I’ve been on the East Side long enough now that I’m part of its history in a minor way, which is a strange thing to notice. The couple who ran the hardware store on Wayland Avenue knew my name. The people who have replaced them don’t, but the store is still there, which is not nothing.

The neighborhood has gotten more expensive in ways that are visible and more uniform in ways that are harder to articulate. The visible part is the real estate: houses that sold for reasonable amounts when I arrived are now priced for people with considerably more money than I had when I arrived, which has changed who moves in and, over time, what the neighborhood expects of itself. The less visible part is something like a narrowing of range — fewer of the slightly odd small businesses, fewer of the people who are here because the rent was manageable rather than because the neighborhood was desirable.

None of this is unique to the East Side or to Providence. It’s the story of walkable urban neighborhoods in mid-sized American cities over the past twenty years, and it has a reasonably well-understood set of causes. Knowing the causes doesn’t make the texture loss less real.

What remains: the physical fabric of the neighborhood is intact in a way that it isn’t in a lot of comparable American cities. The houses are still the houses. Benefit Street is still Benefit Street. The Brown campus is still an awkward presence at the top of the hill, town and gown negotiating the same tensions they’ve been negotiating for two and a half centuries. The waterfront, which was an industrial ruin when I arrived, is now a genuine amenity. The RISD Museum is as good as it’s ever been.

I don’t know what the East Side will be in another twenty-five years. I know what it is now, which is still, despite everything, a good place to live. That’s not nothing either.

The best time to walk Blackstone Boulevard is after the leaves have come down and before the first real cold. There’s usually a window of two or three weeks in November when the trees are bare and the light is low and flat and the walking path is covered in a layer of leaves that hasn’t been cleared yet. The boulevard is four lanes wide with the median path in the middle, and in November the whole thing opens up in a way it doesn’t when the canopy is full.

I’ve been walking this stretch for most of the time I’ve lived on the East Side. It’s not a long walk — two miles end to end, roughly — but it’s a reliable one, the kind of thing you can do when you need to think or when you don’t want to think. The neighborhood on either side is old Providence money, large houses set back from the street, the kind of place that has been exactly what it is for a long time and intends to stay that way.

In November the dog walkers are out in greater numbers, and the runners, and the occasional person just walking, which is rarer than you’d think in a city that’s fairly walkable. The boulevard was designed as a walking promenade and it still functions as one, which is not something you can say about most of the parks and green spaces that were designed with similar intentions a century ago.

What I find myself thinking about, walking it in November, is how much of Providence’s character lives in these pockets — the boulevard, Benefit Street, the Moshassuck greenway, the waterfront. The city has always been better at small-scale things than at the large gestures. The big plans mostly haven’t worked. The walks have.

Federal Hill is having a moment again, which it does every decade or so, and the coverage is the same as it always is: the restaurants are excellent, the architecture is beautiful, the pineapple over the arch on Atwells Avenue is picturesque, and the neighborhood is changing. That last part is usually said with either celebration or alarm, depending on who’s writing it.

I’ve been walking Federal Hill since I moved to Providence. Not regularly — I live on the East Side and it’s a real walk over — but often enough that I have a long enough baseline to notice what’s different. The short version is: more of it is self-conscious now. The places that have been there for forty years know they’ve been there for forty years and have started to act like it, which is not entirely a bad thing but changes the texture of being there.

What I remember from the early 2000s was more functional. The delis and the butchers and the old Italian social clubs weren’t thinking about whether they were picturesque. The restaurants were good but they were neighborhood restaurants, not destination restaurants. The people eating in them were mostly from the neighborhood or from the Italian-American communities across the metro area who had a specific reason to make the drive. The pineapple was there but nobody was posing in front of it.

None of this is a complaint, exactly. The neighborhood is more economically stable than it was and the food has gotten better, not worse, and the social clubs that are still standing are still standing. What I notice is more of a texture thing — the difference between a place that exists for the people in it and a place that exists partly to be experienced. Federal Hill is now partly the second thing. Most of Providence’s interesting neighborhoods eventually get there.

What hasn’t changed: DePasquale Square on a summer evening is still one of the better places to be in Rhode Island. That’s worth saying.