Six: The Arrangements (1961-1979)
I have been putting off this entry for two months, which is longer than I have put off any of the others. August in Providence is not a month that encourages reflection. The heat sits on the city like something that has decided to stay, and the river runs slow and warm in the upper reaches, and the tourists who have discovered that Providence is a charming and manageable city move along the waterfront in their cheerful oblivious herds, and I find myself disinclined to think about the 1960s.
This is not because the 1960s were uneventful. They were not. They were, in fact, extremely eventful, which is precisely the problem.
Let me try to explain.
There is a particular kind of order that is not order at all but simply the arrangement of disorder in a way that benefits the people doing the arranging. Providence in the 1960s had this kind of order in abundance, and the man responsible for most of it was a compact, careful, deeply dangerous individual named Raymond Patriarca, who operated out of a vending machine company on Atwells Avenue on Federal Hill and ran the New England mob with the methodical patience of someone who had confused criminal enterprise with civic administration and found the confusion profitable.
I did not know Raymond Patriarca personally. I want to be clear about that. We are not a people who seek out powerful humans and make arrangements with them, partly because powerful humans are the kind of humans who ask questions and want things in return, and partly because the last time a powerful human took a significant interest in our affairs he came with trucks and paperwork and guns and we have not forgotten it.
But we existed in the same city, and in Providence in the 1960s, that meant something whether you intended it to or not.
Federal Hill was Patriarca’s territory in the way that the waterfront was ours, not legally, nothing about any of this was legal, but in the way of understood boundaries that everyone with any sense respected because the alternative was considerably worse than respect. His people knew the waterfront was strange. Our people knew Federal Hill was dangerous. We maintained, without ever articulating it, a mutual policy of determined incuriosity about each other’s business that served everyone adequately.
This is not an endorsement of Raymond Patriarca or his methods, which were not methods I would endorse under any circumstances. A man who arranges the world through violence and the threat of violence is simply running the same machinery as the government, with the paperwork replaced by different paperwork and the guns held by different people. I have seen enough of that machinery from enough angles to find it unimpressive regardless of the flag or the family name attached to it.
What I will say is that Federal Hill’s particular talent for not seeing what it did not want to see, a talent Providence had always had and that Federal Hill had refined to an art form, created a buffer between our waterfront existence and the kind of official scrutiny that might otherwise have found us inconvenient. The city’s attention in those years was largely directed toward Federal Hill, toward the FBI surveillance and the state police investigations and the grand jury proceedings that seemed to generate more paper than conclusions. While all of that was happening, the strange quiet people down by the waterfront who always knew where the fish were continued to be strange and quiet and largely unnoticed.
We benefited from this too. I am developing a theme, I notice.
The 1960s were also, for the humans, a decade of what they called liberation, by which they meant the discovery that the arrangements they had accepted as natural and inevitable were in fact arrangements, chosen by specific people for specific reasons, and therefore capable of being chosen differently. This realisation, which I would have thought self-evident, apparently came as a significant surprise to a large number of people, and the surprise expressed itself in music and marches and a general atmosphere of upheaval that I observed from the waterfront with something between sympathy and exhaustion.
I understand the impulse. I understand it in my bones, in my blood, in the specific way that a people who were erased from the official record by government trucks understand the impulse to stand up and refuse to be erased. What I find more complicated is the method, the faith that the right arrangement of words in the right public forum will persuade the machinery to change its nature, when in my experience the machinery does not change its nature. It changes its language. It changes which people it describes as the problem requiring administration. The nature remains.
This is, again, not a popular observation.
The younger ones among us were not immune to the atmosphere of the times. There were those in the community, the ones close enough to human to move through the surface world with some fluency, who felt the pull of what was happening in the streets and the campuses and the smoky rooms where the future was being argued over. I understood their restlessness. I did not know what to do with it, which is perhaps the most honest thing I can say about my qualities as a patriarch in those particular years.
A patriarch who is too old and too changed to walk easily in the daylight is limited in his ability to advise people who are trying to decide how to live in it.
I did my best. My best, in the 1960s, was to listen more than I spoke and to remind the young ones, as gently as I could manage, that the humans’ liberation movements were the humans’ to conduct, and that the last time our existence became a matter of public knowledge and government attention it had not ended well for us.
We are not a people built for movements. We are a people built for patience and depth and the long view. This is sometimes a strength and sometimes a failure and I have spent sixty years trying to determine which it was in the 1960s.
I have not yet reached a verdict.
The rivers continued their slow suffocation through the decade and into the 1970s.
I have already written about the choking in the previous entry, about the concrete lids and the industrial outflow and the particular grey wrongness that the water had taken on in those years. I will not repeat it in detail here because I find I do not have the stomach for it twice and the local squid ink, while plentiful this summer, is not unlimited. What I will say is that the 1960s and 1970s added new dimensions to the damage that the postwar years had begun.
