Interviewee: Barnaby Evans

Interviewer: Eric Snyder

Date: December 14, 2003

Category: Community art

ES: I am here with Barnaby Evans, the creator of Waterfire. It is the 14th of December 2003 and we are here in his studio. So tell me Mr. Evans. You're from Berkeley, California and you came to the east coast to go to school at Brown University. What was that like?

BE: Well I grew up in Berkeley as you mentioned an my father was involved with the University of California at Berkeley which meant that as far as I was concerned I couldn't go to school anywhere in the system so I went about as far away as I could find in the United states which was here in Providence and I was very intrigued by the open curriculum program at Brown that allowed you to create your own major and work with different departments and things like that. Brown Under Ira Magaziner had just started this open curriculum program so it was very much in the News as we were looking at colleges. I was looking at Brown and Yale and a couple of different places and Brown was the most interesting place. I didn't know anything about Providence at all and I came here and was really entranced with the school but also with the larger city and with its rather loose interaction with the school of design and the arts community that was here and the historic architecture that was here also intrigued me because in California there is a lot of Victorian architecture from about 1910 but there is very little earlier than that particularly in San Francisco. I was really fascinated by the industrial heritage that was visible everywhere I looked around here. I was puzzled by the negativity of the residents of Providence to their architecture. They seemed very apologetic for it and very dismissive of it and sort of were embarrassed that it hadn't been torn down. I think the whole 60's movement of urban renewal across the country where many cities had torn this stuff down. Providence didn't and in retrospect it's been a wonderful boon to the city that they didn't. That was sort of the aux courant thing to do in the late 60's. Blocks and blocks were just bulldozed. A tremendous number of the best buildings in Providence were bulldozed to make Wriston Quadrangle and West Quad at Brown. There are just amazing photographs of these mansions that were taken down to make those things and then a huge section was bulldozed to make 95 in Providence but other than that it largely stayed in tact despite plans to bulldoze huge sections of it and I think that the residents of Providence realized that they were a little out of step with the current style of urban renewal and so they were very apologetic about all of those old buildings, but I found them fascinating this palpable sense of history that was all around the city.

ES: So when you came here did you do a lot of exploring in Providence?

BE: Not right away because I didn't have a car right away but I did walk all over the East Side and I started to photograph. I discovered photography which is one of the mediums that I work in while I was here in Providence. A girlfriend was a very sort of photographic experience in documenting both the industrial and the historic architecture of the city.

ES: You have had photography on display in several museums.

BE: Mmhmm. The first art form I started working in was photography. I came to photo through my studies at Brown. I put together a major which formally was in environmental biology an Sc.B. in I guess ecology but I was looking at ecology primarily. Environmental biology and ecology, but I folded into it some courses in urban studies and some architecture and I was interested in this sort of rich interaction that happens between history and place and organism both in an ecological sense but also in a human sense. Once I came here to Brown I actually stayed here for all of the summers. I did a lot of my exploration during the summers when I wasn't working so much in school and I had a series of jobs which took me to all sorts of different places. One job was working with Herald Ward, a chemistry professor at Brown, and we were looking at the environmental impact of air pollution in downtown Providence and we made a portable infrared spectrometer to go around and monitor carbon monoxide levels in different parts of Providence and found where the highest concentration was and that left me sort of sitting on the street corner monitoring CO with this very bizarre looking contraption so all sorts of people came out of the woodwork to talk to this funny looking guy. The reaction of the community to Brown which some of them vaguely knew that the school was here some didn't know the school was here. One woman came up to me and said "Brown, that's so familiar that's near here isn't it?" I said "yeah its right up on the hill up there and she said Is that the boy's section of Pembroke?" And I said "yeah that's exactly what it is." But it was just fascinating how contained we were on the campus and how much of the city was utterly unaware of what went on there. Another two projects I worked for Walter Snell who was a world-renowned mycological expert and painter of mushrooms and collector of mushrooms from all over the world. The mycological herbarium at Brown was one of the most famous ones in all of the United States and it was the whole of Wilson hall wait a second Wilson, what's the one just south of Faunce House where the big lecture hall is, Salomon? Isn't that Salomon? It wasn't called Salomon then but that whole building stored dry mushrooms the entire...

ES: There's a greenhouse there.

BE: Sort of right around there, but the greenhouse was unrelated. But the entire second floor of that was room after room of dried mushrooms in boxes all labeled with these fancy scripts and I'm sure it was all destroyed when they renovated it and refrigerators with frozen cell spores and very rare mushrooms and spore prints and all sorts of things. I worked for them for a whole summer where my job was to backpack through New Hampshire Maine, Vermont Massachusetts and Connecticut. Looking for new species of lexinum and when we would find what we thought was a new species of lexinum or something sometimes I was by myself and sometimes I was with another assistant of his we would photograph it and identify all of the trees we would climb because it grows in relationship with the trees. So I would make sketches and spore prints and all that sort of stuff. And that's where I really got more and more interested in photography and the documentation of more complicated relationships. The third job I had was for John Wagy and we did two things we spent half of our time canoeing through the swamps of Rhode Island and standing in waiters in mud up to about here. Making super 8 camera shots of you know film of home movies types of dragon fly mating behavior in the swamps because he was looking at how different species of dragonflies recognized each other. He would set up models of female dragonflies in the mating posture that were modified in various degrees between the two species to try to find out what features they used to tell one species from the other. So I sometimes say I was a professional pornographer so we would film these encounters and then about a third of the time we were collecting gypsy moth caterpillars and gypsy moths themselves to try to figure out what was causing the population dynamics of gypsy moths. We would use pheromone traps for that for the moths so I would walk around Providence and there would always be moths following me because you could never get the pheromone completely off you. You know you'd go into a restaurant and pretty soon a couple of moths would be coming after you. So I have very fond memories of all the crazy projects I did in Providence.

