Eight: The Breathing (1994-1999)
The rivers were uncovered in the way that things are uncovered when someone finally admits they made a mistake.
I was there when they opened the first section of the relocated channel in 1994. Not there in the way that the city officials were there, with their hard hats and their speeches and their photographs for the newspaper. There in the way I am there for most things of importance in this city, in the water, below the surface, feeling the moment when the channel opened and the river found its new course and the current, my current, ran free through downtown Providence for the first time in decades.
I will not pretend I did not feel it as a physical thing. I will not pretend my eyes, such as they are now, were entirely dry. Those of you who know me will find this information surprising and are requested to keep it to yourselves.
The water remembered. That is the only way I know how to say it. The water remembered what it was supposed to be and it moved into the space that had been made for it with the quiet certainty of something returning to its nature. The cold came back to the upper reaches. The current strengthened. The particular quality of Dagon’s presence in the river, which had been so thin and attenuated in the choking years that I had sometimes wondered if I was imagining it, returned with a fullness that made me understand for the first time how diminished it had been.
I had grown accustomed to the diminishment. I had not known how accustomed until it was over.
The River Relocation Project was not completed in a single season. It proceeded in stages through the middle years of the decade, each stage opening another section of the buried channels, each opening felt by those of us in the water as a loosening, a release, the way you feel a knot coming undone one loop at a time. By 1996 the main channel through downtown was open and the riverwalk was taking shape along the banks and Providence was beginning, cautiously and with the particular self-consciousness of a city that has not thought well of itself for some time, to believe that it might be worth looking at.
The humans who had advocated for the rivers in the early 1980s, the planners and the idealists and the stubborn civic dreamers, had been right in ways they could not entirely have anticipated. The rivers did not just improve the city aesthetically. They changed its relationship with itself. A city with visible water at its heart is a different kind of city than one that has buried its water under concrete and forgotten it was there. The water reminded Providence of something it had known and lost and was only now recovering.
I watched this from below and from the occasional surface excursion, cloaked as always, moving carefully along the new riverwalk in the early morning hours before the city woke properly. The walkways were clean and well made and smelled of new stone and river water and the particular fresh quality of a civic project that has been done with genuine care rather than the minimum necessary effort. I found this, unexpectedly, moving. I am not easily moved by civic projects. But this one had taken thirty years of patient advocacy and the better part of a decade to execute and the result was, by any reasonable measure, beautiful.
Dagon’s waters, running free through the heart of the city.
Mother Hydra was not far behind.
Barnaby Evans lit the first WaterFire on New Years Eve of 1994.
I should be precise about the history because Stanislas Zotykiv is precise about history and because the history matters. The first WaterFire was a smaller, more intimate affair than what it would eventually become, eighty braziers on the newly opened section of the Providence River, fire on water, conceived by Evans as an art installation to celebrate the city’s New Year. It was not yet the full scale civic ritual it would grow into through the late 1990s and beyond. It was a beginning, a first lighting, a match struck in the dark to see what it illuminated.
What it illuminated was everything.
I was in the water when the first brazier was lit. I felt the heat of it on the surface above me, that particular warmth that fire casts on water, and I surfaced in the shadow of the nearest bridge and I watched the flames catch and spread down the line of braziers and I felt something that I have been trying to find the right word for ever since and have not yet found it. The closest I can come is recognition. Not of something new but of something very old, something that had been present in this place long before Evans conceived his installation, long before Providence existed as a city, long before the Europeans arrived with their flags and their paperwork and their talent for renaming things that already had names.
Fire on water.
Mother Hydra’s flame on Father Dagon’s surface.
The Gaspee had burned in the bay in 1772 and Providence had begun its revolution in fire and water and had never entirely stopped being that city, the city of the burning ship and the deep current, even when it had forgotten what it was. WaterFire did not create something new. It remembered something old. Evans, who is by all accounts a thoughtful and perceptive man, had reached into the city’s oldest instinct and pulled it back to the surface, and the city had recognised it immediately and gathered around it with the relieved certainty of people who have found something they did not know they had lost.
They still do not know what they are doing when they gather around those fires. They think they are attending an art event. They think they are participating in civic culture. They are doing something considerably older than either of those things and I find, after thirty years of watching them do it, that I have stopped being bemused by their ignorance and started being grateful for their instinct.
