College Hill: Two Schools, One Skyline of Steeples and Studios
Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design share a hill, a library system of neighborhoods, and 250 years of educating the city's imagination. A walk through Providence's academic citadel.
College Hill rises from the Providence River in a single, steep argument: that a city can be built around learning. At its top, Brown University — founded 1764, Ivy League, arranged around its green in a Georgian calm — and on its slope, the Rhode Island School of Design (1877), whose studios and museum made Providence improbably central to American art and design. Between and around them: the First Baptist Church in America (1775, the oldest Baptist congregation in the country), the Providence Athenaeum (1836), and streets of colonial houses that survived because a preservation movement, headquartered in this neighborhood in the 1950s, taught America how to save them.
The two schools' gravity organizes the city: Brown's roughly 11,000 students and RISD's 2,500 fill Thayer Street's bookshops and coffee bars, staff its labs and galleries, and supply the audience for half the culture Providence produces. The RISD Museum — free to the city in spirit and periodically in fact — holds a collection of encyclopedic ambition; Brown's research and medical school anchor the knowledge economy that has replaced the jewelry and textile mills in the city's self-image.
Town and gown keep their practiced Rhode Island diplomacy: payments in lieu of taxes negotiated in public, expansion plans argued in zoning rooms, students volunteering and voting in the wards around the hill. The relationship is an old marriage — occasionally loud, fundamentally load-bearing.
November on College Hill: the elms bare over the Green, studio windows lit late at RISD as the semester's projects come due, the Athenaeum's reading room full in the early dark. Providence's mills made things the world wore. Its hill makes the people who decide what the world makes next.
