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Providence Showcases Engineering Contributions
By Brian Brenner
I started watching the Friday night TV show Providence about a family living in Providence, Rhode Island. It's a low-brain-power show. The people are mostly nice and get into pat situations they try to fix. The father is a veterinarian, so you usually see cute sick puppies and chimps. One of the main characters is dead and appears in dreams. A little strange, but it's OK because on Friday night after a long week, you don't want to have to deal with PBS. Also, the title, Providence, is pleasant and comforting; it's better than a show named Latrine or Waste Dump.
Ever the engineer, I realized that one of the reasons I like the show is the way it depicts infrastructure. The built environment of Providence practically glows on the screen. The city and neighborhoods are usually shown in golden sunlight in early October, and the night scenes sparkle. The city -- with its buildings, bridges, and neighborhoods -- comes on the screen so often it's almost another character. As the show's basic theme, the main character decides to return home soul-less from Los Angeles to her family in homey Providence. A subtext here says Los Angeles is not a real place you can live in happily, but "home" is. In terms of the built environment, the way "home" is depicted by the show evokes interest.
The real Providence has experienced a dramatic transformation in recent years. A lot of civil engineering work has gone into rebuilding the city. The old Providence was sort of a dumpy, rundown, past-its-prime small northeastern city. The Providence River was polluted and buried in culverts. Today, the newly rebuilt Providence has a rescued downtown river and park along its banks. People take gondola rides on the river. Sculptured and appealing bridges cross it. The downtown park hosts an event called "Waterfire" on Saturday nights during the warm season, where giant bon fires are lit on river barges, and they play classical music along the banks. Most Rhode Island residents attend these events, traveling from the nether reaches of the Ocean State (which can take a few minutes). The small downtown has been rebuilt with a new shopping mall, a terrific railroad station, hotels, and facilities, and now it rates as a place to visit.
The residential neighborhoods of Providence are, for the most part, well-kept and intact. They sport a host of old Victorian houses and preserved historic areas for walking. The show chose a big old Providence house as the home of the fictional television family. Many neighborhoods really do look like what is depicted on the show. As with everything else in film, the real Providence isn't as wonderful, glowing, and dramatic as the televised version. Rhode Island residents, while being nice, aren't all that nice. But I think, overall, the city now has a lot going for it, and the show captures that.
Civil engineers may find it interesting that Providence is about to embark on its own version of Boston's Central Artery Project, also known as the Big Dig. The plan is to relocate the junction of interstates I-195 and I-95. These two highways currently mash in a 1960s-style interchange too close to other expressway junctions on I-95, leading to frequent traffic jams. Although the project's original motivation was traffic improvement, an opportunity for urban improvement exists as well. The rerouted highway will cross the Providence River on an elegant tie-arch bridge, replacing the current gangling mess of steel beams and piers and gracing the rebuilt riverfront. The relocation will reconnect an older area of the city, cut off by the I-95 expressway, to downtown. Extensive rebuilding has taken place here already, with new shops, lofts, and the Providence Children's Museum. Since the scope of the project is still many factors smaller than the Big Dig, Rhode Islanders feel a bit overshadowed. But it's still an impressive, large project in its own right. It serves as a good example of peripheral benefits realized from a major transportation rebuilding project.
The lack of engineers' presence in popular culture and thought makes me grateful for the little crumbs thrown to us such as this. In the grand scheme of things, civil engineers design and build the infrastructure that makes society possible; however, we're often taken for granted. A bidding war for a new Red Sox baseball player took place recently, and his contract could almost fund the entire highway construction job in Providence. It would rather see bidding wars over really good structural engineers. But since that's not about to happen, I guess it's OK to sit back on Friday night and watch the bridges and buildings of Providence on television, knowing that millions of viewers around the country are seeing the glowing contributions of engineers.
Brian Brenner is a civil engineer and senior professional associate with the engineering firm Parsons Brinckerhoff in Boston, working with Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff on the Central Artery/Tunnel Project.
This was reprinted from Civil Engineering Practice, Journal of the Boston Society of Civil Engineers Section/ASCE.
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