A Kid’s Guide to the 1980s East Side

Growing up on the East Side of Providence in the 1980s was a unique privilege. It was a time when a kid could roam freely, bike everywhere and play outside unsupervised, provided she came home for dinner. My family lived on Lloyd Avenue, the block between Brown and Thayer, in a comfortable old Victorian with a beloved cat and a good, strong climbing tree in the backyard.

College Hill stretched before my brother, sister and me like a promise, the beauty of the setting and the bustle of student life around us (would we ever be that old?). Thayer Street in the ‘80s, with its independent shops and atmospheric restaurants, struck us as the very height of cool. Our neighbors’ dog Emma agreed and used to walk herself there, leash-less, every morning. She’d greet each vendor in turn before looping back home, sometimes returning to accompany my dad and me to the café Peaberry’s (long gone) for peanut butter cookies.

In springtime, with the trees budding and gardens blooming, my sister and I would walk ourselves home from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Elementary School on Camp Street. If anyone tried to pick us up, they just had to know the family password: snickerdoodle. (No one tried.) We loved King, where, among other thrills, the principal smoked a pipe in his office – you could do such things then. Spring at King also heralded the annual glee club concert, in which we held hands and sang the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.” The parents in the audience all cried and told us we’d understand better when we got older.
When summer came, the neighborhood kids raced outside after dinner for riotous games of Kick the Can and Manhunt in the dark. Small people like us could squeeze in the splintery alleyways between backyard fences, making for some particularly competitive rounds of Manhunt. We never officially lost anyone, but it also wasn’t frowned upon to announce your hiding place after you’d been there for a few hours.

Summer held other delights – like biking in Swan Point Cemetery, where the related peals of laughter hopefully weren’t considered disrespectful by the residents. No matter how quiet we tried to stay, searching for tadpoles and frogs in the cemetery pond always yielded one or two piercing shrieks. On the hottest days, reprieve could be found in art classes at RISD, sketching in the shadow of the great wooden Buddha, followed by luxurious hours of uninterrupted reading in the cool corners of the Athenaeum.

Fall on the East Side meant massive leaf piles and, better still, elaborate forts built from storm debris. Hurricane Gloria in ’85 left enough tree limbs to construct castles. On Halloween, trick-or-treating took ages because every house had candy. November brought my usual birthday treat of dinner at Alfredo’s, the Italian restaurant then on Thayer. I felt highly sophisticated sitting in the red leather banquette, ordering a bowl of buttered pasta (“You could eat that at home!” my parents always protested, but I assured them that it tasted better there.)

And winter on the East Side was tops, because it meant that you could go sledding on the hill at Moses Brown. This was before the school installed a wall on the hill and a softball field in the valley. This was back when you could slide down the incline, screaming at the top of your lungs, and speed nearly all the way into the street. This was back when you could fly. (Parents on that hill also spent time screaming at the top of their lungs.)

There were sobering moments too. I don’t remember when the city finally put traffic lights at the intersection of Lloyd and Hope Street, but I clearly recall the stomach-dropping sound of the car accidents that used to happen there, the sight of neighbors running to help and, once, a young woman crying on the curb, head in hands, as paramedics extracted the other driver from his crumpled vehicle. And there were sobering moments in my own household – my parents’ separation and subsequent divorce, and, in ‘91, the sale of our Lloyd Avenue home.

My parents remained on the East Side after their divorce, and I made new memories in nearby neighborhoods. After my mom moved to the Wayland Square area, she suggested I call “the nice boy up the street” to ask what time the bus for Classical High School came. An excruciatingly awkward, albeit blessedly brief, phone conversation followed – the bus came at 7:25am. But, a few years later, the same boy held my mittened hand as he walked me home from a late show at the Avon, and kissed me goodnight in the glow of a streetlamp on Stimson. And, quite a few years after that, at a church on Angell Street, he married me. The East Side was a pretty lucky place to live.