ES: It sound like there were a lot of them

BE: There were. But I got more and more interested in the city and the people and their reaction to it and I very much liked the scale of Providence and I think that's why so many interesting things happen its big enough that its not a village but its small enough that there is a certain enforced civility because you realize the person you are likely to run into is someone you're gonna you know the person you didn't let cross the street may be the driver when you're crossing the street you know a couple of months from now. It

engenders an interesting sense of community which was different from the San Francisco Bay Area which was just huge and even that's not big compared to Chicago or New York or something like that so that intrigued me. All of the different subsections Providence and Rhode Island are very... In California you drive all over the place so you don't think of it as going a long distance, but here in Rhode Island you have whole families that have never left their neighborhoods they have never left the state or never left...You know, I still run into people who come to Providence to see Waterfire and they say you know this is the first time I've been here and I say "Oh where do you come from?" and they say "oh I live in Warwick." Which is not very far away but it's a very different worldview. So I came to Providence in 71 graduated in 75 and have been here more or less ever since, Which is 28 years.

ES: So what was your first job after you graduated from Brown?

BE: My first job was working for a place called color lab. I actually didn't get to graduate because I was working for them before graduation so although I did get a diploma I wasn't allowed to march in the march because it was a workday. Monday. It was a holiday but they didn't obey the holiday so I didn't get to march and I went into that job because I thought the best way to learn more about photography was to see it from the other side and I learned a lot about color photography and film processing and I had been doing mostly black and white then left that to do art work although I was supporting myself doing commercial photography and gradually shifted from interest in photography to interest in film projects to interest in site specific installation pieces where I would take a specific place and change it and see how people reacted to it. My first installation piece would have been for Convergence I think which is a sculpture event put together by Bob Rizzo and the parks department who invites artists from all over the community but even international so people come from Europe and so there is not much money, but there is an opportunity to do something in a public place. Bob is very open to new ideas and the first piece I did was called A temple to Milk and it was a recreation of the memorial well its not a memorial but there's a very large bizarre structure in Roger Williams park called "a temple to music" and I always thought that was a nice title. It's a big granite neoclassical Grecian temple right on the edge of the water. So I made "a temple to milk" which was about a third scale replica of "a temple to music" but it was made entirely out of milk crates. Thousands and thousands of milk crates, gray milk crates. And you could walk in it and it was big and it was an exact model and it had this very odd translucency because if you can remember milk crates are this sort of network of plastic and you can see right through them. So it had an ephemeral quality that would stay on the landscape so you could look right through it but it also had a presence that you could walk in and an interior and an exterior.

ES: It was eventually disassembled?

BE: It was there for... The festival was up for 10 days it was there for that and a little while longer. I never got good photographs of it because during the festival there were all sorts of people so I just took a few pictures then I was always going to come back and then it poured and poured and rained and rained and rained. And then finally there was a gorgeous day and I came down to photograph it and late that night when the rain had stopped kids had come down and I guess climbed up on top of it and jumped on the roof. And had turned it into a ruin which is of course exactly what happens to the Greek temples and it actually broke apart just like a Greek temple ruin you know with the columns falling down and sort of rolling apart a little bit. So it actually looked like a big Greek temple

ES: It was all part of the installation.

BE: Well I hadn't planned it that way but you learn to be flexible and decide ok so it ended just as a ruin. I have pictures of it as a ruin, but I would have like to have had pictures of it standing as well.

BE: That piece I mentioned, Temple to Milk was about architecture in the sense of solidity and transparency and ephemerally in architecture and I was very interested in Waterfire which we will get to in a moment with creating an ephemeral architectonic statement that would change people's perception of a place. I was also interested in the psychology and politics of a space. I did a piece called protecting the flag which was an ephemeral installation that I did in what it was a time when all the debate about flag burning was happening. At the republican convention there was some protestors burning flags. And there was all of this right wing craziness about how outrageous it was and on the left people were saying well this country is all about freedom we have to be able to burn a flag. I wanted to try to do a piece about burning the flag that would be more thoughtful than burning a flag or yelling about how you should never burn a flag so I tried to construct a piece that would be sort of right in the middle between the two. So it was called Protecting the Flag and it was a piece that I did for an opening in February at the Rhode Island School of Design Art Museum and they usually have a big opening in February once all the Christmas stuff is over they have a huge show. I sent out an announcement inviting everyone to it without telling the museum about it because I planned to do it on the sidewalk right in front of their front door. The director of the museum, Frank Robinson, called me up and said, "Barnaby, I got this invitation what is this?" And it said Barnaby Evans invites you to Protecting the Flag, site specific work at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, the address the time and it was the night of their big opening and he said, "our curators don't know anything about this" and I said "well its not in the museum its just at the museum its on the sidewalk In front of the museum. "He said "well, people are going to think we're sanctioning it." I said "Well they may, but you could put a big sign up that says that you aren't" and he said "You can't do this" and he said "well what is it that you're doing?" and I said well it's a piece about flag burning and he said oh no no no no we can't have that I have conservative donors to the museum they'll be upset and I said "well I don't know if they'll be upset" and he said this "well you can't do this" and I said "well the sidewalk actually doesn't belong to the School of Design and this is a country where you are free to do things in a public space" and Frank Robinson said, he was a dear friend both before and after, he said "alright it can't say anything about RISD on it you can't use any electricity from RISD you can't plug any power tools in you can't-you know, this is- I don't want this thing happening" and I said, "well if you're concerned you can print up a little thing that your guards can hand out saying that the museum has nothing to do with this if you're really concerned but I wouldn't be concerned about it." What the piece was was a large, expensive American flag, by expensive I mean it was silk and it was very finely detailed it was nicely stitched and was a big American flag I think it was 4 feet by 6 feet. It was encased in a huge block of absolutely crystal clear ice. The flag was standing vertically encased in this huge crystal clear block of ice so it couldn't bum on fire because it was locked in the ice and it was locked in the ice in addition with great big wrought steel and wrought iron shackles like shackles and with big padlocks that were locked to it and chains that went down the shackles and were big. It looked like a big screw bolted into the sidewalk. So that the flag was absolutely safe from anyone tampering with it. It was just called "Protecting the Flag". The subtitle was Rendering the Fabric of Liberty. It had a whole series of quotes, about how it was absolutely protected from flames but it also couldn't blow in the breeze and it was cold to the touch and you couldn't see it as well and it was visually quite beautiful and because they wouldn't let me use any electricity from the museum I had generators which I had made a box to keep them quiet so that it was lit and it just sort of glowed there in front of the museum but inside the ice it also reflected out toward infinity from all the internal surfaces of the ice so you saw the flag sort of getting distorted as it went further and further off.

