by Mike Stanton
Artin Coloian, the other aide who had helped bail Cianci out of his financial mess, also had a reputation as a ladies’ man. After one affair went bad, the spurned woman threw a drink in his face at City Hall. Unlike Corrente, however, Coloian was young and single, favoring designer suits and fine cigars. Once, when he was working as a junior aide to Senator John Chafee, Coloian bought a Ford Taurus, drove up to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to the Harvard University bookstore, and purchased a Harvard sticker for the window. Josh Fenton, who also worked for Chafee, recalled Coloian’s telling him that he hoped the sticker would impress chicks.
Coloian had grown up poor, a member of Providence’s sizeable Armenian community. In his teens he hustled odd jobs and painted houses, saved his money, and started buying and selling cars and real estate. His love of politics brought him under the wing of successful businessmen who helped him along. His involvement in the city’s Republican party led him to a job in Senator Chafee’s Providence office and, later, to City Hall.
Coloian, who was in his late twenties, became a favorite of Cianci, who had addressed his graduating class at Mount Pleasant High School in 1982. Unlike the mayor’s more senior aides, he often accompanied Cianci on his late-night rambles through Providence’s bar scene. He handled a variety of chores for his boss, including arranging private fund-raising parties. Wendy Materna recalled Coloian as someone who “made himself useful . . . Artie would say, ‘Boss, I’ll handle that.’ Once, when I got a traffic ticket, Buddy said, ‘Artie will handle that for you.’ ”
Corrente and Coloian also had various moonlighting enterprises.
Corrente still did some accounting for old clients, including a tow-truck operator who got onto the lucrative police tow list. He also owned real estate, including property that he leased to a city agency and a used-car lot that he rented to some former Public Works employees with mob ties who had been convicted of corruption stemming from Buddy I.
Coloian, who had recently become a lawyer, did some immigration law on the side. He continued to dabble in real estate, including apartments that he offered for rent to city employees. And he bought some billboards, which councilman Josh Fenton had previously sought to tax to raise city revenues.
Corrente and Coloian didn’t like or trust each other. Though on the surface they treated each other politely, behind each other’s back they played sneaky games, trying to curry favor with the mayor. Corrente once told someone that he did certain things for the mayor, and Coloian did the things that Corrente wouldn’t do.
Both men undercut Joe Almagno, the gentlemanly chief of staff who had been recruited to lend integrity to the Cianci administration. Corrente would argue with Almagno about patronage and promotions. Coloian would bring up decisions that he knew Almagno had already made in front of the mayor, who would get angry that he hadn’t been consulted. Although Almagno continued to sit next to the mayor at directors’ meetings, Cianci started skipping over him and going right to Corrente.
In the summer of 1993 Almagno resigned. As part of the ensuing staff shake-up, Corrente emerged as the clear number-two man at City Hall. Coloian was promoted to executive assistant; his salary jumped from forty-four thousand to sixty thousand dollars.
Publicly, Almagno said all the right things about pursuing other options and departing on good terms. Privately, he told someone close to him, “I’m getting out before this all blows up.”
FIRE IS A SYMBOL of life and rebirth, death and destruction. It illuminates and it burns. In the mid-1990s, fire became the defining element of Buddy Cianci and his reborn Renaissance City.
On soft summer nights, the fragrant smell of wood smoke curled around the city’s historic architecture. Down the center of the Providence River a line of ethereal fires bloomed in iron braziers on pillars. Music, from opera to New Age, crackled through the air along with the sparks lifting toward heaven. Venetian gondolas plied the waters.
This was WaterFire, a soaring, meditative experience that attracted international attention and drew thousands to the waterfront. The creation of local artist and sculptor Barnaby Evans, WaterFire was hailed by publications ranging from Granta to a Brazilian magazine as one of the must-see events in the United States.
A Berkeley, California, native who went to Brown, Evans was intrigued by the duality of water and fire, their lifegiving aspects and their mutually destructive qualities—water extinguishes fire, fire evaporates water. He thought of ways to fuse the two into something that would attract people downtown at night, to enjoy the newly opened Waterplace Park. He hated how the city emptied after dark, leaving behind “a scary, desolate feeling.” Evans wanted to fill the darkness with hope. Then he had it: beacon fires reflected in the waters, summoning people back to Providence.
