I know that Pawtucket like Westerly RI has been designated as a city for the arts. Creative expression is welcomed in Pawtucket and artists are encouraged to move here and inhabit one of the spaces as a studio -home that are available in various revitalized and rehabbed mills. The annual Pawtucket Arts Festival held in the month of September also testifies to the prominence of the arts here.
But what about the creative space of the city itself? I know that a certain percentage of money is set aside for public art. How have those funds been used and where is the public art that has been created and funded located in the city?
We need an updated Creative Arts in Pawtucket Map. What about the encouragement of the beauty of nature--gardens and plantings and vistas designed to show the art of horticulture that can make this a Garden City,
How can we suggest that property owners or tenants be rewarded for creating artistic front yard gardens in this densely populated city?
I would suggest a variety of possibilities.
1.Improve the canopy of the city by increasing the number of trees planted along the roadsides. The cherry trees planted downtown could be expanded to include many blossoming trees that would add to the beauty of the Springtime streets and the fragrance of the air.
2. Create a new garden contest to see which houses have the most creative and inviting Door Yard gardens. Recall Whitman's lovely phrase "When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed." The city could ask for volunteers or could encourage students in junior high and high schools to help to educate home owners or tenants about the planting and upkeep of low maintenance gardens that use perennials and shrubs as their backbone.
3 AS PRETTY AS PAWTUCKET--create a campaign and a new slogan to promote the idea of the possible loveliness of Pawtucket.
FLOWERS IN THE BUCKET?
4. Learn from other cities and even other cultures. What is a family cottage garden like in England or Ireland or Portugal, Italy or Spain or the Azores or Haiti or Quebec --to name just a few cultural models that could be explored. Many Pawtucket residents come from those cultures and making little gardens in that cultural style could help to restore a visual and living link to them. Most of all it would restore pride.
5, FULLY RESTORE AND RE-IMAGINE The MARCONI GARDENS in Slater Park. This could become a good teaching example and source of inspiration to all local gardeners. It could also be a site used for instruction in such areas and gardening skills as planting, design of a habitats for birds and butterflies, and pruning to shape bushes. And newly weds could take photos there.
6 Use FLOWERS AND PLANTINGS TO IMPROVE CEMETERIES AND REMEMBER Those who have gone before us Each year in December I am astonished and instructed by the display of enthusiasm and devotion that Pawtucket residents show to honoring their dead by name.
They decorate a parade of Small Xmas trees that they are assigned in Slater park. The looks of delight that I see there are really very moving.
It is like Pawtucket's version of COCO and really the song REMEMBER ME should be playing. This Xmas commemoration is already in place and could be extended in ways throughout the cemeteries. We could enlist the help of Ken Postle and his Boy Scouts and could help people to see such cemeteries as Mineral Spring and Oak Grove and even Old Saint Mary's and Riverside as gardens.(this is just a partial list)
These are just some ideas and a vision of the possibilities --need to see the beauty that is still here and enhance it.
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