ES: Was the light shining out from the flag?

BE: The light was shining on the flag but once you lit the flag inside the ice then when you looked at it you would see the reflection in the ice over here of the flag so you could see this sort of infinity effect going on but not as cleanly as with mirrors so it got more and more murky. The statement talked about how its details were fuzzed out and a little bit about the absurdity about feeling the necessity to protect a symbol of freedom from freedom and things like that. Well it was a huge hit at the museum. It was like the thing everyone was talking about so of course Frank didn't distribute anything that said it had nothing to do with the museum. He brought me in and he introduced me he said, "Yeah this is the artist who did this" and the fact that he had been opposed to it bitterly was completely ignored and in fact he used a picture of it on the website for a while about how daring the museum was how it was willing to take on these types of things and I realized that there is always a back story that you don't necessarily see and it played both sides of the debate because the conservatives didn't get the irony of it at all and said "Its really important to protect our flag" and the people who realized the importance of freedom said that's perfect that just captures in one thing the idiocy of trying to protect a symbol of freedom. So it actually spoke in two very different ways to two very different audiences and I think in both of them I think maybe they sort of got a sense of the power of it from both sides. So that was probably the first site work I did that had a lot of really broad range of opinions to it where people would see very different things in it which is also true of water fire.

ES: So did that really establish a name for you in the Providence community?

BE: Maybe there were lots of pieces I had done, but that was one of them. Shortly after that was when we renovated this building which was an abandoned completely burned out wrecked building. It was an old elementary school for the city Providence that had been empty for about fifteen years. It had had a bunch of fires. There used to be a roof that covered the steel that had been completely burned out by the fire. The floor had been burnt and this floor is all new. There wasn't one window in this building it was full of pigeons in fact it was about this deep in pigeon shit and dead pigeons and up there it was about this deep in pigeons.

ES: I really don't like pigeons.

BE: Flying rats, but so then we did this with nine other artists. We renovated this whole building because we were being thrown out of what is now called the foundry. That was the old CIC industrial complex. There were a lot of artists like myself who had studios there and then they sort of fixed it up to low grade office space and we got thrown out so I bought this building and Bert Crenca started AS220 downtown when a lot of artists were being displaced from buildings so we just saw the righting on the wall but couldn't figure out how to buy the building we were just going to move to space after space after space and we didn't have any money so it was really hard to get the loans. Actually the city of Providence lent us the money to buy this building.

ES: Who was the mayor at the time?

BE: Mayor Paolino, Joe Paolino.

ES: Was he very supportive of the arts?

BE: yeah he was supportive. Cianci and Paolino have always been very supportive of the arts as is Cicilini, prior to that, I didn't know the mayor before that but I think it was mayor Dorley. I didn't know him at all. There may have been someone in between. Cianci and Paolino and Cicilini the arts have sort of always been a vital part of Providence, but I'm not sure until Cianci that politically they became valued, but we did that with the Paolino administration and their department of um... This building was just a wreck I mean there were probably eighteen burned out cars in the lot and the building was just in terrible shape and kids would break in and get hurt and there were fires in it all the time and we borrowed from the City of Providence the entire some of money needed to buy the building and a little more than that. They couldn't lend us much more than that because if they do there are some restrictions on how you can use the money because we were doing a lot of the work ourselves and if they paid for any of the labor then it all has to be union labor and stuff like that which we couldn't afford to do. That was a very good deal for us and it was at the outrageously low rate of 7% interest which nowadays seems like high interest and we paid it all back and we had to raise all the money to fix it for you know all the improvements so that meant whatever money we could save would go into that but we didn't have to pay any interest for the first year and a half so then we could get regular mortgages and pay people back so that was great mechanism for us and we did it without an architect just sorting it out on our own.

ES: Tell me about your involvement with Bert Crenca and AS220.

