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WEST END


PROVIDENCE CITY, PROVIDENCE COUNTY, RI

 * West End Map
 * Post Office: Providence
 * Zip Code: 02907



Beginnings [1]

The West End is a large, primarily residential neighborhood developed
principally between the Civil War and the Great Depression. Housing in the
neighborhood includes large, late nineteenth-century former single-family
dwellings (now converted for apartment use), particularly along major
thoroughfares, as well as two- and three-family houses on the side streets.
Industry has played an important role in the area's development since the middle
years of the nineteenth century, and one of the city's two new industrial
districts, Huntington Industrial Park, is located here.



The West End remained an undeveloped hinterland throughout the seventeenth and
much of the eighteenth century. Several roads running south and west from the
settled part of Providence first crossed the area soon after 1700: Westminster
Street (1714), Cranston Street (1717), and Greenwich Street, now Elmwood Avenue
(1731). In 1739, Obadiah Brown established a tavern in Hoyle Square at the
intersection of Cranston and Westminster Streets. By 1783, a hamlet comprising
eight houses near the tavern represented the area's most intensive development.

The population remained sparse until the middle of the nineteenth century;
development was limited to farms and country retreats. Joseph Williams built a
farmhouse on the south side of Potters Avenue just west of Elmwood Avenue about
1783; now heavily altered, the house stands at 43 Calder Street. Williams's
neighbor to the north, Ebenezer Knight Dexter, likewise maintained a farm that
supplied produce for Providence markets. Prominent citizens who built country
retreats here included John Mawney, Captain Samuel Snow, Brown University
president Asa Messer, Anson and Arthur Potter, and Christopher Ellery, whose
altered dwelling still stands at 165-169 Peace Street.

Industry first came to the West End in the early years of the nineteenth
century. In 1822, Earl Carpenter built an ice house on Benedict Pond, and by
1849 he had also established a similar operation on the north side of Mashapaug
Pond; these facilities continued in operation into the twentieth century. The
first factories came to the area around mid-century: the New England Butt
Company established a small factory on Pearl at Perkins Street in 1849 and
expanded production here in the 1880s; in the 1860s, Winsor & Brown built a gun
manufactory at 63 Central Street, and this frame building became part of the
Jones Warehouse complex in the 1890s. In the 1860s, the lowlands near Long Pond
became a center for the West End's industrial activity. The Elmwood Cotton Mills
began operation on Daboll Street in 1866. The north end of the pond was heavily
industrialized between 1860 and 1875 with the erection of a Providence Gas
Company gasometer at 42 Westfield Street and an A. & W. Sprague ironworks
factory between Cromwell and Sprague Streets. Charles H. Perkins built several
industrial buildings in the vicinity in the 1880s and 1890s. Though the pond has
been filled, this area along Dexter and Bucklin Streets remains a
commercial/industrial area, including operations of the gas company, jewelry
manufacturers, and the American Standard Watch Case Co. The largest plant in the
West End is the Gorham Manufacturing Co. facility completed in 1890 at 333
Adelaide Avenue, on the east side of Mashapaug Pond. The Huntington Industrial
Park brought new light industry to the west side of the pond in the 1960s and
1970s.



Urbanization of the West End spread westward from the early settlement at Hoyle
Square, along Westminster Street and to a lesser degree, along Cranston Street.
By the mid-1820s several houses stood on Westminster Street between Downtown and
Olneyville, including those at 1208 and 1228. Ebenezer Knight Dexter gave this
incipient neighborhood a civic focus in 1824 when he left his farm to the city
for use as a military training field. By mid-century, urban development had
begun to fill the neighborhood with houses almost to Dexter Parade. Much of this
housing has been replaced, but the small Greek Revival house at 14 Dexter Street
is a typical structure.

Streetcar service encouraged residential development here on a much larger
scale. The first streetcar line in Providence, opened in 1865, ran along
Westminster Street between Downtown and Olneyville; additional lines on Cranston
Street and Elmwood Avenue came later the same year. This post-Civil War
residential development follows two divergent ethnic and economic paths. The
area north of Cranston Street centering around the Dexter Parade developed as a
middle-class neighborhood, populated primarily by Yankees. The area south of
Cranston Street housed successive waves of lower- and middle-class immigrant
groups.



The houses built around the Dexter Parade were primarily one- and two-family
dwellings. Those on the Parade were the largest and most stylish, set on ample
lots. The two Queen Anne houses at 77 and 81 Parade Street epitomize this
development. The side streets west of Parade Street are typically two-family,
mansard-roof dwellings, like that at 45 Chapin Avenue. To serve this population,
the Cranston Street Baptist Church was established in 1869.

The southern portion of the West End has always been ethnically diverse. While
the area just west of Trinity Square had a sizable upper-middle-class Yankee
population — a link between similar areas around the Dexter Parade and northern
Elmwood — the area became a heavily Irish neighborhood after about 1850,
particularly the part just north of Mashapaug Pond. By 1870, the area south of
Waldo Street to beyond Huntington Avenue on the west side of Mashapaug Pond
between Cranston and Madison Streets was a predominantly Irish neighborhood,
with a number of residents laborers at the Elmwood Cotton Mills. The West End
Irish had no church of their own until 1871, when the large, clapboard Church of
the Assumption opened on Potters Avenue; its presence reinforced and encouraged
the growth of the Irish settlement. In 1878, French Canadians formed their own
parish and built the present edifice, St. Charles Borromeo, on Dexter Street in
1915. Blacks had begun to settle in the southern part of the West End by the
1860s, establishing the Mount Zion Methodist Church on Wadsworth Street in 1861.



The military use of the Dexter Training Ground continued in 1907 with the
construction of the Cranston Street Armory on the field's southern end. By the
turn of the century, most of the West End was densely built, although
Providence's continued population growth in these years encouraged filling every
lot — and occasionally the backs of occupied house lots — with multiple-family
dwellings, particularly triple deckers. The West End remained a relatively
stable neighborhood during the first three decades of the twentieth century, but
the citywide decline of inner-city neighborhoods included the West End: houses
were divided into more and smaller units, and long-time residents abandoned the
area for the suburbs.

The West End's history includes a sampling of almost every phase imaginable:
rural hinterland, stylish streetcar suburb, ethnic melting pot, decayed
inner-city neighborhood. In recent years, it has begun yet another phase as
revitalization of its old houses by area residents has become increasingly
common.

 1. Woodward, Wm. McKenzie and Sanderson, Edward F., Providence: A Citywide
    Survey of Historic Resources, 1986, Rhode Island Historical Preservation
    Commission, Providence

Nearby Neighborhoods


 * Cranston Street Armory
 * Elmwood Historic District
 * Monohasset Mill

Street Names
Cranston Street • Elmwood Avenue • Westminster Street



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