SoBo, NoBo, NewBo

Thirty years ago, when I first moved to Newport, the whole Broadway neighborhood was so rundown and un-hip it virtually constituted another universe. Think downtown Fall River. Think Central Falls. Unless you needed to go to Newport City Hall on some mind-blowingly boring errand, there just wasn’t much point in getting out of the car. Of course if for some reason you didn’t have a car – say you were visiting from out of town – chances were you would probably have needed to utilize Broadway’s derelict & boarded up Bonanza Bus Terminal once in a while. There you could drop your bags, slump wearily onto a filthy plastic seat, and enjoy a cigarette amidst the exhaust fumes of the occasional bus while you watched a slow parade of defeated-looking fellow travelers – a number of whom could be counted upon to be drinking deeply from crumpled brown paper bags - shuffle by you in order to make use of the public restrooms.

For those of us who lived in town and did have transportation, there was less reason to go. Once in a blue moon it might have been necessary to stop at the Salvation Army to donate no-longer-wearable clothes. If you had the kind of job that required you to wear canvas overalls and steel-toed work boots, perhaps periodically you would have gone to Carellas’ Shoe Store to re-outfit yourself. If were hung over and not in the mood to run into anyone you knew at lunch, you could always join the municipal work crews for a burger and a bag of chips at the Star Lunch counter, an establishment whose customer base seemed to consist almost entirely of men, ardent devotees of anonymity and heavy smokers all. Gas was still being pumped at the Gulf station. Litter swirled around on the sidewalks like tumbleweed on the desert, at least until midwinter, when the dirty unshoveled snow held it firmly in place until spring. When a small, unimposing Chinese restaurant finally opened up across the street from City Hall in the mid-late 1980s, it was NEWS. The unspoken consensus on the part of the locals was that the modest but clean Dragon Express added some much needed tone to the neighborhood.

That was the neighborhood. Grimly utilitarian, a Flint Michigan of the soul, the kind of place that could throw you into an existential funk faster than a Bob Dylan tune. Which is why Broadway’s SoBo, NoBo, NewBo transformation of the past decade or so astounds me still. The turning point was when they tore down the old bus station and built the new police station in its stead. Then the Salvation Army store caught fire, burning to the ground, damaging neighboring businesses and emptying surrounding storefronts. In came the pioneers. First was the funky, grunge-inspired Salvation Café, which set the eclectic/alternative standard for much of what followed. Tucker’s Bistro. Norey’s Café. Island Arts. Portobellos. Pop. Spark. Freaky Burrito. Pour Judgement. Artists began to hang around, then moved in. Real estate started happening, buildings were re-habbed, condo conversions took place. Little white twinkle lights started going up in the trees. Restaurants started putting in window boxes and setting tables on the sidewalks.
It was crazy!

All of a sudden, this moribund neighborhood was exploding with youthful energy. Who were these people? Newporters. People – many of them just kids - with ideas & business plans & tons of energy who were attracted by cheap rents and undeterred by the prospect of failure, people who actually found the depressing nature of the area exhilaratingly authentic and used it as the raw material for something altogether different, something distinctly alive. It’s more than just urban renewal, it’s psychic energy in action; Broadway has become Newport’s collective response to a downtown core that has grown maniacally tourist-centered and more and more inhospitable to its year-round residents. What these businesses have given us isn’t so much goods and services as a town itself, a town that tourism almost took away. And what they’ve made is really, when you get right down to it, not a commercial district at all but an anti-wharf, a secession from the prevailing mind-set: a place for, by and about locals.