BE: Sure, I've known Bert for ages and have a great deal of respect for him. I don't know whether he respects me or not but I hope he does. We first got involved when we first realized that there was a complete absence of opportunity for artists to show work in Providence. And historically it's a bit of mystery why that is. Providence has a tremendous number of well known working artists who do excellent work who show in New York and show all around the world, but they don't show in Providence because there are very few galleries. My personal theory on that goes back to the small scale of

the city of Providence where many of the wealthy families who might invest in art and purchase art were also involved in the Rhode Island School of Design because the Rhode Island School of Design was established by all of the mill owning families and the industrial families and it was a school of design more than art as its name implies and it was founded so that they would have people who could make mill machines and looms and stuff like that and it was meant in that sense of design and engineering design and mechanical design and arts and engineering and architecture were all woven together as sort of technique and they founded it in order to provide skilled designers for the local industries and mills which meant the wealthy families have always been well represented on the board and hence had a very close relationship to the faculty and many of the better known artists in the community even if they weren't full time teaching at RISD certainly had a relationship with RISD. So what happened was that many of these wealthy families had very close relationships with the artists so if you were going to go buy a photograph from Aaron Siskind you didn't go to a gallery you went and had Aaron over for dinner and you talked about his work and you got to know him personally and Aaron would say "Come on by the studio and we'll look at stuff' or Aaron would photograph your land in the Cape and it wouldn't just be a photograph you bought from a gallery it would be Aaron Siskind's personal interpretation of the tar streaks on the driveway to your house in Little Compton. So there was a very intimate back and forth and as a consequence, the sort of bragging factor of saying "well I have an original Aaron Siskind" was not that you bought it in a gallery in New York, but that you were buddies with Aaron or Harry Callahan and any of the rest of them and it was a personal thing that they had created for you. And as a consequence there was never any need for the gallery intervention. And Aaron wasn't so stupid as to sell it at any less than the gallery in New York so it wasn't really a deal that you were getting it directly from Aaron. Aaron was making more money because there was no commission to payout and you had this great personal relationship with the artist. So a lot of the collectors here in Providence, of which there are many, have very personal interactions with the artists themselves so we haven't had galleries. So what that meant was there was no opportunity for young and up and coming artists or unestablished artists or artists who weren't on the faculty to show work. There was a small alternative school downtown called school one that was in a bowling alley downtown where Michael Kent has a four in one nightclub. It's where polyvynal is there's a tropical one I can't remember. The complex. That used to be an old bowling alley and after it was a bowling alley it was the first location for school one which was an experimental school for kids who were uncomfortable in the elementary school system and they had a small art gallery there for students to show that they opened to artists and then when they decided that that space was too small they moved to a place on John Street on the east side where the music school is now and they said "Hey the professor who's been the math teacher Art Deon who's been doing the gallery is no longer going to teach. If you artists want to have a gallery we'll give you a space but you've got to organize it. And so Bert and I and Ilene Lawrence and Ruth Dealey and Sandra Bodo got together and formed Gallery One. One of the first big conflicts in the group was should we jury the shows or not. And of course Bert Crenca who didn't go to art school and I didn't go to art school either. Bert Crenca felt strongly that who was anyone to decide what quote art was and that it shouldn't be juried and I felt, I was part of the other faction who agreed that it was very hard to tell what art was so we were going to have a jury that rotated all the time so that it would be a jury of about 5 or 6 and they could only be on for a year and then by random lottery people would volunteer so the jury would always change. I thought it was very important to jury because we were going to work hard to make this a good space to show work with good lights and good walls and respectful of the artwork and sort of a traditional thing with white walls.

ES: Was it to ensure a high quality?

BE: That's what I was arguing. And I wasn't, none of us were concerned with defining what art was, but there's an awful lot of art produced out there by artists who are just starting out or who really haven't developed their "skills" and my feeling was that if we are going to spend all this time and money building the gallery and raising money to put the lights in and stuff like that, that the show had to be interesting enough and worthwhile enough that when someone made the trip over to see it, they were intrigued enough to see it. If they were just going to see stupid work we didn't think they'd be back. Bert disagreed and Bert went and did some cooperative stuff with us, but eventually started his own gallery which was AS220 which was art space and the 220 comes from the old address where they were which was 220 Weybossett I think and eventually it moved around the corner but they kept 220. Eventually they moved a third time over to. They used to be upstairs in PPAC and then they moved right around the corner. I can't remember the name of that street and then they moved now to where they are on Richmond. That was his theory that it would be completely unjuried which is a perfectly valid viewpoint but we felt it was more important to be reassured that the stuff looked as good. Bert is still hanging in doing that and Gallery One showed a very wide variety of shows in fact this whole thing about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church was started by a show that happened at Gallery One. We did a show on sexual trauma where victims of rape were invited anonymously or with their name or whatever to respond in writing or poetry or stories or drawings of however they wanted to address that issue. It was a really powerful show and one of the respondents was the very first man who came out and talked about being raped as an alter boy by clergy. I forgot his name but it got media attention and that was he first came out anonymously at the show at School One and then started to talk about it and that's what started that whole snowballing effect. I think he lived in Fall River at the time. So it was a really broad range of what artwork was but it was still juried and then that gallery showed a lot of different shows I mean we probably did ten years of shows and then when School One moved again to their new location they didn't have room so they discontinued the gallery. So now its further over deep in the heart of the east side and it's a great school but it doesn't have an art gallery that's open to the community of artists. So Bert was at PPAC and then he was down on Weybossett then Richmond and now he's on Empire. So the 220 I think is the address on Weybossett.

Next Tape

ES: I'm continuing my interview with Barnaby Evans tape 2.

BE: Now we're on a new tape

ES: I was wondering if you could talk about the so-called Providence Renaissance.

BE: Mike Stanton's book, The Prince of Providence is about Mayor Cianci.

