Perhaps no one better represents Providence’s chiaroscuro effect more than Vincent “Buddy” Cianci, the city’s mayor for 17 of the last 25 years.
Cianci’s first reign as mayor ended in 1984 when he resigned after pleading no-contest to charges of kidnapping and assaulting Raymond DeLeo with a fireplace log, an ashtray and a lighted cigarette. Cianci believed DeLeo, a long-time friend, was having an affair with the mayor’s estranged wife. This assault was witnessed by Cianci’s police chauffeur, his divorce lawyer, the Providence director of public works and a former state attorney general.
What moves this from the felonious to the sublime is the comeback. If Bill Clinton is the comeback kid, then Buddy is the comeback master.
Last year Cianci, running unopposed for re-election, received 97 percent of the vote – a number even Fidel Castro would envy. Quite a change from both 1984 and even 1990, when he reclaimed the mayoralty by just 317 votes.
How did he do this? Cianci, as he, his admirers and detractors admit, is the consummate salesman. It is said he will attend the opening of a door. “I always remember there’s the friend of mine who’s a Cambodian guy – he came here, survived the killing fields,” says Kerr. “Did the classic American struggle, went to school and went to college, became a school counselor and then he got his master’s degree. On a hot summer afternoon in South Providence in this guy’s backyard, they were celebrating his master’s degree with some Cambodian food and a few friends and up comes the limo and out gets Buddy with a proclamation. … And that’s him, he’s always doing stuff like that.”
In short, he is a born politician, a non-stop talker who could gladhand anyone. If he does not have the most telegenic look, at 57 he looks both slimmer and smarter than the roly poly guy with the bad haircut who took office 25 years ago. Questions about his colorful past are answered briefly and then without pausing he segues into the bright side of the present and the brighter side of the future.
“It’s a good feeling to see the progress, to be a part of the tremendous progress we’re making everyday,” he says about his current reign over this city of 160,000 people. Cianci may be alone in seeing Providence in competition with Boston for business and tourists, but Buddy being Buddy, he also sees Providence winning. “Boston Financial is located here. In addition to that we took AAA from Boston. We also have Resolutions Travel which makes the hotel reservations for every hotel in the country right out here. We’ve got Data General – all kinds of companies that have come here and are located here from Boston, Fidelity’s got an office here. We’ve tried to make it competitive, the quality of life is sensational. We’ve got a great new airport that’s 12 minutes from the down city – that’s a hub airport. You’ve got to be an absolute masochist to use Boston. Providence – you come in and there’s valet parking and the flights are all jet and it’s like half-price from what it is in Boston, it’s much more civilized. … we don’t compare ourselves to Boston, but I mean we’re not Boston and sure as shit Boston ain’t us.”
If, in his first term as mayor, Cianci did a great job of selling Cianci, in his second he has done a nearly equally impressive job of selling his city. Cianci’s comeback has mirrored Providence’s. In the last 15 years, Providence has undergone a physical and economic metamorphosis, attracting jobs and becoming, in media terms, hot.
The city has an eponymous hit TV show on NBC, 60 Minutes II is doing a piece about the city, as is GQ. NBC has created something called The Gravity Games – think ESPN’s X Games with a bigger network behind it – and is going to be holding and hyping them in his fair city. (That the X Games themselves began here and then decamped for San Diego makes it even sweeter for the locals.) The Farrelly brothers, the native son/idiot savants behind There’s Something About Mary and Dumb and Dumber, always shoot part of their movies here. Steven Speilberg’s Amistad was partially filmed here, as was Brad Pitt’s bizarre death-on-a-holiday flick, Meet Joe Black. Local boy Michael Corrente has made three movies here: Federal Hill, American Buffalo with Dustin Hoffman and Dennis Franz, and the upcoming Outside Providence. The Family Guy – which Fox TV premiered directly after this year’s Superbowl – is set here. In fact, the Providence-Hollywood connection is now so strong that city will soon have its own soundstage – the largest outside of Tinseltown itself. In 1997 alone, moviemaking directly put $22,000,000 into the local economy.
Nor is all this glitz and glamour all that’s fueling what the city’s booster – Cianci always chief among them – are calling “The Providence Renaissance.” Since 1984, Providence has gone through a face lift larger and less expensive than the Big Dig: Train tracks which once created a kind of Wall of China, separating downtown and the prosperous East Side from the rest of the city, have been moved and covered; the Woonasquatucket and Moshassuck rivers, paved over in the 1800s, have been moved and uncovered – and lined with new parks, bridges and an amphitheater. What was once an ugly, confusing maze of a downtown is now a graceful, confusing maze. A $455 million mall with 165 stores – the largest shopping area between New York and Boston – is set to open this summer; a $350 million convention center with attached hotel is now open; five new hotels are under construction and more than $200 million has been spent upgrading nearby T.F. Greene Airport.
