:30. She has to take three buses before arriving at Hope High School. She lives by herself, in a two-bedroom apartment in South Providence which she pays for with her AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) payments. She is on her own.

Ship of fools
June 29
When the barge North Cape bled 800,000-plus gallons of oil into the Bay in '96 it echoed a bit too closely another Narragansett disaster: when the Greek ship World Prodigy struck Brenton Reef, it dumped more than 400,000 gallons of its own. And though the captain of the ship claimed responsibility, Johnette Rodriguez had a hard time tracking down those ultimately responsible for paying damages -- the owners of the ship.

With the "Greek" tanker currently wallowing in Narragansett Bay, registered to the Ballard Shipping Company in Piraeus, whose stock is held by International Marine Company, registered in Liberia, the actual owners have yet to come to light. Checking with the Moran Shipping Agencies in Providence, who are agents for the owners of the tanker, this reporter could elicit no answers nor have any messages been returned.

Ch-ch-changes
August 10
No bitterness implied here, but: all of the volunteer-in-the-neighborhood, care-about-the-community folks who happen to be desperately looking for an apt. to move into every September, and who claim that the gentrification of Fox Point has little to do with them, seeing as how they're moving just east of Governor Street, which isn't really the Point anyway, note that when Ted Slafsky wrote about the disappearance of the Point in '89, he was talking about Wickenden and Brook streets.

Gone are Lisbon Dry Goods, Custy's barbershop and Manny Almeida's saloon. They have given way to Cat's Pajama's, the Fabric Connection and the Cafe at Brooke's. Store by store, the multi-family houses, dry goods shops and taverns have been replaced by chic boutiques, fancy art galleries and trendy cafes.

ACTing UP
October 5
In September, AIDS activist, ACTUP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power) member, and local club owner James McGrath got arrested for chaining himself to the New York Stock Exchange to protest the prohibitive cost of the new AIDS drug AZT, made by Burroughs Wellcome. Mark Binder sat down with him to talk about the event that caused a 20 percent drop in the drug's price.

McGrath: We threw out these fake $100 bills that said, "Fuck your Profiteering, Wellcome is this this this," some information. [The traders] were, "Fuck you? No, fuck you!" They had to be restrained, they were going to come up there on the balcony and kill us . . . I was never so happy to see the police in my life.

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