ES: recently released

BE: Recently released. I hadn't paid much attention to Providence when I first arrived. The political aspects of Providence, but I sort of first became aware of sort of the politics of it with Mayor Cianci's first run for office and he ran as a republican and I remember it was a three way split and it was sort of a surprising victory for him. He was very young I don't remember the details, but he had this amazing capacity to shift his tone from audience to audience so when he was talking to students he was kind of on this side of things, when he was talking about the elderly or the historical society or PPS he had a different tone. When he was talking about to the long shore men down on the port he used 4 letter words and he was very chameleon like in his ability to respond knowledgeably with many many constituents of the city and this city is a city of many many constituents and I think that came from his growing up as an immigrant kid Italian going to Moses Brown School on the hill. Which was somewhat elitist and he was sort of made fun of as an Italian. He learned to negotiate in these remarkably different social circles from the life on the hill and his family, his father was a doctor so it was a fairly sophisticated family but then the street life on the hill and the environment at Moses Brown and going on to college he wasn't the first in his family to go to college but I think that he still sort of had this sort of immigrant. He's a remarkably bright guy, Mayor Cianci, maybe I'll read you a letter I just got from him in prison, he's in Fort Dix penitentiary but he's a remarkably literate and knowledgeable person. I remember being at a press conference for Waterfire and there was some possibility of Xerox Corporation opening a branch office in downtown Providence so after we announced our season someone came up to him and said something about is Xerox going to open their office in Providence and he obviously didn't want to answer the question because he may not have known the answer first of all but he wanted to leave the possibility of it open and if it was bad news he didn't want to give bad news and if it was premature to give good news he didn't want to do that either and he just went of on entirely not expecting this question in a different context he went off onto this rift about Xerxes and Xerxes crossing the Hellesfons and how there was a case where a leader with foresight had to build a bridge and here in Providence he had taken out a bridge and uncovered the river and in each part the river was at the heart of the city or the heart of the future of their campaign and then went into Darius which is Xerxes son and just on the drop of a dime that a mayor could talk about the Persian empire, Xerxes and his son Darius and have all the facts correctly and I wouldn't have known the facts were correct except I had just been reading. The historian who writes about all this stuff, Heroditus. I had just been reading Heroditus a few weeks before and he was dead on with his facts and I was astonished and that was the capacity that Buddy Cianci had. He really has this very broad grasp of many many things. And the other thing he has is an intuitive understanding of politics and people and how it works. Which was entirely alien to me when I got involved with this building I got involved with the ward politics of Providence, with the different councilmen and things like this and the councilman helped me to do this and sure enough. His name is Tom Glavine. Shortly after we had done this building he called me up and said "Barnaby, I'd like you to help me with my re-election campaign. And I said, "well councilman I don't know a soul in this state" and he said "oh no the people know you Waterfire is popular" all this sort of stuff and so I served as treasurer on his campaign which didn't really mean much and I didn't know what I was doing, but what astonished me about it was that it was very very physical. You know you would have these get togethers at bars and stuff like that and everyone would come up and hug each other and put their hands on each other's shoulders and touch hands and I realized that this is a really sort of ancient peer pecking order ritualistic process and it is really fundamental to old school ward politics. I grew up in California where none of this stuff existed but Providence still very much had this and there were coalitions being built and expectations and this was the payback I was expected for his cooperation in helping us with this building which was what he should be doing as councilman. It was a derelict building it was an eye sore it was dangerous. So he was doing his job, but there was also this very subtle issue of payback and it wasn't overt or inappropriate, but it was a very interesting world to me, something I knew nothing about and still don't know much about. And Cianci was a complete genius with all this stuff about political coalitions and he also knew and this is the part where Cianci would get in trouble is we have a very strong city union here and he knew that in order to motivate that particular subset it didn't have to do with being able to talk about Darius and Xerxes and stuff like that. It really had to do with fear. And with your going to lose your job and I'm not going to hire your son or something like that and he used all of those political arts to run the city and sometimes people say Providence has this Renaissance and I say yeah we've got the politics of the Renaissance too with the Medicis and people stabbing each other in the back and poisoning people and all this I mean that doesn't happen in Providence, but this is the old traditional form of old time politics that I had never experienced before. Buddy Cianci gave an interview in a government magazine I think its called Governing. And they came to interview him I think this was before the Plunderdom investigation. But with respect to plunderdom, at Waterfire we didn't we any of that stuff. We saw his temper and his political fascination but we didn't see any covert stuff or any inappropriate stuff at all. But I think part of his power was that you had a sense that he always knew what was going on and he would call you up and say, hey I hear that so and so gave you a donation or something like that so part of his control was this sense that he knew what was going and he had an incredible memory. He did an interview with this magazine called Governing. It was a long interview, a fascinating interview and he ends the interview with, the interviewer asks something like what do you attribute your sense of your command of this city? Why are you able to get stuff done? And he said it's really important to motivate people to understand that to have a vision and get engaged in it and follow through with it and he said the bottom line is you have to make sure that everyone is going to drink the cool aid and that was the end of the interview they just ended it there and that's of course a reference to Jim Jones in Jonestown, so if he says to do it they're all just going to go and line up follow his authority and do it and that was an amazing thing for him to have said but it gives you a sense of the sort of command that he- the obedience that he expected of people and he often got from certain circles and it was that sort of strong armed thing that people resented with Buddy. Another thing that they resented was that he always had his name on everything so if someone had an idea his name got in there so people with good ideas tended not to come forward because they want to see them co-opted under Buddy's name. A lot of people think that Buddy had something to do with Waterfire. He had nothing to do with Waterfire but if you look in these books and we sent him copies of them and I'm sure and people say stuff like "this is Buddy's greatest idea and things like that" and he understood it was good for the city and was always supportive and cooperative, but the first time I did it he knew nothing about it and in fact we went and got him to come out of his office and said hey come look at this and he said "wow this is pretty neat". But he had nothing to do with its creation or its idea but he did recognize it was good for the city and he was always helpful and supportive of us but the city's contribution although very real both in practical and financial terms was a lot smaller than people thought it was, but if we tried to correct that impression, Buddy would call me up and say what's this I read in the paper here that says the city only gives you-you know the budget for Waterfire is 1.1 million dollars and we get usually from the city directly about 20 thousand dollars which is if we do 20 nights it's a thousand dollars we spend more than that for...

