Have a ‘Gansett

Our first stop in Providence was High Spirits Liquors. With only an hour to spare before every alcohol vendor in New England locked its doors, Sweeney and I drifted from the interstate to a strip mall parking lot wedged beneath University Heights. Inside it was air-conditioned, brightly lit, and entirely emptied of customers. Five eager twenty-somethings looked up from the registers, and a muscular, bearded clerk stepped forward as we made our way to the fridge. “I’d love to make a recommendation.” How could we say no? He was filled with equal parts propriety and desperation for human contact, a condition I eventually came to recognize as general among Rhode Islanders.

Sweeney and I’d spent that hot afternoon inching through Connecticut in a car crammed with all my worldly goods. Six days earlier he’d picked me up in Brooklyn on the tail of my college graduation, and then we’d continued on to Providence where he’d been studying at Brown for the last year. “Isn’t this strange?” I’d repeated throughout that long drive, toeing the snack wrappers below the dashboard, watching the landscape change from robust elms and oaks to the dense and delicate fauna of New England. Isn’t this strange, isn’t this strange? “I can’t picture what my life will be like here.”

Sweeney’d laugh, clapping my shoulder. “You don’t even like it here.”

It was true that I hadn’t at first. I was dismayed to wake up in his new apartment the previous fall to a view of the highway and a giant shopping mall just beyond his kitchen window. I’d taken a walk across the interstate looking for a coffee shop or café, unable to find anything, getting lost among the strangely dormant government buildings, the Westin Hotel, and The Cheesecake Factory. There weren’t any clusters of commerce in sight until I’d scaled College Hill only to find an Au Bon Pain. There were no street signs, grids, and almost no passers-by to ask directions, leaving me hot and agitated and wondering how such an apocryphal city could have been so poorly planned.

It’s just as well that my arrival as a resident involved as little planning as the city itself. While the liquor store clerk trailed us through the aisles, my mind wandered to the heap of unboxed and haphazard belongings scattered inside the car. “There’s a reason that one’s so cheap,” the clerk warned as Sweeney eyed a Massachusetts honey beer. What about Saranac? Long Trail? The pomp and circumstance of this sale was strange to me. I was used to the cupboard-like liquor stores of Brooklyn, which, between plates of bullet-proof glass, the proprietor rolled your selection from under a security window, and which were sometimes, albeit illegally, opened all night. There was often accompanied by the smell of dog, a colony of flies thrumming against fluorescent bulbs, and a language barrier.

In the end we settled on a six-pack of Narragansett tallboys, which is what we’d come there for in the first place. I clutched the icy red-and-silver cans to my chest. As we exited, the staff looked on distantly, dreading the moment they’d have to sweep up box flaps, dust keyboards, and attend to all the small, droning tasks reserved for an under-used service industry.

Narragansett Brewery harkens the story of Providence’s boom-town days which, by nature, is tragic. Though the plant was based up the road in Cranston, its initial operations generated county-wide work for everyone from blacksmiths to railroad men, and its lithographs were ubiquitous around the city’s bars, brick facades, and general stores. From the late-1800s to the 1960s (interrupted only by Prohibition), Narragansett beer was the number one selling brand in New England. And it was a source of such regional pride that even its factory workers were encouraged to guzzle between their shifts. They provided employment for WWII vets, pioneered the flip-top can, and were generally consumed and adored by citizens with familial-like fervor.

The old slogan, “Hi, Neighbor, have a ‘Gansett!,’” and the late mascot, Chief Gansett, testify not only to this mid-century fondness, but also to the advertisers’ 1960s field day, producing campaigns as enduring and appealing as Coke’s. But when the brewery opted to expand in the 70s, they handed the reins to Falstaff and outsourced to a strange and distant plant in Indiana. Consumers complained that the lager had become “watery.” Competitors said the kids don’t want to drink “their father’s beer.” The hometown vibe and economic support that had made the brew so meaningful to citizens vanished. Narragansett lost its twenty-year sponsor slot for the Red Sox, announcers stopped plugging in their name at games, and the stadiums roared for Budweiser. The forty-two acre Cranston plant shut down in 1981, leaving thousands of employees and subcontractors, many of whom had worked for Naragansett all their lives, prospectless.