WaterFire debuted on New Year’s Eve in 1994, as part of Providence’s First Night celebration. It was such a hit that Evans, with Cianci’s enthusiastic backing, brought it back for good in the summer of 1996.
Cianci could often be found where the crowds were thickest, holding court at an outdoor table at Cafe Nuovo, a chic restaurant in the new brick-and-glass office tower rising from a triangle of land where the ancient Moshassuck and Woonasquatucket Rivers flowed into the Providence River on its journey to Narragansett Bay and the sea.
WaterFire showcased the New Providence, a trendy city to live in and visit with its vibrant arts scene, world-class restaurants, and Old World flavor. Providence became the paradigm for the New American city, defined by culture rather than manufacturing. The comeback city and the comeback mayor were profiled in national publications. Cianci spoke at urban-planning seminars from Wilmington, Delaware, to San Diego. He attributed Providence’s turnaround to cheerleading and the city’s strong-mayor form of government, which enabled him to cut through red tape and exert real leadership.
“You have to get people to join in the mission,” he said. “You have to get them to drink the Kool-Aid.”
Cianci became the messianic mayor, an urban Moses who had moved rivers.
The story of Providence’s turnaround is actually more complicated. It offers a case study in urban planning and how a city can reinvent itself by focusing on its heritage—in Providence’s case, as a historic seafaring power.
When architect Bill Warner first suggested the daring plan to move the rivers, in 1983, skeptics dismissed it as the “Moses plan.” But through a fortuitous series of breaks and a heroic partnership of architects, engineers, government bureaucrats, business leaders, and elected city, state, and federal officials, the Moses plan came to pass. Cianci had endorsed the idea in its early stages, before leaving office in 1984. For too long the city had turned its back on its greatest natural resource, its waterfront, which had grown seedy, weedy, and filthy.
The Moses plan flowed from another ambitious idea that had been kicking around since the early 1900s—to move the railroad tracks that bisected Providence. For nearly a hundred years, the tracks, elevated on an earthen embankment known as the Chinese Wall, had cut off downtown from the State House, half a mile away. The land in between had become an unsightly jungle of freight yards and parking lots.
In colonial times, this wasteland had been the Great Salt Cove that Roger Williams saw when he paddled up the Providence River. He founded his colony near its shore. Over time, as seafaring gave way to manufacturing, the cove was filled in around the edges for wharves and factories. In the latter part of the nineteenth century the cove was taken over and eventually filled in completely by the rapacious railroads. Older, affluent East Siders, who remembered the elliptical Cove Basin with its elegant promenades and waterfront festivals, had fought the railroads. Mayor Thomas Doyle, who objected to the Chinese Wall, called the cove “holy water.” The city’s superintendent of health said that a large body of tidewater was healthy because it helped circulate fresh air through an increasingly foul factory city; filling in the cove, he warned, would literally make Providence sick. But the cove, neglected by the railroads, had grown rank with industria
l waste and sewage. The railroad interests controlled the City Council, which voted to turn over the cove lands. The last of the cove was filled in 1892.
Within a few decades, various lone visionaries began proposing different ideas to move the railroad tracks and rejuvenate the old cove lands. One utopian plan called for bringing back the cove and building a new City Hall on a manmade island in the center, reached by meandering footpaths. During the Great Depression, a local radio broadcast noted that the city’s founders had passed up an opportunity to lay out Providence like Venice, with water highways “where long, swan-like gondolas might have glided.” But the broadcast praised industry, concluding, “If our forefathers did not conceive the creation of a little Venice, they did make a little Rome out of a marsh, a lagoon and seven surrounding hills.”
Around 1910, a Canadian railroad executive, Charles Melville Hays, envisioned Providence as the eastern terminus of a new transcontinental rail system that would challenge the monopoly of Wall Street tycoon J. Pierpoint Morgan. Providence’s leaders, eager to compete with Boston, feted Hays with sumptuous dinners at the University Club and lined up two million dollars in public financing for the project, which would have created a new rail line and a new port. But then Hays took a business trip to London. When it was time to return home, he refused to sail on a ship owned by a Morgan syndicate. Instead, in April 1912, Hays booked passage on the maiden voyage of the Titanic. The Providence plan went down with him.
