Slater Memorial Park, Pawtucket,
Providence
The Slater Memorial Park, which
includes various recreational facilities, is
in Pawtucket in Providence, Rhode Island.
Like its neighbors, Fall River and New
Bedford, Pawtucket has a large population of
residents from Portugal.
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It is also has a large Liberian population, which is chiefly composed of
refugees from Charles Taylor’s rule.
Pawtucket, having a land area of over twenty
square kilometers, is the fourth largest
city in the state. It was founded as a town
in 1671.
There used to be two Pawtuckets:
one to the west of Blackstone River and one
to the east.
The latter was transferred to
Rhode Island and the two sections of
Pawtucket merged and were incorporated as a
city in 1886. Pawtucket was home to the
beginnings
of the American Industrial
Revolution. |
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| Pawtucket is often associated with another
town in England: the Belper, Derbyshire.
This was where Samuel Slater learned about
the Richard Arkwright’s Water Frame under
the guidance of Jedediah Strutt. He later
brought his extensive knowledge of the Water
Frame to Pawtucket back to Pawtucket.
In 1790, Samuel Slater built the
first commercially successful cotton-spinning mill on the
Blackstone River. The mill, called the Slater Mill, had a
fully-mechanized power system that greatly increased the
speed and efficiency of operations.
Pawtucket had what is called the Downtown Circulator that
makes traveling around the downtown portion of city easier.
The Circulator, a one-way loop, was patterned after the
British ring roads concept.
Pawtucket is known for being a center for arts and culture.
To maintain this image, Ann Galligan, a researcher from the
Northeastern University was commissioned by the City of
Pawtucket to conduct a series of studies and to come up with
a plan to promote arts and culture in the city. The
objective behind this plan is to attract and retain more
artists to expand the city’s artists’ community, and to
allocate sufficient resources to meet this community’s
needs.
Every year in September, the City and the Pawtucket Arts
Collaborative organize and manage the Arts Festival and the
Riversing. The Riversing is an independently-produced
musical event which normally lasts for one day. There are
many notables in the art industry from Pawtucket. They
include cartoonist Don Bousquet, journalists Joel Garreau
and Irving Levine, musician Wendy Carlos, independent film
director Michael Corrente, silent film star Ruth Clifford,
Grammy-nominated singer and songwriter Jon B, and many more.
Pawtucket is also very much into sports. The city is home to
the Pawtucket Red Sox which regularly appears in the McCoy
Stadium. Pawtucket also has the Narragansett Race Track. The
thoroughbred horse racing track opened in 1934 and closed in
1978 after hosting numerous competitions including the Gun
Bow, the Hall of Famers War Admiral and the Seabiscuit.
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