Mark Patinkin: After downtown Providence’s looting - the helpers arrive
For those demoralized at the looting in Providence, I give you today a young woman named Angel Burke.
She is 28 and was on Washington Street Tuesday, a few blocks from the Trinity Rep theater, helping board up a smashed window for a shop owner she had never met.
It was a small convenience store called Washington Street Market. Angel had come downtown with a few friends to help put the city they love back together.
The owner, a gentleman who’d arrived here decades ago from the Middle East to make a better life, was distraught, and not at the store at the moment because of a family health emergency.
But Angel and the others told him they would take care of it. And so they did – taking measurements, driving to Home Depot, and buying a plywood sheet they were now placing over the window.
Angel, who has been in Black Lives Matter protests, felt this destruction was wrong.
“I love this city,” she said. “I love the diversity here. It’s sad this happened to a place so welcoming.”
There was broken glass on the floor inside, but the police had stopped the attackers from getting into the market. Still, many Washington Street shops had been looted by dozens bent on theft and vandalism.
Yet were you to have walked the street in the sunshine of this day-after, you’d have seen a more heartening glimpse of human nature.
An African-American woman named Brittany Reid, 29, stopped to ask the small crew if she could aid the shop’s cleanup. She, too, had come by simply to help.
Brittany moved to Providence a decade ago from what she calls a violent part of New Jersey, and embraced her new home because it embraced her.
“I know there’s racism everywhere,” she said, “but this was the first place where I can say ‘Hi,’ to Caucasians, and they smile and say it back to me.”
Brittany said she now works as a “lunch lady” at the small Charette Charter School blocks away.
“My heart is breaking,” she said. “Looting is wrong. Robbing is wrong.
“It pulls away from the message, which is, ’I just want to be treated like you.’”
A fiftysomething gentleman named George Bovill stopped by, too. It turns out he is a contractor, and he got onto a chair to drive pilot holes through the plywood.
His girlfriend, Sana Asstafan, is the owner of the street’s iconic Blake’s Tavern, an Irish restaurant and bar that had also had windows smashed.
George was at his Cranston home at 2:30 a.m. when Sana called to say she heard Blake’s was being attacked.
Soon, the two were there.
“It was a war zone,” George said. “A ton of kids running around. Cops chasing them.”
Sana saw police wrestling with looters. It was frightening – everything dark, and dozens of youths running past her and George.
The damage was a particular blow because it was only the day after Blake’s reopened from the pandemic.
But by this Tuesday afternoon, George and his crew had cleaned up the glass and boarded up four huge windows.
In a testament to resilience, Blake’s was actually open and serving customers on the sidewalk.
“I love this city,” said Sana. “All different backgrounds and cultures. It’s a big ethnic mix and we all get along.”
As I continued down the the street, I soon passed a young woman and man with a broom, trash bag and dustpan.
One of the two, Jessie, owns a seamstress business; the other, Mark Bolvin, is an IT manager at Blue Cross.
They were simply here to help strangers clean up.
Both are passionate supporters of the fight for racial justice. And Mark added: “This is our city. You hate to see it destroyed like this.”
Providence, added Jessie, has always been about unity.
Then they moved on, looking for other store owners they might help.
It was like that all over downtown, on this hopeful day of bright sun after so dark a night.
mpatinki@providencejournal.com
(401) 277-7370
On Twitter:@markpatinkin