ES: What is most of the money spent on?

BE: Most of its labor we have 12 to 15 full time people who work here. This guy and those two are mostly working on fundraising. There is a volunteer coordinator, and he sort of does special projects and the music editing is done in my office up there. And then we have a staff of about 6 or 7 people down in our other office where there are boats and engines that are being rebuilt and spark plugs being changed there's a lot of labor and that's probably 600,000 dollars and then our next biggest expense is probably insurance. We'll probably spend 95,000 dollars just on insurance this year. I say probably because they always go up every year. There are different overlapping policies and the rates go up every year. The city requires us to have coverage for 5 million dollars of liability insurance. So that's 5 thousand dollars a night just for insurance.

ES: Has there ever been a problem using outboard engines in such close proximity to the flames?

BE: Well that's one of the reasons why our rates are so high. That's one of the things they look at. We've never had a problem with it we're pretty careful. That's why our boats don't have gas tanks that are under decks because that's the real danger gas being spilled up. That's one of our concerns we want the fumes to immediately dissipate. That's why our rates are so high and we have a lot of boat maintenance we have to do. There are fire extinguishers I every boat and the person who does the volunteers trains them in all sorts of techniques. So there are issues in that.

ES: It seems that Waterfire has been sort of a celebration that has brought the Providence community together in celebration of the Providence Renaissance and how did that start and was it inspired by certain things. Comment on that.

BE: ( ), who is an internationally known architect, called Waterfire the crown Jewel of the Providence Renaissance and there are many other people including Mike Stanton consider Waterfire to be a large part of the Providence Renaissance. I think there are a lot of different elements that have made what happened in Providence possible. One of them goes all the way back to the Providence Preservation Society and the realization that 'hey we didn't tear these buildings down and we ought to save them.' And PPS by rumor got started because Brown tore down so many buildings in the neighborhood of Brown that these people got together and said hey we've got to save this heritage. And they started to save Benefit street which was a slum, and South Main which was an incredibly dangerous slum when I was a student I mean most of the buildings had hypodermic needles all over the floor it was just a scary place. It was wonderful actually I loved it.

ES: I've heard that from a lot of people that they liked the sluminess and that it was kind of a fun and quirky type of place.

BE: Yeah, down on Wickenden Street was a place on Brook and Wickenden Street called Manny Almeda's Ringside Lounge which was a Portuguese sports bar and largely white college kids would go there and just get the shit beat out of them and occasionally they would get knifed. And I mean it was a pretty tough neighborhood down there and there was a reason to stay on the hill. You wouldn't believe it on Wickenden Street now, but so the Preservation movement was one them. Both Brown and RISD expanded and started to take over more of their neighborhoods. Cianci sort of had a vision that there was this possibility as more and more of the buildings got restored it was increasingly historical and people would come for the historic house tour and it was really sort of a curious mix of things and then the other thing that happened in Providence was that we had a Renaissance in restaurants and many of those were started by RISD and Brown students who got intrigued with food because of the Portuguese and Italian neighborhoods in Providence there was always an interest in fresh food and interesting cooking. Many of the restaurants like Alforno or 3 Steeple Street or some of my favorites which are gone. Jo's downtown which is probably the best restaurants that Providence ever had or Julian's or the one on North Main Street. Every single one of those restaurants was started by an artist and they were really innovative funky and interesting restaurants. Leo's downtown also started by an artist and someone from Brown. Lupo's, all those were started by Brown people. So the Brown people tended to do the music and the RISD people tended to do the restaurants. The combination of the two suddenly made a place that was completely desolate with no place to go into a place that had some really interesting places and a lot of the artists would hang out in them and they were very reasonably priced and the restaurants were very very good. And Cianci recognized that and encouraged that further with a program he had where he gave loans to people who started restaurants which is a really interesting idea because restaurants almost always fail very high failure rate and Cianci recognized that. Banks recognized that. Banks will not give you a loan to open up a small restaurant they will give you a loan if its part of a chain so if you open a Me Donalds of a Denny's or some large national chain and the national chain agrees to come in and train the people and tell them how to do it, then the bank will give you the money, but if you want to open up your own crazy funny little place like Fez right there downtown or any of those places, banks won't give you the money because they know there is a very good chance of failure. So Cianci had a very interesting program where he would give loans for people to open restaurants. The requirements were that the person who signed the loan had to be the owner and the chef and if not the chef then the onsite manager of the restaurant so what he was trying to do was fund small quirky individual boutique kind of restaurants and he completely understood that many of them would fail.

ES: So he didn't want to give the money to some financier who would sit back on the sidelines.