They are worshipping correctly. They simply do not know the names of what they are worshipping.
That is, perhaps, enough.
The community felt it too.
I do not mean only the opening of the rivers, though that was felt deeply and immediately by everyone in the water. I mean the broader shift, the change in the city’s relationship with its own waterfront, the new foot traffic along the riverwalk, the restaurants and galleries and small businesses that followed the renovation, the general sense of a city turning back toward its water after decades of turning away.
For us this was complicated, as most good things are complicated when you have been hiding long enough that visibility itself has become a threat. The riverwalk brought people to the water’s edge in numbers and at hours that had previously been quiet. The WaterFire evenings brought thousands of them, standing at the railings, looking into the river with exactly the kind of attention that we had spent decades discouraging.
We adapted. We are good at adapting. We went deeper during WaterFire evenings in the early years, staying below the range of casual observation, learning the rhythms of the new foot traffic and adjusting accordingly. It required more care than the quiet decades had required. But it was a different kind of care than the anxious, diminished carefulness of the choking years. It was the carefulness of people who have something worth protecting rather than the carefulness of people who are simply trying to survive.
That distinction matters more than it might appear to.
There was also this: WaterFire brought people to the river who would not otherwise have come. And among those people, occasionally, were ones who stood at the railing and looked into the water with something more than tourist curiosity. Something older. Something that had been looking for a surface to press itself against for years without knowing what surface it was looking for.
The blood recognises the water. I have believed this for a long time. WaterFire gave the blood a place to come and look.
Not all of them knew what they were looking for. Most of them did not. But they came to the water and they stood in Mother Hydra’s firelight and they looked into Father Dagon’s current and something in them that had been quiet for a long time became, briefly and without explanation, less quiet.
We noticed. We began, carefully, to pay attention to who was coming to the water and why.
This was the beginning of the gathering, though I did not know it as such at the time. It looked, from the inside, simply like survival. Like a community that had contracted as far as it could contract and was beginning, almost imperceptibly, to expand again.
It was more than that. But the more than that took years to become visible, and I have learned not to rush the things that need time to become what they are.
By 1999 Providence had changed in ways that I was still, at the end of that decade, trying to fully account for.
The Superman building, what they call the Industrial Trust Building, is still lit, still dominant on the skyline, though beginning in those years to show the first signs of the long dimming I have already described. The downtown was livelier than it had been in thirty years. Brown University expanded, as Brown University always expands, with the serene confidence of an institution that has been doing exactly what it pleases since 1764 and sees no reason to change its approach. The restaurant scene that would eventually make Providence a destination rather than simply a place had begun to establish itself, the chefs and the sommeliers and the particular Providence food culture that drew on the Italian and Portuguese and other immigrant traditions that had shaped the city for a century.
Federal Hill had reinvented itself, or was in the process of reinventing itself, the shadow of Patriarca replaced by something more openly commercial, the old social clubs giving way to restaurants, the neighbourhood becoming a destination rather than a territory. I watched this transformation with the detached interest of someone who had watched Federal Hill be many things over seventy years and had learned not to mistake any particular version of it for the final one.
The waterfront was ours again, in the sense that it had always been ours, in the sense that the water beneath the new riverwalk and the WaterFire braziers and the tourist foot traffic was still cold and still deep and still carried Dagon’s presence in its current. The surface had changed. The depth had not.
We were still few. I want to be honest about that. The revival of the rivers and the beginning of WaterFire had not immediately reversed thirty years of contraction. Communities do not rebuild themselves in five years. The blood that carried Dagon’s mark was still mostly out there somewhere, dispersed along the coastline and beyond, living human lives in human cities, feeling the pull of the water without knowing what the pull was.
But the pull was stronger now. The water was cleaner and the current was better and Dagon’s presence in the river had returned to something approaching what it had been in the early years, and the ones who carried the mark in their blood, wherever they were, whatever lives they were living, felt something shift in those years without being able to say what had shifted.
Some of them would find their way here eventually. I believed that then and I believe it now.
I had learned, in seventy years of waiting, that belief and patience are the same thing.
I had plenty of both.
– S.Z., Providence, December 2025
