Providence mourns a year without WaterFire

John Mongelli wasn’t looking for volunteer opportunities when he went to the river that sunny afternoon in 1996. He was looking for some fish he had noticed swimming earlier.

But a strange sight in the water caught his attention: a small boat with four people attached to ropes towing an object behind them.

“I watched them for about half an hour," he recalls. "Then about half an hour later, I was holding one of the ropes. And about half an hour after that, I was driving the boat. So I kind of got roped in."

Two dozen years later, Mongelli — WaterFire’s longest-serving volunteer — looks back at that memory with fondness and sadness.

To him and to hundreds of other volunteers, artists, performers and business owners, WaterFire represents many things: community, a source of income, and a point of pride for a city that found a way to reinvent itself. Its absence this year because of the coronavirus pandemic has left a gaping hole in the city's collective psyche.

“It’s almost like losing a family member,” Mongelli said. “It’s hard.”

Peter Mello, managing director of WaterFire Providence, had big plans for 2020. This year was supposed to be WaterFire’s silver jubilee — the 25th anniversary of the first time artist Barnaby Evans installed a series of floating braziers in Providence’s rivers, unwittingly sparking an annual tradition that would rebrand downtown as a tourist destination.

This public theatrical production draws over a million visitors to Providence a year, generating more than $114 million annually for the local economy and sustaining nearly 1,300 jobs, according to a 2012 study conducted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

But COVID-19 put Mello’s festive plans on hold and sent him into crisis management, as WaterFire now faces a deficit of around 80% of its usual operating budget.

“We were hoping to be celebrating in a much different way,” Mello said. “In fact, we are less about celebrating, and more about surviving right now.”

The pandemic’s devastating blow to the creative economy extends far beyond WaterFire. Between the beginning of April and the end of July, Providence lost 11,468 jobs in the creative occupations, according to a Brookings Institution study. Many businesses in the industry also are facing an existential crisis, as they depended on arts and cultural celebrations such as WaterFire to market their goods and services.

Ben Giguere’s Gather Glass is one of the creative businesses hurting from the pandemic.

Giguere and his team teach the arcane craft of blowing molten glass into myriad objects, from everyday utensils to exquisite decorations worth thousands of dollars. WaterFire was a fertile recruiting ground for new students.

Giguere would entrance passersby as he pulled out a red-hot substance from a mobile kiln and proceeded to mold it into a perfectly-shaped glass, using nothing but his lungs and metal instruments. Some nights the crowds got so big, he would have to ask people to move so they wouldn’t block the walking path.

“Having this pandemic and no WaterFire, it kinda hit us pretty good, ‘cause we would do pretty well down there,” Giguere says.

The pandemic initially forced Giguere to close the workshop and stop all in-person classes, which he estimates comprised 90% of their business.

“We went from our best year in 10 years to zero overnight,” Giguere said.

To offset the loss, Giguere flipped his business upside down, focusing on production of glass artifacts for wholesale through a company in New York. Classes have resumed in a limited capacity with new safety protocols, but like many businesses and organizations in the creative community, returning to pre-pandemic business levels remains uncertain for Gather Glass.

Randall Rosenbaum, executive director of the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, said only 11% of 66 arts and culture organizations they surveyed reported returning to pre-pandemic operating levels or expected to do so by February 2021. The vast majority anticipated reopening by next summer or an unspecified date in the future.

For Kristen Adamo, the uncertainty bodes ill for Providence’s hospitality industry.

Adamo is president of the Warwick-Providence Convention & Visitors Bureau, which acts as a “destination” marketing firm for Providence. Her team facilitates over 260 meetings, conventions and sporting events a year, generating over $80 million in direct spending in the city. WaterFire is one of the main lures they use to convince companies to bring their business to town.

“If you laid the WaterFire schedule over hotel occupancy in hotels in Providence on Saturdays that WaterFire happens, you would see a noticeable uptick,” Adamo said.

