Walking Blackstone Boulevard in November

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.