Our town Let ‘Mack’ Woodward be your guide BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	Street smarts That Providence fly-over under the opening credits of that ill-fated TV series was a great visual ambassador for the town. Providence may have given the impression that the citizens have a penchant for trite dialogue, but quaint white steeples and charming overlooks did abound. The recently published Guide to Providence Architecture, by architectural historian William McKenzie Woodward, gets down to street level. The book stays grounded in history and interesting information about the city’s many areas and architectural dimensions. Published by the Providence Preservation Society (ppsri.org) in collaboration with the Rhode Island Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, it’s a smartly functional guide book, photo-packed and beautifully designed. The 11 walking and driving tours it contains are laid out quite helpfully, with color-coded page edges to return you to particular tours quickly, and there are a couple of photographs at the top of most pages. Conveniently, the paperback book is the width of a back pocket but also is tall enough — 9-1/2" — to contain plenty of helpful text. The tours are historically rather than geographically sequenced, so areas discussed overlap, and you can read the guide straight through for an absorbing lecture on the development of the city. Tour One is of pre-Revolutionary Providence. The next is titled "Moving Up: The Lower Slope of College Hill" and proceeds north along Benefit and all the late 18th-century clapboard houses that survived urban renewal.. Before the tours return to College Hill and the East Side in chapters nine and 10, we have looked over commercial buildings downtown, industrial architecture along the rivers, and prominent institutional buildings of colleges and organizations such as the Providence Art Club and the Athenaeum. The West Side and South Side aren’t neglected, with plenty of examples drawn from the Queen Anne and Colonial Revival houses in the Elmwood section. Open spaces get their own chapter — not just Roger Williams Park and Swan Point Cemetery, but also Blackstone Boulevard, with its wide, grassy promenade, and even Butler Hospital, with its peaceful tree-filled environment and rolling lawns. The guide concludes with a survey of how "The City Reinvents Itself," going back to the future with the 1960 main post office building and its pre-space age Quonset hut profile, concluding with, of course, the Providence Place Mall. Woodward has strong opinions about the mall, as you’d expect. He praises the airy, well-glassed Winter Garden area above the river for its dramatic east-west views. But he says that despite the attractive exterior detailing by Friedrich St. Florian, the overall massiveness of the structure fails to blend into its urban setting as it should. Considering the forum that this architectural historian had with this guide, Woodward doesn’t pontificate when he presents an opinion. Perhaps the snippiest he gets is with his one-sentence dismissal of the balcony-festooned block of bricks, the Regency Apartments on Broadway, on view from I-95. He writes: "Curtis & Davis’s reinforced-concrete monolith of One Regency Plaza equivocates between the International Style purity of Mies van der Rohe’s mid-20-century Lakeshore Drive apartments in Chicago and the incipient Brutalism emerging in the mid-1960s." More typical is his ability to detect what is praiseworthy in design that he also criticizes. For example, in discussing the brick-and-brownstone Scottish baronial Hope Club, he describes it as a "pile," adding that it "evokes the hubris of the late 19th-century masculine exclusivity and entrepreneurialism," but he doesn’t begrudge "what a stalwart, unapologetic architectural expression it is, and thus worthy of our admiration." More significantly, the author is informative. While anthropomorphizing the John Brown House as being perched "somewhat haughtily" on a rise above the street, he also notes that this went against the prevailing fashion in the late 18th century of placing houses at the street line. And while we know that Brown was a notoriously unrepentant slaveholder, it takes Woodward to give us a glimpse of how far back Brown’s arrogance went, as he tells that as a child Brown described himself as "the Cleverest Boy in Providence Town." Guide to Providence Architecture is dedicated "to the spirit of Antoinette F. Downing," the preservation society member who in the 1950s inspired the national movement to save historical districts, fighting Brown University’s attempt to raze homes along Benefit Street. With puckish good humor, Woodward informs this guidebook with a similar concern for understanding and respecting heritage we might otherwise overlook. — Bill Rodriguez

You might think that Providence is too small a town to be able to fill a 300-plus-page guidebook with sites of architectural interest, but you’d be wrong. The Providence Preservation Society knew that. For the past 20 years they’d made available a set of self-guided walking tour booklets, covering a half-dozen neighborhoods. With so much to be detailed about Providence, it seemed like they were publishing a haiku series.

The booklets were graphically dull and had gotten out of date, said Catherine Horsey, executive director of the Providence Preservation Society. "And also, we wanted to let people know that there was a lot more Providence than Benefit Street."

