PROVIDENCE — Walking down Public Street on a late July night, the familiar smell of asphalt welcomed visitors. A mist fell over the shoreline access point, even though it wasn’t raining; Sims Metal next door is required to spray its scrap heap to prevent dust from entering the air.

But despite the environmental disturbances, which residents in the area experience often, something new on Public Street was inviting people in: a fleet of pinkish-red, yellow, and orange windsocks.

Last Monday night, Eli Nixon flew all the windsocks for the first time — a performance and demonstration that will be repeated throughout the summer, raising specific colored windsocks to correlate with the area’s air quality.

On the federal government’s air quality index, yellow is moderate, orange is unhealthy for sensitive groups, and red is unhealthy, period.

The project is part of a series of installations sponsored by the Providence Commemoration Lab, said Nixon, who uses they/them pronouns. While Nixon and other collaborators talked, guests watched the windsocks from within a shade structure co-designed and -built by fellow artist and Nixon’s friend Fatema Maswood, along with Wesley Sanders and Yasmine Hassan.

Nixon, who specializes in “low-tech public spectaculah,” is well known for projects like Bloodtide, which included a sculptural homage to horseshoe crabs installed on the main staircase of the Providence Public Library.

Some of the materials for the installation on Public Street are new, but many are reused. Pneuhaus fabricated the socks — the multi-colored socks came together from scraps. The Steel Yard’s workforce training crew made the metal poles the socks fly on out of old cafeteria tables. The team used old kitty litter bags for the sandbags, and phragmites and bamboo, harvested from Roger Williams Park Zoo, to build the shade structure.

Nixon got involved after being invited down to Public Street by Maswood.

“Ooo, this spot is magical,” Nixon noted when they first arrived at the public access point. But after spending some time there, Nixon noticed their throat was sore when they got home and there was a certain coating on their skin from the nearby spray.

The end stretch of Public Street is nestled between a salt pile and a scrap yard, leading out onto the Providence River.

Local residents fought to keep Public Street public, but Washington Park Neighborhood Association president Linda Perri said there is still a lot of work to be done on the public way and in the whole neighborhood.

“I just want to cohabitate. I just want them to be good neighbors,” she said of the many industrial companies operating in the Port of Providence. “And they aren’t.”

Worse air quality, higher heat, and persistent bad smells plague South Providence, compared to other areas of the city.

Brown University professor Meredith Hastings attended the windsock event and spoke about some of these issues, which she has studied as a part of her project Breathe Providence.

Hastings and her team have been monitoring air quality on the hyperlocal level. They also created a “Smell my city” app, which allows residents or people in the area to report where and when a bad odor permeates the air.

“The year of data that we collected through that app, it really demonstrates how much the community knows about what’s happening in terms of their air quality, how much it’s affecting them,” Hastings said, “and it’s not represented in the measurements that we make in terms of what the Clean Air Act requires of us.”

Hastings said she is working with different community groups and the city to discuss what kind of changes can make real improvements for the neighborhood.

“The thing that’s been so cool about this project is I just feel like there’s a lot of people who are working on this from all sides,” Nixon said. “It takes a researcher at Brown answering the phone to a wacky artist … being like, ‘I want to make something that makes it more visible.’”

They also thanked community members, including Perri and Monica Huertas, executive director of the People’s Port Authority, for all the work and advocacy they have done.

Nixon said they hope the windsocks and the shade structure continue to bring attention to the area, the people, and the ways they’re working toward making it a safer neighborhood.

As the sunset started turning the sky light pink, attendees ate orange, yellow, and pink popsicles while saxophonist Manny Escobar’s jazz drowned out the noise of trucks from Allens Avenue and the heavy equipment nearby.

The windsocks will be raised as air quality fluctuates, and the shade structure will be up until September.

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