Seven: The Forgetting (1980-1993)
The Industrial Trust Building went dark in 2013, which falls outside the boundaries of this entry, but I have been watching it go dark for considerably longer than that. A building does not simply switch off. It dims. It empties floor by floor, tenant by tenant, the lights going out in ones and twos over years until one day you look up from the water and realise that what you have been watching is not a building losing tenants but a city losing faith in itself, and the building is simply the most visible evidence of a process that has been underway for a long time.
I know something about that kind of dimming.
The 1980s arrived in Providence with the particular energy of a city that has been told, by forces larger than itself, that the things it built its identity around are no longer required. The manufacturing was going. The jewellery industry, which had survived the Depression and the war and the general turbulence of the postwar decades, was contracting with the grim efficiency of something that has finally run out of reasons to continue. The mills that had lined the rivers, the same mills whose outflow had been poisoning our water for thirty years, were closing, which should have been a relief and was, in the way that the cessation of a chronic pain is a relief, tempered by the awareness that the damage has already been done and will not simply reverse itself because the source has stopped.
The water was still wrong. The concrete lids were still in place. The rivers still ran grey and diminished beneath the city that had buried them.
But something was changing. Slowly, barely perceptibly, the way the light changes in the deep water before a storm, but changing.
I was paying attention.
Providence in the 1980s was, by most human measures, not doing well.
The population had been declining since the 1950s, the familiar American story of the city hollowing out as the suburbs filled up, the people who could leave were leaving and the ones who stayed behind were making what they could of what remained. Federal Hill was a shadow of what it had been under Patriarca, the organisation that had provided its particular brand of order now dismantled by years of federal attention and internal fracture. The downtown shopping district that had hummed with postwar optimism was quiet in ways it had not been quiet before, storefronts empty, the Industrial Trust Building still lit but beginning to look, from certain angles, like a man smiling through an effort. They call it the Superman building now, after some reference in their popular culture that I have never felt sufficiently curious to investigate. I find I prefer not to.
The East Side held on, as the East Side always holds on, Brown University continuing its eternal business of receiving the young and releasing them slightly altered, the old houses on Benefit Street and Prospect Street maintained by people with enough money to maintain them and enough taste to want to. College Hill has always existed in a slightly different Providence than the one the rest of the city inhabits. I have observed this for nearly a century and I find it neither surprising nor particularly interesting. Every city has its hill where the comfortable people live above the complicated people below. Providence simply makes it literal.
For us, the 1980s were the low point. I want to be honest about that because this document is not intended as a reassuring account of how everything was fine and Dagon provided and we endured with dignity. We endured. The dignity was variable.
The community that had established itself in Fox Point in 1928 was, by 1980, a fraction of what it had been at its most numerous. Some had followed Henryk south in the 1950s. Some had gone deeper and stayed there, reducing their surface contact to nothing, becoming in all practical senses creatures of the deep water alone, which is a choice I understand and do not judge and find quietly heartbreaking. Some had simply been lost, to the years, to the poisoned water, to the withering I described in the previous entry, to the ones who chose the surface world and its brief bright life and were not heard from again.
What remained was small and tired and spread thin along the waterfront, the fish markets reduced to one, the houses on Wickenden Street occupied by a rotating population of artists and students who had discovered that Fox Point was affordable and charming and had no idea what had been there before them or what still moved in the water behind their renovated Victorian porches.
We had become, in the most literal sense, invisible.
I am one hundred and sixty-three years old and I have learned that invisible is not the same as gone. But in those years the distance between the two felt smaller than I would have liked.
I should tell you about the river people.
Not our people. The humans.
In the early 1980s a small and stubborn collection of Providence residents, urban planners and architects and historians and the particular kind of civic idealist that every city produces in small quantities and relies on more heavily than it admits, began to talk seriously about what had been done to the rivers. Not in the way that people had occasionally complained about the water quality or the loss of the waterfront, but in a more fundamental way, a way that asked what the rivers had been before the concrete and whether that thing could be recovered.
I heard about these conversations the way I heard about most things by then, from a distance, filtered through the waterfront community that remained and the occasional surface excursion I could still manage with sufficient concealment. But I heard about them, and what I heard produced in me a feeling that I had not experienced in some years.
Something that was not quite hope. I am too old for hope in its uncomplicated form. But something adjacent to it. Something that said: pay attention to this.
I paid attention.
The Providence Foundation. The urban planning documents. The early proposals for what would eventually become the River Relocation Project. I could not attend the meetings, obviously. I could not sign petitions or appear before planning committees or participate in the civic process in any of the ways that require a name on a document and a face that can be looked at in daylight, for reasons that I trust require no elaboration. But I could listen, and I could, in the small ways available to me, encourage.
There are things you can do from the water that humans do not have categories for. Currents can be guided. The behaviour of the water itself, its smell, its sound, the way it moves against the stone foundations of the buried channels, can be influenced by those who know how to influence it. I am not saying that I caused the River Relocation Project, that would be an overstatement of both my abilities and my involvement. What I am saying is that the water wanted to come back, and I helped it want to, and some of the humans who were paying attention to the water in those years may have felt that wanting without knowing where it came from.
