Amidst bathos and banality while you wait…and wait.
— Photo by William Morgan
There are not many grimmer places than the contemporary medical office waiting room. And, as we get older, it seems we have to devote more of our lives to wasting time in such dreary, soul-deadening spaces. Carpets with busy patterns (to hide the dirt?), low ceilings with acoustical tiles, furniture (invariably in pale shades of rose or violet, sometimes stained), and dog-eared copies (several months old) of Sports Illustrated. The coup de grâce is often a television, too loud and tuned to medical info-mercials or a talk show with miserable human specimens who are in much worse shape than whatever it was that is sent us to the doctor.
We entered this particular foretaste of purgatory not to be healed, but to make an appointment. Feeling my life ebbing away, especially after the practice's telephone service informed me that I was Number 17 in the queue, my wife and I drove to the awful faux-concrete (yes, that plastic stucco-looking surface that looks nibbled at the edges) medical building on North Main Street in Providence. This is one of those rental office spaces that has been fixed up and repainted so many times, you can only pray that the mold and rodent droppings have been sealed in.
Our dermatologist at 345 North Main, blessedly, does not have a television, and we were not there long enough to start screaming. But amidst the only-slightly-better-than-cheap-motel wall art, an old photograph caught my eye.
The image shows a house I had never heard of, much less ever seen. But its demolition was a real loss. Underneath the 18th-century expansion, is clearly a rare 17th-century Rhode Island stone ender (note the large chimney to the right).
Less than a handful of these early cottages survive, so it is particularly painful to contemplate its destruction. The caption beneath the image makes it all seem more depressing:
“Our Abbott Street parking lot, with North Main Street visible at the left:
“Roger Williams {1603-1683, the theologian, writer and founder of Rhode Island} often visited here and led prayer meetings where our parking is now.’’
Providence-based writer and architectural historian William Morgan is the author of The Cape Cod Cottage. His Snowbound: Dwelling in Winter will be published next year by Princeton Architectural Press.
