Historian Richard White wrote of the Columbia River that it is “at once our creation and retains a life of its own beyond our control.” In the case of the Moshassuck and West Rivers, humans tried their best to deny them those lives for most of the nineteenth century and some of the twentieth, harnessing both waterways as power sources and provisional sewers for a sprawling system of mills and mill villages. In doing so, they literally worked the rivers to death. Bleacheries, textile mills, slaughterhouses, and sewage outflows choked and toxified their waters. As one journalist remarked of the Moshassuck in 1916, “none but a tin fish with a double coat of non-corrosive paint could live in it.”
It must have been hard not to notice what was happening to the rivers in those years, not only because they smelled awful, took on the colors of dyes, and flowed with blood, but because the life and labor of the whole district oriented to them, for better or worse. But the city turned away from the rivers, at first gradually, with the decline of industry, and then decisively, at the hands of officials and planners. It hasn’t turned back.
Much of the old North End, where the Moshassuck and West Rivers run, was razed and leveled in the late 1950s. The city’s 1946 “Master Plan for Land Use and Population Distribution” declared that new industrial sites should be established “in the valley bottoms on land now largely occupied by bad housing,” a strategy meant to kill two birds with one bulldozer: the flight of industry and the “blight” of low-income, multi-racial neighborhoods.
Development Area D-7, as a slice of the North End was known in city planning documents, was home to about 3,000 residents occupying 500 buildings on 50 acres. The neighborhood was working class and multi-ethnic, with residents including Irish, Poles, Italians, and by the 1950s, African Americans. To justify the displacement of so many people, the Providence Redevelopment Agency cited the neighborhood’s “difficult topography,” “irregular street pattern,” and “social inadequacy,” that last point referring to higher-than-average rates of tuberculosis, “illegitimate births,” and “general public assistance cases.”