BE: Exactly. He wanted to get small quirky interesting restaurants run by people who were passionate about food. And so he gave a loan to Blue Point he gave a loan to New Rivers, and if you went bankrupt then you didn't have to pay him back, but if you succeeded then you paid him back and it was a very low interest rate and it wasn't a lot of money, but it was enough to let these artists start these places. And so we started to have this very interesting food scene. And then Capitol center came along when Amtrak had to upgrade its railroad tracks through the whole northeast corridor and they were going to tear the tracks up and put in new tracks and Governor Sundland and the Providence Foundation probably said you know we are going to tear up the railroad tracks, why not put them in a more intelligent place because at that point there was a huge railroad stockyard with all sorts of tracks and in the old train station where the Providence Foundation is there were a series of seven or eight tracks and something called a Chinese wall which completely divided south main street from North Main Street it went all the way through downtow and then beyond that were a whole series of tracks and they said if we put the tracks where and they said if we put the tracks where they are now and put them in the underground brand new train station it will free up all of this land. It was a very clever idea and they started to do that and then they uncovered the Wannasquatucket River and at that point Bill Warner got involved and Bill Warner said you know they asked Bill to get involved with traffic patterns and pedestrian patterns and Bill responded to a study that was done at RISD, through RISD and MIT and it was talking about pedestrian patterns and walking patterns and uncovering the river. And Bill and Fredrick San Florian and I think Bill Kite. The tree of them were at Blue Point the restaurant run by a glass maker at RISD. They drew on a linen napkin a whole a proposal called the napkin plan where they decided you know if we just pick up and move them over here, we can make them a celebrated part of downtown because in their old location the rivers actually went underneath some buildings. They went underneath the federal court house and they went underneath another building so you could never have a walk along the banks of the river because it was stuck underneath the federal court house. So the three of them and its unclear how much all of them had input, but they just sketched out the plan on the napkin and came up with this idea to physically move. Remove the railroad tracks and move both rivers. And I can show you pictures of this would you like to see them. So they realized, the three of them had this dinner conversation again at this restaurant and they realized probably with the help of some wine and from the looks of the napkin there was probably plenty of wine. They had this insane idea of moving the rivers to allow pedestrians walking across them and it was so insane it took some convincing and Bill Warner of the three of them deserves the credit for really realizing that this was worth pursuing and although it is somewhat lost to controversy about who contributed what to the idea. I'm sure they all had a lot to do with it.

ES: What were their titles?

BE: All three of them were architects. Fredrick San Flurian was a professor of architecture at RISD, and Bill Warner was a local practicing architect who had done a lot of projects, and Bill Warner deserves the credit for realizing that this wasn't going to happen without somebody really championing it. It was very hard to convince people that A. it was possible and B. they could find the funds for it and he went and talked to a number of people primarily at the Providence Foundation and the State of Rhode Island and convinced them that this was worth doing. Senator Chafee, Senator Reed, Senator ( ) Governor Sundland, and got them really interested in doing this. They also included Cianci, but he wasn't involved in the early stages and there's a book about all of this. There is downtown Providence here is the whole area we are looking at this is the Providence River this is the Mashasuk River and this is the Woonasquatucket River and the old train lines this is the old train station. The tracks came in here and all of this was tracks. And the new train station is way up here and the tracks now come underground through there, but they used to come through this entire area. Along this building was tracks they went right behind this they went straight through to here that was all tracks and this was the Chinese wall and then there were sittings in all of this area and then it continued down thought there. So there is the same area before and after. That is what it used to look like and here is the same area now. Now the train tracks in here have already been removed you can see they started to go here but I don't have a picture while there were still many train tracks so this was just the used train tracks and you can see that this building was brand new. And you can see how these tracks used to come you can tell these used to be all tracks and this is the old location of the river and this is the new location of the river. This building has now been build all these tracks are gone the train tracks now runs through here underground and this is all gone and the river location is starting to shift here. This is the remains of the Chinese wall and these are some of the Sittings this is 3 Steeple Street. More descriptions of Downtown Providence.

[Evans Shows Snyder a Powerpoint slide show]

