Collier Park Point Reopens After Months of Closure

Collier Park Point Reopens After Months of Closure

 

One of Providence’s best parks, Collier Point Park, has finally reopened after months of a lockdown.

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The park was vandalized in early May, and the facility was closed after damage to the electrical systems.

Collier is neither owned by the City of Providence nor the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management; it is owned by Lotus Infrastructure Partners, which operates the nearby natural gas-fired Manchester Street Generating Station. 

The power plant and the park have been traded between energy companies and hedge funds in recent years.

In 2022, a GoLocal feature on the park by architecture critic Will Morgan of the unique park.

Centrally located but a little difficult to access, Collier Park is a narrow six-acre piece of land wedged between the traffic of Allens Avenue and the shoreline of Narragansett Bay. Aside from the boaters who use its launching ramp and fisherman who cast off from its piers, the park is an undiscovered Providence treasure, hidden beneath the spaghetti junction of interstate highways, tainted by oil drums and scrap yards. Nevertheless, the 1996 park symbolizes the gritty history of the city’s maritime and industrial past, and is well worth exploring.

 

 

William Warner, planner and landscape architect as well as one of the design gurus of the city’s waterside renaissance, capitalized on the rawness of the place. His two-story concrete and steel Transfer House recalls Collier Park’s role as the landing place for the fuel to run two adjacent powerhouses, Manchester Street Station and South Street Station. This pavilion provides a fabulous view of the water, and one can imagine it being used for concerts, small gatherings, classes, and so forth.  The site, however, could use some sprucing up. Historical panels outlining the park’s importance have been vandalized, while much of the interior is a canvas for graffiti.

Warner developed the abandoned coal delivery system into a series of sculptural objects that work as historical reminders as well as abstract pieces of art. When Providence trolleys were electrified in 1895, coal to create the electricity to power them was unloaded from the last generation of working schooners (there was a repair yard for sailing ships close by).