In Between Blight and Historic Preservation: Urban Renewal in Providence, Rhode Island

This paper seeks to analyze two inter-related developments in contributing to the legal history of urban renewal in American cities and the city of Providence. First, I study the development of the legal standard of blight in state courts in the pre-Berman v. Parker era of American jurisprudence. Focusing on a set of advisory opinions, early state court-cases and state constitutional convention documents in Rhode Island, I aim to show how blight as the legal standard for a taking was debated, contested, and ultimately, enshrined into state constitutional and statutory law.

Next, I take a critical lens to the formation of the Providence Preservation Society (PPS), one of the early, and most powerful historic preservation society groups in the country, which formed in the immediate wake of federal urban renewal. I study early documents from the historic preservation movement and critique the narrow understanding of urban preservation that predominated groups like PPS at the time. I contrast the groups’ focus on preserving building fabric and structures in the College Hill neighborhood with the destruction of numerous areas of the city under the legal pretext of blight. In doing so, I focus on the complex figure of Antoinette Downing, a leading preservationist in the city.