After World War II, rail-relocation plans were revived in earnest, but a lack of financing delayed their implementation. When Joseph Doorley, Jr., became mayor in 1965, he opposed the move, arguing that the money would be better spent on rebuilding the neighborhoods. When Buddy Cianci ran against Doorley in 1974, he trumpeted a plan by a Rhode Island School of Design professor to move the railroad tracks and uncover the river. But once again there was no money.
The breakthrough finally came in 1978. The Federal Railroad Administration had begun a five-year, $1.5 billion upgrade of rail service from Boston to Washington. Ron Marsella, executive director of the Providence Foundation, a nonprofit Chamber of Commerce affiliate, wondered if the federal government would pay to move the tracks in Providence instead of simply rebuilding them. His idea quickly caught on with U.S. senator Claiborne Pell, a railroad buff. Pell called the governor, Joe Garrahy, who was also enthusiastic. Bruce Sundlun, the president of the Providence Foundation, took the idea to Cianci, whose response was, “Hey, if the federal government’s going to pay for it, let’s do it.” With the key local leaders on board, Pell lobbied in Washington and won approval.
Cianci and Garrahy also lobbied Washington, as they prepared to run against each other for governor in 1980. Their political rivalry created the comical scene of their aides flying home together from meetings in Washington, then rushing to City Hall and the State House to see whose boss could get out the first press release.
Leaders realized that they needed a vehicle to shepherd the project, one that would be free of politics so that it could take a longer view. For all of Cianci’s enthusiasm, one former aide said, he was skeptical at first because of the long time frame. “In this business, two years is long-term,” Cianci said.
In 1980 the quasi-public Capital Center Commission was created, its members appointed by the governor, the mayor, and the Providence Foundation. “The project had to survive the politicians of the time,” Cianci recalled in the 1990s. “Little did I know that I’d still be here.”
The city committed $4.6 million to the project; the federal government paid 70 percent of the overall $100 million price tag. Cianci presided over the groundbreaking on February 16, 1983—one month before he assaulted Raymond DeLeo.
That same month, the Providence Foundation’s new executive director, Kenneth Orenstein, panicked when he reviewed the plans and saw that Capital Center engineers had proposed paving over the entire Providence River to create a new road. The idea was not new. In 1946, a city planner had suggested putting a highway over the river so that “the foul open sewer, which runs through the heart of the city, will finally be subjugated.”
Much of the Providence River had already been “subjugated.” The Crawford Street Bridge, which spanned a 1,147-foot stretch of the river behind the post office, was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s widest bridge. Behind it was Suicide Circle, a congested rotary at the base of College Hill where cars jockeyed around the tall stone pillar of the World War I memorial.
Orenstein called Warner, who was studying potential waterfront uses for the Providence Foundation. “Look,” he said, “you’ve got to come up with something. They’re going to pave the river.”
Warner, who had moved out of Providence after realizing that spring had come and gone without his noticing, sat by the woodstove on his eighty-acre farm in southern Rhode Island one rainy Sunday afternoon. In a few hours he sketched out a plan to uncover the river and replace the wide bridge with a series of smaller, graceful bridges. Later, refining the plan, Warner moved the river out from underneath the post office, placed the confluence of the three rivers one hundred yards to the east, eliminated Suicide Circle, and removed the Crawford Street Bridge. It looked good on paper.
In the ensuing months, Orenstein and Warner peddled the plan to all of the key players. Some were resistant. One city planner threatened to walk out of a meeting if Orenstein didn’t put the plan back in his briefcase. This is when someone derisively dubbed it the Moses plan.
