Unlike the honorific remembrances to India Point's prosperous past as a seaport, there are few material symbols left from its days as a metal scrapyard. The introductory sign at the South end of the 1-95 bridge notes simply this park replaced the former scrapyard. The mid-20th century is a time that Providence often wants to forget. The 1930s - 1970s were a time of depression for Providence, coming in between prosperous days of trade and the financial and built renaissance of the late 20th century. India Point Park is an important part of this renewal, and, as such, memorializes the scrapyard days of the area in subtler, quieter ways.
Perhaps the only explicit remains of the scrapyard lie quietly in a circle just East of the bridge. The image below is of two metal, gear-like machinery remnants from the scrapyard days of India Point Park. According to Frances Betancourt's paper, the park designer deliberately left these and two other large machine pieces as a sculptural element of the park and reminder of a less prosperous time in its past. The pieces are rusted, scraped up, and even bent and broken in some places, showing a lack of care from the depression days of India Point. These machine pieces remind passersby of a time when India Point was not a place of enjoyment and recreation, but a place of noisy, dirty, machine-driven work.
Though India Point has been transformed from a forgotten scrapyard to a vibrant park, modern artifacts of depression and insecurity are clearly visible. The park has a serious litter problem, despite the numerous and beautiful garbage cans. The overwhelming amount of plastic drink bottles discarded here reminded me just how long some of humanity's products stay around and affect our landscapes, even after we've tried to change the landscape's identity. The below images are examples of recent memory-deposits in the park.
Though the snowpiles of Winter 2008-9 are mostly gone, lines of garbage mark their footprints. This garbage - artifacts, really - tell us stories of recreation (both illicit and childlike), of hygiene and the body, of food and drink, of human-animal interactions and many more. Though they are rarely explicit in their messages, discarded things serve as a memory of personal use and small-scale inhabitance of an area. A brief and strictly visual survey of one small garbage pile revealed the following artifacts:
*A fishing lure
*Cigarette butts
*Crushed Pens
*Used syringe
*Used tampons
*Crushed Lego
*Bike tire reflector
*Small bone - a chicken's?
*Animal excrement - a dog's?
*Charred wood
*Small emptied bottles of alcohol
*Small emptied bottle of conditioner
*Drinking straws
*Rope
*Used lighter
*Tin foil
*Styrofoam
*Numerous discarded drink bottles and drink bottle caps
Some individuals have claimed direct ownership of India Point Park by physically marking the park and constructing short-term dwellings on it. Graffiti and temporary homes remain as manifestations of this human-landscape interaction:
Back to India Point Park: Memory
