Wanskuck

Wanskuck is one of two neighborhoods that comprise the North End, an area in the northern part of the city roughly divided by Route 146 and the West River Valley. The Wanskuck neighborhood is bounded by the Elmhurst neighborhood to its west, Smith Hill to the south, Charles to the east, and the town of North Providence to the north. Two major north-south thoroughfares are Douglas Avenue and Admiral Street, which run from the center of Providence through the Wanskuck neighborhood and eventually to the town of North Providence.

Prior to the 19th century, the North End was a sparsely settled rural area with only a few farms and houses. Until the completion of the Wanskuck Road (now Branch Avenue) in 1706, the North End lacked a major road or highway. Largely unconnected to the developed areas of Providence, the North End was annexed to North Providence in 1765. It was during this period (1756) when Esek Hopkins, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, built his house on Admiral Street. In the early 1800s, industry first came to the area with the establishment of a small cotton mill on Wanskuck Pond. Soon thereafter, the first village in Wanskuck developed around the mill.

As in many surrounding areas, substantial settlement followed industrial growth in the various river valleys in and around Providence. Just after the mid-19th century, corporations began arriving in the area of the North End seeking to capitalize on the natural resources of the West River and its clear-watered ponds. The Wanskuck Company, established in 1862 in the North End, began as a major manufacturer of woolens for the Civil War, and was the driving force in the physical and social evolution of the Wanskuck neighborhood. The textile company constructed several two-family dwellings south of Branch Avenue in order to house its workers.

Furthermore, the company's need for labor brought skilled English workers and mostly unskilled Irish and French Canadian workers to the area. As the Wanskuck Company grew increasingly successful over the next 50 to 60 years, residential and commercial growth followed in the developing village.

By the turn of the century, the North End had grown to have an extremely diverse population of Irish, English, German, Scottish, and Italian immigrant families. Italian residents, in particular, became a large part of the community, numbering in the thousands by the first decade of the 20th century. The growing immigrant population, combined with the rapid development of the area, served as the major factors behind North Providence's decision to return the North End to the city of Providence in 1874.

Neighborhood growth continued into the 20th century, spurred mostly by the extension of streetcar service into the North End. Trolleys running on Branch Avenue by 1895, and on Douglas Avenue by 1908, fully connected Wanskuck to the rest of the city for the first time. By the 1930s, the North End was a densely settled working and middle-class area for residents working both in and outside the neighborhood. With the close of the Silver Spring Bleaching and Dyeing Company in 1939 and the Wanskuck Company in 1957, the North End was no longer a site of major industry.

According to the 2000 census, 11,270 people resided in the Wanskuck neighborhood, an increase of 19.3 percent from 1990. Almost half of all residents are white (47%), while almost a third are Hispanic (26%), more than double the 1990 figure. Almost a fifith of residents are African American (18%) and 2% are Asian. About 65% of Wanskuck residents age 25 or older completed high school and about a fifth (18.8%) have a college degree or higher.

About one in four employed residents work in the manufacturing sector while a third of residents are employed in education, health, and sociall services in 2000. Unemployment in 2000 was roughly the same in the Wanskuck neighborhood as the city as a whole (9 percent compared to 9.3 percent).

The median family income in Wanskuck in 1999 was $26,662, about 17 percent less than the citywide figure. About a third (32%) of Wanskuck residents had incomes below the 1999 federal poverty level, an increase of fifty percent from a decade earlier. The number of children living in poverty has increased over the past decade, rising from 38.8 percent in 1980 to 48.6 percent in 2000. 17% of elderly persons in Wanskuck were living in poverty in 2000.

Housing tenure in Wanskuck has changed slightly over the past decade. The proportion of owner-occupied housing units has declined from about 34.1 percent in 1990 to 32.6 percent in 2000. The housing stock consists predominantly of one and two family housing units, and nearly two-thirds of the housing units were built more than 40 years ago. In 2004, the median residential sales price in Wanskuck was 190.250, 13.5% lower than the citywide median sales price, and the median rent in 1990 was about the same as the citywide figure. About a third (28%) of Wanskuck residents moved into their present housing unit within the past five years, while another third moved in more than 10 years ago.
_______________

Sources: Wanskuck: Neighborhood Analysis, Department of Planning and Urban Development (City of Providence, 1977) and Providence: A Citywide Survey of Historic Resources, edited by William McKenzie Woodward and Edward F. Sanderson (Rhode Island Historical Preservation Commission, 1986).