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.
Doug Alexander - Providence, Rhode Island 