So her organization and the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects got together to plan a full-fledged guidebook and consider candidates for its authorship. On the screening committee was William McKenzie "Mack" Woodward, an architecture historian with the Rhode Island Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission. He was a natural candidate for the job but turned it down, saying that he already had written extensively about the city over the past 30 years. But when they read the submitted writing samples, heads were shaking over their dismal quality.

"Mack finally just said, ‘I can do this better than anybody else can,’ " Horsey recalled. "So that’s how he came to be writing it."

She noted that the personal tone Woodward took was "very uncommon" for an architectural guidebook. But both sponsoring organizations thought that strong opinions would stimulate discussion, Horsey said. Architects are accustomed to critiques of their work, she remarked, and the only complaint she has received came from a real estate agent.

As far as Woodward is concerned, a writer discussing buildings could do far worse than make his point of view colorfully clear. He says that when he was in New York City recently, he looked in several guidebooks to find out what architect designed the hotel he was staying at. Woodward pauses several seconds as he searches for a word to describe the guides, and the adjective comes out sounding like a sin: "Dry."

Woodward is standing in a place he knows well — the corner of Washington and Empire Streets. He is sporting aviator glasses, a gray brush mustache, and a reserved but forthcoming manner. He is very precise with information, carefully formulating his answers, like a tree expert who wants to get his Latin taxonomy exactly right. And like a botanist in a forest who glances around and knows every shrub and stump by name, Woodward doesn’t look down a street the way you and I do.

"I love the way that these two buildings play off each other," he says of the home of Trinity Repertory Company and the restaurant building facing it, noting that when they were built, in 1917 and 1912, respectively, glazed terra cotta decorative façades were reaching their peak as a design choice. The home of the late Empire and new Kestral restaurants, he points out, was built as a showroom for the Packard Motor Car Co.

Raised in Texas, the preservation society historian came to Providence in 1976, and when it comes to the subject of the city’s architecture, Woodward, in his 50s, is now recognized as the most knowledgeable person alive. A block from his starting point, on Westminster, he says that when he first came to town there was still a little wood frame building on Aborn, the side street he gestures toward, that was the last house left in the area.

"Most don’t realize it today, but Westminster Street in 1820 looked pretty much like Benefit Street looks today," he says. "It was lined with small-scale two-story houses and some large houses."

A quarter of a century ago, the first project Woodward was involved with was to document the history of downtown, so he is right at home amidst the blaring traffic. He admires the late afternoon light angling onto the front of the Tilden-Thurber building, remarking that its highly ornamented appearance was so appropriate because as a big jewel box, it declared what it sold inside, from 1895 till a decade or so ago.

At Mathewson Street, he discusses the architect of the stately sandstone Gothic Revival Grace Episcopal Church. Richard Upjohn modeled his design after 13th- and 14th-century English country churches he was familiar with. But Woodward is more taken with the contrast between one end of the street and the other.

"It’s nice to have that at one end," he says, looking at the Providence Performing Arts Center, "as the end of one era, if you will, and at the other end to the beginning of another era — the Convention Center at the north end. So you have two reference points about the history of architecture and development in the city."

As we pass apartment construction on some former commercial buildings, Woodward comments on the long-coming residential revitalization of downtown. At Westminster and Dorrance, he notes that it was the dividing line between residential activity to the east and retail activity to the west, and also was the traditional parade route for returning soldiers. At Kennedy Plaza he says that when Providence was settled, there was no public commons, so the 20th-century plaza is the closest we have to that traditional New England central open space. City Hall is there at one side and the federal courthouse at the other. The land for the courthouse was bought by the city and donated so that a government edifice as stately as the city hall would be built across from it.

Voluntarily giving money to Washington for the sake of self-image?

Roger Williams University professor of architecture William Morgan, in his introduction to Woodward’s guide, brings up the question of whether architecture reflects the "soul" of a city. When Woodward is asked about that, he responds instantly, as though he’d already mulled that over.

"I think what we build says a lot about what we think of ourselves," he begins. "Some of the things that were built here in the middle years of the 20th-century speak of a culture that doesn’t think a whole lot of itself. I’m not pointing a finger at Providence specifically — a lot of what this country built at that time doesn’t say a lot about our own self-estimation.

"The spirit that created so much of what is in Providence," he goes on, "built by any number of groups of people, be they Yankees who made it rich through the China Trade or manufacturing, or be they immigrants from Italy or Ireland who may not have even owned their own homes but certainly opened their pockets to build very fine churches — they had a sense of self-worth, and it’s reflected in the churches they built."

Interesting observation. One of many. Thank goodness that one person willing to write the Guide to Providence Architecture could express himself so well.