This sad date introduces other, perhaps tangentially, but wholly related items: that same year, many of the old Providence rail lines were bought up by P&W, leaving a bridge and several of the city’s extensive tracks to rust away over the Seekonk River. And just two years after that, the Narragansett Indian nation, the brewery’s namesake, gained federal recognition for the first time and were given control of 1,800 acres of land outside of Charlestown, Rhode Island. And it happened nearly three hundred years after Providence’s founder, Roger Williams, who’d been kicked out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony for his radical views on worship, had forged famously fraternal relations with the Indians, only to have all his work undone by the King Phillips massacres. Then the Revolutionary War happened. The Northeast Corridor became the biggest steel, textiles and silver producer in the world. Brown and RISD took root. Providence built the first elevated track in New England, the first shopping mall in America, the most opulent capitol building to date. The mob moved in. It was the “beehive of industry,” double the population it is now. Pregnant women were gunning cans of Narragansett. And then all of this crumbled away when someone had the bright idea of turning America into a service economy.

After leaving High Spirits, Sweeney and I drove toward Smith Hill, the enclave where he lived. The neighborhood is cut deeply away from the university district by I-95 and the glorious Greek-Revival statehouse, a great imperial thing that disrupts and silences all of downtown. Rolling green lawn flanks either side of the building for a quarter mile, and the marble dome gleams like the Death Star. Sweeney’s street was quiet, lined with beautifully renovated Victorian homes and totally without pedestrians. We parked and started the tedious haul from the car up his narrow, Italianate staircase, sweating and cursing. Afterward, we popped our Narragansetts and drank them on folding chairs in the backyard.

“Did you see this?” I said, pointing to the clam bake recipe printed on the side.

While looking for an apartment, I met a landlord who owned half the real estate around Holden Street in Smith Hill. In 1980 he’d moved into the second floor of an old carriage house while studying architecture at RISD and several years later bought the building. “I thought, just give me ten years, and this neighborhood will be booming.” So he went forth, purchasing and renovating many of the beautiful, fin-de-siecle governor’s homes that took up most of this bucolic road bordering the interstate. Come the early-90s, there still wasn’t much interest. “Give me another ten years, I thought.” But the early 00s came and went, and here he is today, with a slew of pristine properties, reliable tenants, but none of the enormous shifts he’d watched happen in Boston, New York, and even Baltimore took place. He’s beginning to imagine it might always be this way.

I settled into a third floor flat that cost half of what my bedroom in Brooklyn did. From my window, I could see an old foundry that had been renovated into high end condos called The Foundry. Sitting in the front room one evening, the windows thrown open, I thought I could get used to the cheap beer, low rent, quiet nights. I felt a great deal of kinship with this city that often returns to square one, braced by its own ancient limits. The roar of the highway competed with the vacuum-like silence of that old, un-peopled neighborhood. I felt the strangeness of the city magnifying my feeling of mental claustrophobia that had been developing since leaving school. Because I couldn’t explain it, this terribly difficult transition and this apparently empty town. I thought, this must be what it felt like to wake up in the future, my future. It’s akin to walking along the edge of a canyon; looking into outer space; waking up on an unknown interstate, wrapped in a blanket. Everyone talks about this post-college warpzone. It’s uncomfortable but exciting. It’s hard to be excited when uncomfortable. Things work out. Forces conspire in your favor. You grow older. That’s the story. Your past become less clear. Your environment must be reinvented in the image of your pursuits. You must rely on the myths and parables you memorized as a child. Do you remember any?

In 2005, a young Rhode Island lifer and a board of investors resurrected Narragansett Brewing, bringing it back into New England’s boutique beer market. They even brought on one of the old brewmasters from way back to keep original quality standards in check. And for the first time in nearly thirty years, bars around the city and across the state started serving it on tap. And although it’s brewed in Rochester, there was a surge of local pride upon its reintroduction. People want something to believe in, a tribe, a legacy, a logo. The cans look like they did in 1960 because the advertisers from that era really knew what captured our hearts (with ill-intentions or not). And Americans are hungry, perhaps hungrier than ever, to represent.

« Read more from Issue 4: Street Level

About Adrian Shirk

Adrian Shirk was born in the now-defunct maternity ward at St. Vincents Hospital on an important national holiday. She’s a founding member of, and fiction editor for, The Corresponding Society, and its associated journal, Correspondence. Her work is forthcoming in Owl Eye Review and Wilder Quarterly. A graduate of Pratt Institute’s Writing Program, she’s most famous for her role in the 1971 Sistergate takeover of an abandoned 5th Avenue tenement building.