The Gazette recommends that Waterman Street be renamed Mixed Commercial Rssixential Street.

The street carries a family's name. One of them widened and straightened it, and his house, at 108–110, came down in the last days of August. What replaces it is described in the city's filings as a five-story mixed-use building with ground-floor retail, which is the same thing that replaced 116 Waterman and 382 Brook. The name should follow the use. The spelling is correct.

The Record

Rufus Waterman built the double house in 1877. He ran the iron business Mason & Waterman, directed the Providence Tool Company, was president of the Exchange Bank, was a trustee of Swan Point Cemetery and of other people's estates, and originated the plan for Blackstone Boulevard. His obituary in the Evening Bulletin of June 2, 1896 credits him with starting the movement to widen and straighten the street the house stood on.

The house did what houses on that hill do. It became apartments. A doctor's office was added in 1944, aluminum siding in 1961, storefronts cut into the basement around 1971. At the end it was a store with six apartments, two to a floor.

In September 2023 the city's preservation planner wrote a memorandum for the City Plan Commission. It says the building is a contributing structure to the College Hill National Historic Landmark District, and in the next breath that it is "not located within a City of Providence local historic district, which means that there is no regulation that prevents demolition." The national designation is a description. The local one is a rule. The house had the description.

The memo asked for something anyway: that the owner assemble "a history of the property, elevation drawings, floorplans, exterior and interior photos" and give the package to the state preservation commission and the City Archives, as remediation. The City Plan Commission made it a condition of its approval.

The demolition permit was issued in August of this year. The building came down in the last days of August; the notice was a photograph. The filings describe the replacement as five stories, mixed use, retail below, and give the number of apartments as twenty-six in one document and thirty-five in another.

Whether the archival package was ever assembled is not stated in anything this paper could find. If it exists, it is the only record of the house that is not a photograph of it being gone.