The 32 properties on this tour were built from 1850 to 1960. Click on a map marker to see the property name, then click the name to see more. Or, scroll down to see a gallery of all properties. Click any photo to learn more.
For those with a sweet tooth for late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century revivalism, Providence’s East Side is one enormous candy store filled with a wide variety of delectable homemade confections. The area east of Hope Street and north of Angell Street became much more accessible after improvements to the streetcar line in the early 1890s, and the increasing use of automobiles in the early twentieth century made this hitherto-far-flung area even more appealing. Revivalism was at a fever pitch in this country during the years that this part of the city developed (despite the early works, then found only locally around Chicago, of the brilliant former Rhode Island resident Frank Lloyd Wright). This tour is little more than an initiation; the avid revivalist is encouraged to wander from the described route to take in the wide variety of Colonial, Tudor, Mediterranean, and Heinz (57 Varieties) Revivals found in this area, all with a crisp local twist.
Hope Street introduces a couple of fine Queen Anne houses. Olney Street is an evolving dialogue between Queen Anne and Colonial Revival. Around the corner, Freeman Parkway introduces the city’s most highly structured and urbanely effective plat (an almost too-pedestrian term for such a finely tuned stretch of several blocks). A magnificent twentieth-century Gothic church punctuates the route to Orchard Avenue, one of the city’s most engaging Colonial Revival streets, where the culmination occurs in the juxtaposition of two ecclesiastical masterpieces, one Gothic, one Modern. Across the way on Oriole are more meditations on Queen Anne. Then on Grotto Avenue are a cluster of chastely modulated bungalows, rare for Providence, followed by a not-to-be-missed late Georgian Revival gem.
– 2003 Guide to Providence Architecture
