Friends of India Point Park

IN THE NEWS: PROVIDENCE JOURNAL, Sept. 20, 2004

Park patrons know the ropes at India Point
BY LINDA BORG, Journal Staff Writer

"It's really a people park," says Bob Schacht, a Fox Point resident who was instrumental in gettng India Point Park built three decades ago.

Journal photo / Andrew Dickerman
Children enjoy the new playground yesterday at India Point Park in Providence.

PROVIDENCE -- In the late 1960s, Mary Elizabeth Sharpe saw something precious amid the industrial wasteland along the Providence waterfront.

Beneath the rotting piers and junkyard debris, she saw a jewel of a park where people from Fox Point could picnic, bring their children and walk their dogs. She pressured her cousin, then-Gov. John Chafee, to move the scrapyard to make room for a park. But it wasn't until the railroads decided to sell their sidings that plans for a waterfront park really took hold.

In September 1974, India Point Park was dedicated. Thirty years later, a cross section of the Fox Point community came to the park to hear Pete Seeger sing and to witness the dedication of a mosaic tile mural that depicts the waterfront's past.
"The founders would be thrilled to see what joy people get from being in such a beautiful place," said Peggy Sharpe, whose mother-in-law was Mary Elizabeth. "This is the anchor on the other end of the waterfront."

"It's really a people park," said Bob Schacht, a Fox Point resident who was instrumental in getting the park built. "It's what Frederic Law Olmsted had in mind" when he envisioned building large public spaces in big cities.

The history of India Point is, in many respects, the history of Providence. John Brown established the East India trade, which gave the park its name. Thousands of immigrants arrived here to make Providence their new home. And the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad built freight yards at the site until the Hurricane of '38 washed them away.

Yesterday, young professionals in biking shorts sat next to beret-wearing leftists, who sat next to students with nose piercings. All were listening to a haunting Spanish folk song sung by a reed-thin Seeger, now 85, and his grandson, Tao Rodriguez, who spent 10 years in Nicaragua and shares his family's passion for social justice.

That's the multicultural spirit embodied in the 49-foot ceramic mural created by Mika Seeger (Pete's daughter) and Peter Geisser, two Rhode Island ceramicists. The mural offers a whimsical snapshot of India Point's fabled past: there's a pirate ship and paddleboats, steamships, barges and ferries. Narragansett Electric, with its signature smokestacks, frames one end of the mural; a schooner anchors the other.
Like the park it illustrates, the mural represents the labor of many. Five hundred people, from school children to elderly neighbors, created the 15,000 ceramic pieces that make up the mural, from the tiny blue and green tiles of the river to the brown tiles of the houses along Wickenden Street.

The two artists ran 30 community workshops to teach people how to make the tiles because, as Geisser said, the mural should reflect the ideas and values of the local community. Mika Seeger, who lives in Tiverton, used her own glazes and fired the tiles in her wood-burning kiln.

"The beauty of the process is you get all these wonderful variations in color," Giesser said, pointing to the warm earthy shades of the houses and the soft whites of the sailboats.

Giesser loves the way visitors respond to his work, which is a sensory delight, embedded with mermaids, butterflies, bicycles, even a pirate with a black beard.
As he was putting the mural together, one neighborhood boy said, "Hey mister, where did you buy this thing?"

Giesser said, "We made it."

The next day, the boy came back and said, "I told my friends, 'No one messes with this. This is real.' "

On a summer night, a Latino family was visiting the park. The little girl, wearing a white dress and matching hair ribbons, ran her hands along the rough mosaic, patting each of the tiny figures.

Giesser said it was if she were saying, "Hello, I'm here."