Transportation

Kennedy Plaza’s Past and Future Offers Interesting Ride

Idea of combining Providence’s bus hub with train station gains steam

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Kennedy Plaza in downtown Providence has been a hub of activity for sometime. (Colleen Cronin/ecoRI News)

PROVIDENCE — Kennedy Plaza has been a center for transportation, in various modes, since before it was called “Kennedy Plaza,” before Providence became a city, even before the property that the hub sits on was solid land.

But that long run could soon be coming to an end, as officials search for a new location for the state’s bus hub. What will happen to the plaza? The answer could lie in the many reinventions of its past.

The Cove, where Kennedy Plaza now sits, played a prominent role in the city’s history before it was filled in. (Rhode Island Historical Society)

The Cove

Long before Kennedy Plaza was a bus hub, or a trolley hub, or a train hub, it was a cove.

The Woonasquatucket River drained into the Cove, which then made up the head of Narragansett Bay and helped divide large swaths of land east and west.

When European colonists arrived in the area and started building homesteads on the Cove’s east side, farmers often had to travel across the water by boat to get to the meadowlands on the western side, according to The Civic and Architectural Development of Providence by John Hutchins Cady.

The first bridge to span the Providence River from what was known by the colonists as the Neck (Fox Point today) to Weybosset Point was built in 1660, and it allowed the settlers to circumvent the Cove and its fjords.

In his telling of the Cove’s development, Cady, a preservationist, architect, and urban planner in Providence in the 20th century, described how a series of bridges were erected and destroyed (largely by storms or high tides) in the same spot for years. Up until the early 1800s, the bridges were always built with draws, so the Cove could still be used for transport and commerce.

But following the War of 1812 and the sudden decrease in international shipping trade, the Cove’s maritime importance started to dwindle. Then, according to Cady, in 1815, after a huge squall destroyed another bridge and reshaped the coastline, harbor lines were drawn around the city to exclude the Cove. The following year a new Weybossett bridge was installed that didn’t have a draw and thus didn’t allow large ships to pass.

In the maps kept by the Rhode Island Historical Society, the footprints of the Cove start to get smaller and smaller from there, as land is filled in to accommodate the development of the West End.

Buses, at least for now, dominate Kennedy Plaza. (Colleen Cronin/ecoRI News)

Train, Trolleys, and Buses

Despite the fixed bridge that cut the Cove off from Narragansett Bay, the creation of the Blackstone Canal, connecting Providence and Worcester, briefly kept it alive for shipping. Boats traveled the canal for about two decades, until the Providence Worcester Railroad started running trains in 1847, and the waterway closed a year later.

This marked the beginning of the end of the Cove and the area’s use for boat transportation.

“A civic project of major importance was the filling of a part of the cove waters and the construction of an elliptical cove basin … surrounded by a promenade,” Cady wrote. “The plan was proposed by the Providence and Worcester Railroad Company … with the objective of establishing tracks, yards, and terminals near the civic center.”

By the Civil War, the Cove had been filled in to the point that it was an artificial pool, surrounded by a walkway and train tracks.

But the expansion of railways, at the expense of what water was left in the area, didn’t stop there.

In maps drawn by Cady, in 1848, there was a passenger depot around the edge of the Cove’s basin, but by 1889, the Cove was gone, with a railroad viaduct and a new depot where it used to be.

What had been Cove Street had long since been renamed Exchange Place, an address that survives today.

Exchange Place had become the hub for freight and passenger trains in the area, but according to Cady, the place itself was largely undeveloped, beyond the train infrastructure, at the start of the 20th century.

An image in the Providence Sunday Journal from 1895 captured what that looked like a largely open space surrounded by City Hall (built in 1878) and the new train station, part of which still stands. A monument to General Burnside stood at one end and a monument to soldiers and sailors on the other.

“The remainder of the area was paved from curb to curb with granite blocks,” Cady wrote.

In 1914, the city park commission tried beautifying the area by planting trees, shrubs, and flowers. Street tracks for trolley cars were laid around the plaza, which had a trolley shelter and something Cady referred to as a “public comfort station.”