Cianci grasped the potential, even if the plan didn’t come at the best time for him personally. In the spring of 1983, minutes before he was scheduled to meet with Orenstein and state officials to hear the plan, Cianci received word that he was going to be indicted for assaulting DeLeo. The mayor went ahead with the meeting but seemed clearly agitated. Although the planners had seen him lose his temper before, Cianci seemed angrier than usual. Unaware of the impending DeLeo indictment, Orenstein listened as the mayor shouted that the state had been keeping him out of the loop on the river plan.
Finally Cianci calmed down and embraced the idea. That fall, he and Governor Garrahy announced a feasibility study of the river plan. Recognizing its revolutionary nature, the National Endowment for the Arts also provided a grant.
The rest of the Moses plan was history—but not Buddy Cianci’s history. Their paths diverged as the mayor went into exile, then, like the rechanneled rivers, flowed together again in the early 1990s. By then, the project, which cost forty million dollars, most of it paid for by the federal government, was nearly complete. As the crowning touch, designers created WaterPlace Park, a one-acre pond where the old Cove Basin had been. The pond, a bulge in the Woonasquatucket River, was graced by a concrete amphitheater and encircled by promenades that continued along the newly exposed rivers.
In the summer of 1994, WaterPlace Park was dedicated with the release of one hundred white doves. While most of the politicians and dignitaries arrived by land, Cianci came by sea. He and Wendy Materna motored up the Providence River from India Point in the Nicola’s inflatable dinghy and circled the pond to the cheers of construction workers.
Materna smiled with a practiced ease as the cameras clicked. For the past four years, she had been the unofficial first lady of Providence, a lithe, graceful presence by the mayor’s side. She had danced with him at the policemen’s ball and subbed for him when he was late for speaking engagements. She had smashed a bottle of champagne to christen a new fireboat. She had suggested that he bottle his own marinara sauce and sell it for charity, like Paul Newman, and even gave him her recipe to use.
Cianci’s first few years back in office had been good ones, bathed in the glow of redemption. On summer weekends, he and Materna would hole up on his boat, in Newport or Block Island. He would arrive at the dock in Newport at 10:30 on Friday night and Materna would have everything prepared: music, candlelight, chilled cocktails. Late at night, the mayor would pace the docks and walk their cocker spaniels, Tucker and Belle, unwind
ing and enjoying the solitude. Sunday evenings, after the tourists had departed, were the best, as he savored the peace and the sunset over Narragansett Bay. But as Cianci’s term wore on, there were more and more weekends that he would head back to Providence early to attend one event or another.
Materna had also put up with Cianci’s late nights and his childish temper, his drinking and his infidelities. She had caught him cheating on her many times, she said, and also suffered his verbal abuse and inconsiderate behavior. She remembered screaming at him in his house on Power Street one night at 4 A.M., so angry that she started throwing things. She had also worked to build a relationship with Cianci’s teenage daughter, Nicole, but it wasn’t always easy.
Some of the mayor’s aides likened Materna to Henry Higgins, trying to teach Cianci’s Eliza Doolittle the social graces and smooth over the rough edges. One friend of Cianci’s said that she gave him structure. Materna joked that wasn’t in the back room with the “old boys.” She was “Wendy the WASP, the blond doll he’d pull off the shelf to give him legitimacy.” He called her Gwendolyn.
She had seen how insecure Cianci could be behind the public bravado, and the conflicted nature of his heritage—the rich boy in Silver Lake, the Italian kid at Moses Brown. One time they went into the Squantum Club, a private old-boys club in East Providence, where the father of one of Cianci’s Moses Brown chums, another Italian-American, hugged Cianci and said, “Who’d have thunk it—a little guinea boy like you growing up to be mayor.”
Mortified, Materna looked at Cianci. After the man walked away, Cianci said to her, “You don’t get it, do you?” The man had meant it as a compliment.
Buddy’s election night proposal had become a running joke. He had proposed “many times” since then and even given her a few rings, she said, but he never followed through. He would tell Wendy not to worry, but she wanted more in her life. She was thirty-eight—Buddy was fifty-three—and she wanted to get married and have a family. Wendy’s voyage up the Providence River with Buddy that summer day in 1994 was in many ways reflective of their nine years together—buoyant and exciting, with tricky currents beneath. Although she loved him, she also felt that there was “too much water under the bridge—so much heartache.”