The highway came through in those years, Route 195, cutting through the southern edge of the city with the particular brutality of infrastructure that has decided it has the right of way over everything that preceded it. The river adjustments that accommodated the highway construction pushed the waterways further from their natural channels, further under concrete and asphalt, further from the light and the air that even buried water needs to remain alive in any meaningful sense.
I felt it as a further tightening. A compression. As though the city above were slowly, without intending to, pressing down on everything beneath it with the thoughtless weight of its own expansion.
The community contracted. Not dramatically, not all at once, but steadily, in the way of things that are being slowly squeezed. Some left for deeper water, following the route that Henryk had taken south in 1950. Some simply went under and stayed there, reducing their contact with the surface world to the minimum necessary for survival. The fish markets on Wickenden Street, our most visible connection to the human economy above, changed hands twice in the 1970s, the cover businesses becoming thinner and more perfunctory as the community that had built them grew smaller and less able to sustain them.
We were becoming, in those years, something closer to a rumour than a community. Present but not present. There but not there. The kind of thing that shows up in the peripheral vision of a city and disappears when you look directly at it.
I did not like it. I had not come from Innsmouth to become a rumour. I had come to build something that would last, something that Dagon’s people could return to when the time was right, something that would still be here in the deep water when the surface world eventually remembered that the surface is not the whole of the world.
But endurance requires compromise, and compromise in those years meant going deeper and quieter and smaller, and I made the compromises because the alternative was trucks and paperwork, and I have mentioned what I think of trucks and paperwork.
There was a man in the 1970s, a city councillor whose name I will not include in this document because he is apparently still alive and his grandchildren did not choose their grandfather, who became briefly and uncomfortably interested in the waterfront community. Not in us specifically, he did not know about us specifically, but in the waterfront generally, in the question of what was down there and who owned it and what it might be worth to someone with development in mind.
He came down to the water twice that I know of, in the summer of 1974, with another man who carried a clipboard and the expression of someone calculating the value of things that are not his. They walked the waterfront. They pointed at things. They made notes.
The second time, one of the younger ones among us, a woman whose name I will also not include because she would be embarrassed by the story, surfaced in the shadow of the dock while they were standing on it and looked up at them from the water with the full effect of what she was, which at that point in her transformation was considerable.
The man with the clipboard left Providence within the week. The councillor did not return to the waterfront for the remainder of his time in office.
I did not sanction this. I was also not, if I am being entirely honest with this document, particularly displeased by it.
The waterfront remained, for the time being, ours.
Raymond Patriarca died in 1984, which falls just outside the boundary of this entry, but the unravelling of his organisation began in the late 1970s with the FBI investigations that had been building for years, and the effect of that unravelling was felt on Federal Hill well before his death. The buffer that Federal Hill’s insularity had provided, never formal, never acknowledged, simply the practical consequence of two communities with parallel interests in official invisibility, began to thin as Federal Hill’s attention turned inward to its own survival.
We were on our own in a way we had not quite been before. This was not, in itself, new. We had always been on our own in the fundamental sense. But there is a difference between being on your own in a city that is quietly looking the other way and being on your own in a city that is starting to look more carefully at everything, and Providence in the late 1970s was beginning, slowly and reluctantly, to look more carefully at everything.
The FBI will do that to a city. I do not admire the FBI. I admire very few law enforcement organisations and the FBI considerably less than most, for reasons that begin in February 1928 and have not improved with subsequent evidence. But I will say that their sustained attention to Federal Hill in those years had the incidental effect of making everyone in Providence who had reasons to prefer official inattention considerably more careful, and careful, for us, was something we knew how to be.
We had been careful for fifty years. We could be careful for a little longer.
I am writing this in August, and the heat is making me irritable, and I find that irritability clarifies certain things that the more temperate months allow me to soften.
Here is the thing I have been softening for six entries now, the thing underneath the history and the careful observations and the dry remarks about governments and their machinery:
We were disappearing.
Not quickly. Not dramatically. But steadily, in the way of things that are being ground down by the accumulated weight of years and loss and the simple arithmetic of a community that was not replacing itself fast enough to offset what it was losing. The ones who died. The ones who left. The ones who looked at Dagon’s mark in their blood and chose the surface world and its brief bright life over the depth and the dark and the long patience of what we are.
Henryk’s branch of the family was out there somewhere, south of here, living whatever life they had made for themselves in the years since 1950. His children, and their children, carrying the mark in their blood without necessarily knowing what it was or what it meant or why the water called to them the way it did. I had lost the thread of them. This is not something I am proud of. A patriarch who loses the thread of his own family is a patriarch who has failed at the most basic level of his function, and I have had fifty years to sit with that failure and I find it has not become more comfortable with age.
But the rivers were buried and the community was contracting and I was going deeper and the surface world was becoming, year by year, a place I could navigate less and less, and some threads, when you are very old and very tired and the water around you tastes of things it should not taste of, simply slip through your fingers before you notice they are gone.
I noticed eventually. But eventually, in those years, came too late.
– S.Z., Providence, August 2025
