T
hink Again
Behind the transformation of the Providence Public Library | By Robert Isenberg
Photography by Nick DelGiudice
Oh, what a little light can do. If you ever walked down Empire Street at night, you understand. New lamps now shine from the walls of the Providence Public Library, brightening the pavement. New bulbs, embedded in the sidewalk, now glow underfoot. Despite the scaffolding and partitions, the library looks fresher, newer. Junk has been cleared away from the high windows; ancient plants no longer decay in the transom. Slowly, the building is returning to life. 28
East Side Monthly • March 2020
For a year and a half, the PPL has been walled off, a mysterious renovation project in the heart of Downcity. You could still visit and borrow books, but all you’d see was a single room, a ring of shelves, and tables crowded with patrons. Here and there, passersby have caught hints of progress. But when it reopens at the end of March, the state’s largest library will burst from its chrysalis, and visitors will witness the full metamorphosis within. “The library was basically built to be a
giant book repository in 1953,” says Jack Martin, executive director of PPL. “It desperately needed a renovation. It got to a point where we said, ‘We have to do this. What else are we going to do? The building is unusable.’” Costing about $26 million, the project is far more than a makeover. The “front” of the building, a beige monolith etched in art-deco patterns, looks roughly the same as before, but the inner layers are thoroughly gutted. Workers have busily rehabilitated 83,000 square
