Where the Dumps That Used to Be Ponds Used to Be

• In Event: Wastescapes: Managing Excess in the Twentieth-Century United States

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of industrial-era waste crises on the urban New England landscape. It chronicles a time when the city of Providence, Rhode Island was generating higher and higher volumes of trash despite lacking the infrastructure to send it “away.” Instead, from the 1880s until the 1950s, officials encouraged the serial conversion of inner-city lowlands, ponds, and lakes into landfills, each of which filled more quickly than the last. It is a largely forgotten history, but as Cohen details, its effects were transformative and lasting.

Author

• Samia Willow Cohen, Brown University