This is the park and you can see it's a nice park, but you can also see that there's nobody in it. This is where I began to realize we had a problem with this park and with the Renaissance that we had to somehow take the park which was usually- The river park and Waterplace basin. Waterfire, the first time we did it was. It was finished in 92 and the first time we lit Waterfire was in the fall of 92 and then December 31 of 94 was when I lit Waterfire as part of First Night. First Night actually said we want to do something for the tenth anniversary of the First night of Providence, does anybody have any ideas. And I said you know I've been looking at this great river project where we spent all this money and millions of dollars and yet when I go down there on a gorgeous sunny day there's not a soul down there. I said I'd really like to create a work of art that might be able to capture a sense of renewal and renaissance and fire has this sort symbolic notion of rebirth and progress and civilization and I'd really like to use fire to gather people to the space and then once we get people into this space then we can start a tradition of people getting together and interacting in this space and maybe we can make it a lively type of place. It keeps people warm it keeps it light at night and there's music and I said lets really try to make it gather people to the park and now when there's Waterfire that park is not empty. This is people waiting for us to light Waterfire. If you look at these pictures, there are people everywhere you look there are people in rows here. there are people standing on this bridge here on this bridge here. Solid people solid people all the way along here everywhere you can see. People are coming to see the lighting of Waterfire and one of my intentions in creating the piece was to try to make civic ritual which would gather people together and also be symbolic of restoration and renaissance and progress and the idea of taking back the night and romance. One of the problems with downtown was that it was empty and it was perceived as dangerous and empty place will always seem dangerous. Jane Jacobs writes about eyes on the street and people sort of being there to monitor the space and then when there's a broad range of people there of different ages and different genders and backgrounds, it suddenly seems like a great space, but if you leave it to just the sort of panhandlers who tend to meet in and abandoned public space, then it appears very desolate and dangerous and people aren't comfortable going there. If the whole community reclaims a space it belongs to the whole community if the people aren't there it belongs to whomever happens to take it over who will take over an abandoned space are people for whom it has value. Whether it be kids who want to get out of school and don't want to be seen or people who are drunk or people who want to take over an abandoned building and some of those things are good. I think artists taking over an abandoned building is good and drug dealers using a space to make drug deals is not good. So there were many elements that came into forming the Providence Renaissance, but there were also a lot of things we had to combat first of all we had to combat the fact that at 5 :00 everyone left their jobs and went home. Restaurateurs will tell you that prior to Waterfire they didn't have much business on weeknights. New Rivers used to close for a whole month. They would pay everyone and tell them not to come to work. They had to change remember that one of the things I said about Providence was that people had a very negative self image. People were very self deprecatory about Providence and from someone coming from the outside at that point. The restaurants were interesting and the architecture was interesting. The self-deprecatory attitude toward the city. It was an interesting phenomenon. So one of the things that was really important to do in order to make the city sort of come alive was we had to have people proud of the city because the city really was pretty amazing and in part the self deprecatory attitude I think came from the fact that a lot of Rhode Islanders were really not well traveled and didn't realize that the sort of decline that they witnessed in their city had also happened across the whole country. So where Providence had been a very wealthy important city up until WWI, it then went into this long decline where industry went sound and people lost jobs to Mexico and Asia. And that's been happening all across the country. Providence I think really did collapse somewhat but it also in that collapse preserved all sorts of interesting things like buildings and stuff like that and I think that many of the people who lived here just saw the older buildings as a reproach of some sort about how. They weren't modem and it wasn't 20th century and they didn't realize the incredible authenticity of these historic buildings was really a value in and of itself and not having gone to a city like Atlanta where all the old stuff is more or less gone and its just one Wal-Mart after another. They didn't realize the pleasure and wonder of this historical legacy that they had all around them: Somehow Waterfire because of its emotional resonance and symbolism of life and renewal really caught the local people's attention. If you look at those comment books I'm talking about one of the comments you see over and over again is something like I'm so glad to finally see something so beautiful in Providence and it makes me proud of my city and you see people writing this over and over again and that's a very subtle change in mindset and you see things like now the family reunion happens in Providence because the family wants to see what's happening down here and they want to come to Waterfire. We get letters from people saying when are you going to do Waterfire in August we want to have a family reunion in August and I want everyone to come see Waterfire. And that sense of community engagement and pride and value of the community is priceless and that's a very important thing. Beyond the local affect now people from Providence and Hartford and Worcester and Maine Manhattan and New York and Connecticut they come to Providence because they hear about Waterfire they hear about the restaurants they hear about the architecture and when you have all of these things working together, it's a motivation to come make the trip and I think the ephemerality of Waterfire is also an important part. It's a complete transformation of the scenic at night and its entirely not there the next day and as a consequence, if we were doing this every night of the year, it wouldn't work as well. Because now everyone who wants to be there on that particular night can put it on and say ok the next Waterfire is on such and such a date and so you get the sort of crowd that you might see on Romblace in Barcelona every night and you couldn't do that in Providence.

ES: What was the inspiration for Waterfire?

BE: Lots and lots of things. The inspiration of Waterfire comes from 5 or 6 different things one of them was my family I grew up in California and we spent a lot of time in the High Sierra and we spent a lot of time in the western desert in Nevada and we used to go out into the desert about 2 hours north of Reno and we used to camp there for 2 or 3 days at a time. We would bring all our water and all our supplies and we would camp in this extremely desolate desert environment where there was no water and none else there. And what we would do is during the day we would hike around the desert and explore a lot of the geological features and we would also make an effort to try to clean up any litter we saw. And with the wood we would make a very small little campfire so we would always sit at sunset with no electricity and no light in any direction accept occasionally a car would drive by ten miles away on the other side of the lake. It was total darkness... and we would sit around the fire and watch the sunset and then when the sunset was over we would light the fire and tell stories as a family... and it was a very small little fire so it would burn for a while....and I got darker and darker until it was pitch black...And that sort of experience of sitting together as a family completely isolated from anything anywhere except for the fire... Sort of the magic of the night and being in the dark. I think that was a really strong influence. Other elements came from a commission that was advertised by the hospital of Seattle on Puget Sound and it had a rescue ambulance helicopter and it had gone off on a mission to rescue a pregnant woman and something mechanically had gone wrong with the helicopter on the way to rescue her and the helicopter crashed into Puget Sound and the Pilot and the two medical technicians drowned and the hospital put out a call for sculptures to design a memorial fountain and I thought that was interesting to do a fountain so I looked more into the case and it turned out that the pregnant woman's waters had just broken so she knew it was time to get to the hospital quickly and because of the layout of Seattle she had to call a helicopter. So when her waters broke it was a sign of incoming life. Water was already a symbol of life, and then when these people came to rescue her on a mission of saving life, they drowned in water and then they were going to make a memorial fountain to commemorate this whole thing. So it struck me how water was a symbol of both life and death in this particular situation, but it also was a symbol of both life and death in almost all possible symbolisms... you have water as a symbol of cleanliness and fertility and life and...water is also a symbol of depth, of formlessness of existentiality of non permanence of loss-of loss of memory, of erosion, of crossing the river Stix into Haites forgetfulness and of death in many cases as well particularly in cultures associated with the desert water is often associated with death or even Jonah being swallowed by the wale and being carried way down to the bottom of the ocean is a symbol of loss... So that intrigued me and that was one element and then another element was there was a call to create a holocaust memorial for the Jewish Community Center here in Providence on Elmgrove Avenue they wanted to make a small Holocaust memorial and I wound up creating a piece for that I thought about it and one of the obvious things was an eternal flame.

I remember feeling this sense of anger.