Imagine walking through the city along the wooded bank of a rushing stream.  The morning sun drifts through the leaves, flickering across the current and warming the damp shore.  You hear a whistle overhead and, glancing up, watch a cardinal flash through the branches.   As you walk on, two children glide by on bicycles.  You know you have reached the middle school when you see a group of students assembled along the riverbank for their morning ecology lesson.  Continuing along the trail, you pass an elderly couple gathering dogwood and forsythia.  A breathless jogger runs past, followed by a woman with a bag of groceries.  Peering through a group of cottonwoods, you see an elegant brick mill tower.  For a moment you reflect on the bygone age when the stream you are walking along helped power Providence’s booming textile industry.  Moving on, you approach an open marsh, and your trail becomes a boardwalk. You step into the brilliant sun.  Suddenly, the cattails break into a papery rustle as a flock of red-winged blackbirds rises into the sky.  Looking up, you are for a moment surprised to see the crowded urban landscape so close around you.  

This is the vision for the West River, a small, neglected stream which winds through the North End of Providence from the North Providence border to the lower Moshassuck River.  The West River presents an outstanding opportunity for a multi-purpose greenway which could help serve the recreational, transportation, environmental, and educational needs of the two neighborhoods of the North End.  The river connects many points of interest, including schools, parks, shopping plazas, community centers, and residential neighborhoods.  A greenway along the river would not only offer a safe and convenient route for pedestrian transportation, but it would also reduce the North Side’s shortage of park acreage.  In addition, a greenway would preserve key areas of ecologically significant wetlands that are currently threatened by intrusive development and illegal dumping.  Finally, a greenway along the West River could potentially spur the redevelopment of an adjacent abandoned mill complex, providing an economic boost to the surrounding neighborhoods. 

Besides enhancing the neighborhoods of the North End, the creation of a West River greenway would be a crucial step toward the realization of an even grander vision for a citywide greenway network for Providence.  Although the city has a respectable foundation of several existing and planned greenways, their spatial distribution does not encompass the entire city.  The upper North Side is the only major geographic section of the city that lacks a recreational open space corridor.  Added to the existing Blackstone Boulevard on the East Side, the developing Woonasquatucket River on the West Side, the River Walk downtown, the planned Mashapaug Pond Greenway and East Coast Greenway route on the South Side, and a few other shorter greenways throughout the city, a West River Greenway would complete the framework for a spatially comprehensive greenway infrastructure for Providence.  With this framework in place, the rationale for developing the minor missing linkages between the primary greenways would be compelling.  Ultimately, the completion of a fully interconnected citywide greenways system would be an enormous contribution to the Providence Renaissance, bringing the city closer to “that lofty standard that makes a city great in the eyes of its people, and in the pages of history.”[1]