Dagon’s waters remember what they are. They do not forget simply because something heavy has been placed on top of them.
And Mother Hydra’s fire had not gone out. It had simply been waiting, as fire does, for something to kindle against.
The Fox Point neighbourhood changed around us in those years in the particular way of Providence neighbourhoods that have been discovered by people with student loan debt and artistic ambitions. The Portuguese fishing families who had been our neighbours and our cover since 1928 were moving out, priced out gradually by the same forces of charm and affordability that were bringing the artists and the students in. The DaCunhas sold the fish market in 1981. The Silvas were gone by 1985. The neighbourhood that had sheltered us, without knowing it was sheltering us, for over fifty years was becoming something else, something younger and louder and considerably less interested in the water than in the restaurants opening up along the waterfront to serve the people who had come to look at the water.
I found this, and find it still, a peculiarly Providence kind of irony. The waterfront became desirable at precisely the moment when it was least itself, when the rivers were most buried and most degraded and most removed from what they had been. The humans came to look at what remained of the water and called it charming without knowing what they were looking at the ruins of.
But they came. And some of them stayed. And some of the ones who stayed began, in the way of people who have chosen to live near water, to ask what the water had been and whether it could be that again.
I have lived long enough to know that the question is always the beginning.
There is something I have not yet written about in this document, something that sits in the years between 1980 and 1993 and does not belong to Providence’s history but to our own, and I find I must write it here because it is the thing that made those years both the lowest point and, in a way I could not see at the time, the turning point.
We nearly stopped.
Not dramatically. Not with any decision or declaration. Simply in the way of things that have been diminishing for long enough that the diminishing becomes the condition and you stop imagining it could be otherwise. The community that remained was aging, in the way that we age, slowly and strangely, but aging nonetheless. The young ones were few. The transformations that should have been happening, the natural progression of Dagon’s mark through those who carried it in their blood, were happening less frequently and less completely than they should have been.
The water was part of it. Bad water makes for difficult transformations, incomplete ones, ones that leave people caught between what they were and what they should be becoming, which is not a comfortable place to be caught and which I watched happen to three of the young ones in those years with a helplessness that I am not accustomed to feeling and did not handle with any particular grace.
But it was not only the water. It was also the distance. The scattering. The threads that had been lost over the decades, Henryk’s branch and the others, the ones who had gone south or gone deep or gone into the surface world and not come back. The blood that carried Dagon’s mark was out there, dispersed along the coastline and beyond it, living in human cities and human families and human lives, feeling the pull of the water without knowing what the pull was or where it came from or that there were others who felt it too.
We needed them back. I knew it in those years with a certainty that was almost physical, a pressure in the chest that had nothing to do with the water and everything to do with the simple arithmetic of a people who were not going to survive their own dispersal.
I did not know how to find them. The surface world had become, by the 1980s, a place I could navigate only in the most limited sense, cloaked and careful and slow, an old thing moving through a young city that had no category for what I was. I could not place advertisements. I could not make enquiries. I could not do any of the things a human patriarch might do to locate his scattered family.
What I could do was wait, and tend the water, and say the old prayers, and trust that Dagon’s mark in the blood of the lost ones would eventually do what blood does, which is find its way back to itself.
It is a thin strategy for a people on the edge of disappearing. I am aware of that. I was aware of it then. But it was what I had, and I have made a long practice of working with what I have, and so I waited.
And tended.
And prayed.
And the years passed the way years pass when you are very old and the thing you are waiting for has not yet arrived, which is to say slowly and then all at once.
In the autumn of 1993, I surfaced on a night in October, the same month I had walked to the covered river thirty-six years earlier, and I stood on the India Point waterfront and I looked north toward the city and I felt something that I had not felt since March of 1928 when I had come ashore at this very point and the water had known me.
Something was coming back.
Not the something that I would eventually come to dread, the pressure in the deep current that I have written about in earlier entries, the thing that feels of 1938 and darker. This was different. This was the feeling of a tide that has been out for a very long time finally beginning to turn. Gentle and certain and patient in the way of things that have simply been waiting for the conditions to be right.
The rivers.
I could feel them beneath the concrete, still moving, still cold, still carrying something of Dagon’s presence in their dark current, and for the first time in years that presence felt not diminished but gathered, as though the water itself had been building toward something and was nearly ready.
I stood on the India Point waterfront in October of 1993 and I looked at the city that had sheltered us without knowing it for sixty-five years and I felt, for the first time since the Depression years when Lord Dagon’s gold had come up from the deep and fed our neighbours without their knowing why, that Providence was about to remember something it had always known.
I went back into the water and I waited one more year.
It was, all things considered, the easiest year of waiting I had done since 1928.
– S.Z., Providence, October 2025