The trolleys didn’t last long, with the last one running in the city in the 1940s. Still, they laid the foundation for city and state’s buses.

“Most public bus routes that crisscross Rhode Island today overlap track beds that once supported electric trolleys,” historian and former Rhode Island Public Transit Authority bus driver Scott Molloy wrote in his book Trolley Wars.

Despite the mode shift, Exchange Place remained a sort of center of transportation. Trains still operated out of the station until a new one was built near the Statehouse in the 1980s. Around the same time, then-Providence Mayor Buddy Cianci moved several stops to Kennedy Plaza — which had by then been named after President John F. Kennedy — to make it a more distinct hub.

Since then, there have been changes to the locations of stops, a new bus terminal, and a load of plans for how to make the space work better.

Kennedy Plaza won’t likely look like this again. (Rhode Island Historical Society)

The Future

David Salvatore, president of The Providence Foundation and a former Providence City Council member, said he started seeing renderings for changes to Kennedy Plaza when he started on the council in 2011.

“Nothing came to fruition,” Salvatore told ecoRI News in a recent interview, recalling the various ideas floated for the bus hub over the years. “I won’t say they were good or bad for me. I have seen some of the grandiose plans that people have pitched to the city… but I think we have to be laser-focused on a transportation hub.”

He said moving the hub for buses to a location near the train station is the plan that makes the most sense. When looking at other cities with good public transit around the country and the world, having a multimodal configuration is common.

“Providence is behind the eight ball,” Salvatore said.

RIPTA CEO Chris Durand, who is now leading the charge on the hub move, has also said he favors moving the hub to the train station. “It makes a lot of sense for a lot of reasons,” Durand told ecoRI News last year, explaining that it could make using both forms of transportation easier and help boost ridership.

In public meetings, Durand has said the current space is challenging because it is owned by the city, not RIPTA. Ownership and zoning issues make it difficult to create a transit hub that offers the best use.

Many previous attempts to move the hub have been met with heavy opposition from transit advocates, who have said their needs and wants in prior plans weren’t taken into consideration. For example, when some state officials started to suggest former Interstate 195 land could host the new hub, a blitz of criticism that the location would be too far away from the center of the city and crucial destinations for riders followed, ultimately leading RIPTA to announce last summer that it would no longer consider the former highway land for the hub.

But with a potential location near the train station in the mix, opposition to moving the hub from Kennedy Plaza has diminished, though it hasn’t completely disappeared.

Salvatore noted this plan seems more viable than others in part because it looks to prioritize the hub itself.

As to what will come of Kennedy Plaza if the hub moves, Salvatore said it’s more about programming than aesthetics. He wants it to be a place that welcomes people into the city and state, and makes them imagine, “That’s a place I would like to call home one day.”

No matter what happens, he believes the history of the plaza should be front and center in a redesign, to show the many lives Kennedy Plaza, through its many names and modes, has lived.

“I think,” Salvatore said, “we should always share history.”

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  1. Hardly anyone who rides buses regularly wants the hub to move from Kennedy Plaza. But the rich folks who do not ride the bus seem to be incapable of learning. If you want a successful transit system listen to the riders.

  2. 1980-1997 the cafe plaza pub leased the comfort station from the providence parks department. 17 years and was a nice place to enjoy a lunch and dinner. sadly mayor cianci closed down the pub due to a kick back $ scam. sadly he tried to force the owner a rent increase he could not pay.

  3. When we moved to Rhode Island in the early eighties, the train station, local bus hub, and intercity bus station were all within a few blocks from each other. It seemed like genius.

  4. If you do move the bus hub to the train station, you will STILL need buses to go to the same areas the bus hub is now. Nobody will want to walk up or down the 2 hills that only have one side that you could walk on.
    I think this is all about the superman building and the lack of people interested in using or buying that building that has no boiler. They have to put one on the side every winter to keep the building warm. I say tear it down!!

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