Without a machine and because the business community didn’t trust him – this was a time when Providence was the Mob capital of New England and having an Italian last name made people automatically assume certain things – he had to become a mayor of the neighborhoods. Fortunately this was an ideal fit with his meet-and-greet personality and helped him win a loyal following among the city’s voters. During that first administration he needed all the loyalty he could get.
The 10 years in office were tempestuous, to put it mildly. With the national economic woes and the flight of manufacturing, retail, and people the ‘70s were a difficult time in every city in the nation but Cianci’s administration made it harder than it had to be. A point the mayor concedes, although he isn’t his usual loquacious self when discussing the more difficult parts of his and the city’s history. “I was a kid when I was mayor [the first time],” he says. “You saw what the city looked like when I became mayor. It was tough and so it took a lot of experience, it took continuous leadership, took me a long time to get people to believe that the city could be better than it is and making the private sector to trust us. … If you’re mayor almost 20 years, you’ve got to learn something. Even a guy who’s a judge when he first goes on the bench isn’t a good judge, but look at him or her 20 years later.”
During his first administration, the city endured several strikes by garbage collectors and other municipal workers over pay issues and proposed layoffs. The property tax rate increased by 31 percent. Clashes between the Mayor and the Democratic City Council all but paralyzed what little fiscal planning took place. Indeed by 1981, the city was on the brink of a bankruptcy that was only averted by a mid-year tax increase. He also over-reached himself: In 1980 he ran for governor and lost by a 3-1 margin.
Despite all that, some good things had been done during those 10 years.
“At a period when there was just some very bad thinking going on and that everyone said tear down everything, Providence stopped,” Orenstein says. “In the vacuum of it stopping … the Preservation Society began a block-by-block, house-by-house revitalization of College Hill.” This not only saved a huge stock of gorgeous colonial and Federal-era architecture but, “it also brought back in the old, Yankee community which in other towns had left. … If those people lived in the city then they might consider investing and working in the city.”
In addition to helping the preservationists, Cianci is quick to point out the other accomplishments like building the new Civic Center. “We restored City Hall, built the performing arts center, we saved Trinity [Repertory Theater], we began the river relocation project.” This last was finally accomplished by Joe Paolino who served as mayor during Cianci’s interregnum.
But then “The Incident” occurred and exit Buddy. Or, not so exit. Cianci did what a lot of discredited political types – Oliver North, G. Gordon Liddy, former US Rep. Robert “B-1 Bob” Dornan, among them – have done: He became a radio talk show host. And a very successful one. His afternoon drive-time show drew 100,000 listeners a week. This in a state with just under a million people. So Cianci was able to remain in the public eye.
According to The Providence Journal’s Bob Kerr, Cianci did something else in those years out of office: A lot of thinking. “His sabbatical was really good for him in a way because I think he wouldn’t have had a long political future the way he was going in his first stint,” says Kerr with a bit of understatement. “He used that time to kind of figure things out for himself. I think there’s a lot of the old Buddy still there but I think he’s learned when to keep it in check. That’s the big difference. I don’t think it’s a different guy. I think it’s a smarter guy who can still be a bully and pretty petty at times, but who has learned to pick his battles a little better than he used to.”
It should be mentioned that the Journal and Cianci have never been on the best of terms. On the day before the election of 1990, the newspaper ran a huge timeline chronicling in detail all the fiascoes of the first Cianci administration. (Presumably this was to benefit all the voters who had moved to the city in the preceding six years.) This only in part explains why Kerr is so suspicious of the Renaissance, which he thinks has about as much to do with the city as Providence the TV show. “The ‘Renaissance’ runs from the East Side to the last good restaurant on Federal Hill,” he says.”[It] is more for out-of-towners than it is for people who live here.”