On WaterFire nights, hotel occupancy in the city is usually up to 80% or even 90%, and room rates tend to be significantly higher, according to Adamo. This past August, occupancy was down to 44%, though Adamo says it was probably lower since the Graduate and the Omni, two of Providence’s largest hotels, were closed.

Bob Burke, longtime owner of the 48-year-old French bistro Pot au Feu and a fourth-generation Rhode Islander, said the absence of WaterFire sapped the vitality of nightlife in Providence.

“A summer without WaterFire was like winding the clock back many decades,” Burke said, harkening to the time when downtown was a lifeless expanse of parking lots and rail lines that his grandfather used to describe as “a graveyard with lights.”

The capital redevelopment projects at the end of the 20th century brought Waterplace Park, the Providence Place mall, the Rhode Island Convention Center and other hotels and businesses downtown.

But Burke, who saw it all happen from his perch at 44 Custom House St., says it was WaterFire that animated the city’s waterfront spaces.

On WaterFire evenings, Spogga would be at the center of all the action. Shirtless, with a ponytail that reaches his waist and surrounded by spinning balls of fire, he is one of the most memorable sights of the evening.

A native of Rhode Island, Spogga has performed across the country and on stages such as Mardi Gras in New Orleans, where he lived. But WaterFire, where he has fire danced since the early 2000s, holds a special place for him.

“Every year that I would come home from New Orleans, that river was home to me,” Spogga said.

Tara Smith, a 14-year WaterFire veteran best known as Lily the white living statue, shares a similar experience.

“When I am at WaterFire and I am performing, I feel like I am at home,” Smith said. “And it’s a very strange sensation going all summer and not having that.”

And Andrew Anselmo, an origami journeyman who has brought the art of paper folding to Providence for over 20 years, has seen the human side of WaterFire. He has helped men propose to their girlfriends with paper rings, seen girls grow up to become mothers, and talked with terminally ill people who told him they wouldn’t be coming next year.

“There are some things you cannot put a price on, and WaterFire is one of those things,” Anselmo said.

Over the years, WaterFire has found its way into the stories of the people who experience it and the city that hosts it every year — from the teachers who are honored with the Rhode Island Educator of the Year award, to the capoeira students who celebrate their graduation at Waterplace and the family members who remember the loved ones they lost to breast cancer at the annual Gloria Gemma Breast Cancer Resource Foundation fundraiser.

“It’s part of how we think of ourselves,” Burke said.

While the pandemic has kept WaterFire from celebrating its 25th anniversary as planned, it has not stopped Mello, Evans and their team from creating art that touches people. In April, the WaterFire team created The Beacon of Hope, an art installation to honor the lives lost to the virus in Rhode Island. Mello said they recorded over 1,000 deaths, and the team is planning to install a permanent memorial at the WaterFire Arts Center on Valley Street.

WaterFire also received $145,000 from the state’s Take It Outside grants initiative to build outdoor staging for socially distant live performances. “Decameron,” a multistage play produced in partnership with The Wilbury Theatre Group, was the first to open in August. It was followed by “Fire Flowers and a Time Machine” in October, and there are plans for a third outdoor play in November.

“It has been a roller-coaster ride,” Mello said, describing the struggle of trying to plan with so many unknowns.

But Mello sees a silver lining in that the pandemic has given them permission to pivot their attention to the arts center, a 37,000-square-foot renovated rubber factory that became WaterFire’s home in 2017.

A multipurpose venue, with a store and leasable office space — currently rented by The Wheeler School for its eighth-grade class — the center is helping WaterFire move toward self-sustainability

“We don’t view ourselves as just doing the event downtown,” Mello said. "We view ourselves as being creative problem solvers, using art to bring about change in the community.

“And that is really to us what it’s all about.”

Jonny Williams is a freelance writer. Reach him at jdw275@georgetown.edu or on Twitter: @jonnywilliams90