Welcome to the Great Salt Cove Atlas, an open educational resource created by students in Rhode Island School of Design’s Landscape Architecture History & Theory seminar during the Fall 2024 semester. This Atlas explores the many iterations and transformations of the Great Salt Cove, a tidal estuary that once spanned much of Downtown Providence, Rhode Island, the ancestral homelands of the Narragansett, Niantic, and Wampanoag peoples.
Like many industrializing cities moving towards an idea of progress that precluded an indeterminate, brackish landscape at its center, Providence gradually erased the Cove—both physically and from the public imagination. Over time, the Cove’s boundaries were demarcated, its edges hardened, its form regularized into a perfect sphere, its basin then wrapped by a public promenade, and its tributaries (the Moshassuck and Woonasquatucket) severed before it was entirely filled in. During the 1990s River Relocation project, a tiny segment was “restored” as Waterplace Park. As you navigate this website, tracing the naming practices—from the ‘Great Salt Cove’ to the ‘Cove Basin,’ and later ‘Covelands’ or ‘Wastelands’—offers a glimpse into how this space was valued and reshaped over time.
Despite the Great Salt Cove’s centrality as a lifeway for Indigenous populations and later as an anchor for colonial development, secondary sources exploring how and why this landscape—what former RISD architecture professor Michael Holleran called the “most reworked piece of land in Rhode Island and among the most reworked in North America”—was transformed are limited. Holleran’s 1990 essay, which examines the Cove’s three major metamorphoses during the mid to late 19th century, served as a foundational text for our class, one that we sought to expand upon. Beyond seeking to better understand the cultural narratives and power dynamics driving these landscape changes, we aimed to center perspectives typically excluded from the historical canon, including those from displaced mixed-race neighborhoods like Snowtown and Indigenous histories that we now recognize as woven into every aspect of Providence’s spatial evolution—both past and present.
This project charts our work over the semester. We began by annotating historic maps, revealing how the Cove has been represented over time and identifying the priorities embedded in these depictions. Building from our critiques of these maps, we traced the evolution of the Cove by developing a collaborative map that grew week by week on our studio wall. We concluded the semester by coalescing the final projects, that emerged from our collaborative mapping process, in the Atlas Field Guide. Alongside these, students wrote blog posts reflecting on the weekly readings, and applying these theoretical lenses directly to Providence and the Great Salt Cove.
