The Neighborhood: From Trotters to Trolleys

Like everything before it, the old neighborhood at one time was open space, dotted with maples and oaks and sycamores, the brush a tangle of sumac, bittersweet, and aggressive poison ivy, populated by squirrels and rabbits, moles and voles, deer and bear. In spring the buds swelled on the trees and became tender shoots that morphed into green leaves and violets grew in the clearings. In summer, rabbits nibbled under the trees and foxes and mice raised their families in dens among the trees. In fall the sumac turned to waving scarlet fronds and the trees blazed gold and orange as squirrels stored their nuts in hidden caches and the birds headed south. In winter the bones of the trees cast blue shadows against the snow where mice noses emerged, testing for the scent of predators. Then civilization encroached; a factory was built only a few miles away, to utilize nearby water as its power, and beside it the trim white home of the factory owner. The factory prospered, the size of the white house doubled, and it became the home of a governor.

Governor William Sprague found that open space once filled with trees and wildlife a perfect place to exercise his champion trotting horses. In 19th century America where vehicles were horse-drawn, the trotter and his counterpart the pacer were king, and the harness-racing event the biggest part of the annual county fair. That now flat stretch of land next became Narragansett Trotting Park. This sprawling acreage had a grandstand so large that it contained a hotel, and financiers like Morgan and Vanderbilt formed its audience on opening day.

Fortunes come and go, and in the later 19th century the Spragues' 67-acre property became the state fairgrounds, and in 1896 a novelty attraction appeared at the fair: racing cars! These sputtering vehicles—so unreliable that if a car even finished a race it was considered a success—made occasional appearances, and the park was also used for other big outdoor shows: circuses, exhibition trotting races (including an appearance by the great Dan Patch, who held harness-racing records for years), and even Wild West shows, one attended by a small boy who would later grow up and buy a house and raise a family at the edge of the park. He remembered for years afterwards his wide-eyed amazement at the trick riding and shooting, the colorful Native people on prancing horses, and a "stagecoach robbery" sequence, the dust and the smell of horses and popcorn. Trolley cars wended their way down Cranston Street and its extension, Narragansett Avenue, to bring people to the park, men in ties and top hats, women in long skirts and parasols, and as always excited children in frocks or roundabout and knickers to ooh-and-ahh at whatever attraction played at the moment.

Soon the age of the horse and carriage made way for the horseless carriage, and not months before the United States joined the Great War, the park closed and re-opened with what was the first paved and banked oval track, in what was apparently the first super-speedway in the United States. Eddie Rickenbacker, a few years before his flying exploits in France, pushed the limits of automotive speed in the first race, driving a Maxwell motor car. Soon speed became the watchword as other then racing-greats like Barney Oldfield and Louis Chevrolet circled the track. Glenn Curtis, the aircraft designer, raced motorcycles there, and air races were even held around pylons added to the park for that purpose.

As the classic newsreel announced "Time marches on." The trolley cars that squealed and ground their way down the avenue now just called "Gansett" to carry fairgoers were bringing people who wished to live in the suburbs. By the time the 1920s were ending, the fairgrounds had moved out to East Greenwich and the cars to other venues. The racetrack left its mark on the street names—Chandler, Jordan, Overland, Cadillac, Packard and Fiat (Fiat Avenue was the backstretch)—and in the neighborhood's nickname, the Speedway, long into the 1960s, when you could have your hair cut at the Speedway barber and bowl a game at the Speedway Lanes, and when a leftover chain link fence from the Speedway, now separating two back yards, linked the little boy who'd gone to the Wild West Show and the little girl who grew up in the little Cape Cod house turned sideways to fit on the corner lot.