Save the date for the Providence Preservation Society’s 42nd Festival of Historic Houses on Saturday, June 8. This year’s Festival will feature homes and gardens in the historic Mount Hope Neighborhood. Please fill out our online form to receive an email when tickets become available!
A Brief History of the Mount Hope Neighborhood
The 2024 Festival of Historic Houses focuses on a five-block area of the Mount Hope neighborhood in northeastern Providence, and the houses on this year’s tour provide a snapshot of the most active period of residential development in this part of the city.
Between about 1850 and 1930, Providence became a nationally prominent manufacturing center as well as Rhode Island’s financial, commercial, transportation, health care, higher education, and government center. Population skyrocketed as tens of thousands of new residents, most of them immigrants from other countries, arrived seeking jobs and opportunities. Providence also grew physically, expanding into a metropolis of two dozen distinct neighborhoods surrounding a central business district.
All of these new residents needed a place to live, and while many crowded into existing neighborhoods closest to Downtown, or adjacent to mills and factories, there was plenty of open space in the surrounding, still-rural areas outside the city center. These areas were gradually platted for residential development with new streets and blocks of house lots, new neighborhoods began to form, including Mount Hope.
Housing development in Mount Hope was initially concentrated in its southern and western sectors, adjacent to Olney Street and North Main Street and within walking distance of Downtown and the Moshassuck River industrial district. Here, significant Black and Irish communities established themselves by the mid-19th century. After streetcar lines were introduced on North Main Street (1875) and Camp Street (1886), the pace of development accelerated throughout the neighborhood, and it was fully built out over the next half century. New streets in Mount Hope, many referencing trees or other pastoral imagery, and the name of the neighborhood itself, were a marketing strategy designed to appeal to “the suburban ideal” that was gaining widespread popularity as industrialization and urbanization rapidly transformed American life. Suburban areas were viewed as less crowded, quieter, safer, healthier, and closer to nature; Mount Hope offered all these benefits.
Most of Mount Hope’s houses are single-family or two-family dwellings built for working-class and middle-class occupants. Ranging from simple cottages to more elaborate, architect-designed residences, Mount Hope’s housing stock features many popular architectural styles of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including Italianate, Second Empire, Queen Anne, Colonial Revival, Bungalow, and Triple-Decker. Catalpa Road contains a notable collection of 11 Colonial Revival style suburban tract houses, all designed by Providence architects Murphy & Hindle and constructed by the Gilbane Building Company between 1902 and 1904.
In the 1950s-1970s, rapid commercial expansion occurred along North Main Street. At the southern end of the neighborhood, the Lippitt Hill Redevelopment Project demolished many older homes and apartments, replacing them with larger-scale development such as the University Heights shopping center and apartment complex, and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Elementary School. This activity displaced numerous residents, many of them people of color, forcing them to relocate to other parts of the city or elsewhere. Today, Mount Hope remains a desirable place to live, with a diverse population and a stable supply of low-to-moderate income housing stock.