RI's melting pot: 100 years of shifting demographics through one street's history

PROVIDENCE – When the Taveras family arrived from the Dominican Republic during the 1960s and '70s, members worked in the jewelry industry and eventually made their home in two side-by-side houses on Potters Avenue.

That's much the same story as Franklin W. Bloomer, one of the first residents of those same two houses more than half a century earlier.

While Bloomer wasn't from the Dominican Republic – he was born in Wickford – his father owned a jewelry factory, and several of his brothers worked there before he became a traveling salesman for the family jewelry business. In fact, over the more than 100 years that the houses have stood, several families of jewelry workers have called them home.

Though having three habitable floors, the houses were classified as duplexes, giving them two street addresses each: 347-349 Potters Ave. and 353-355 Potters Ave.

Early residents of the houses

While it's not exactly clear when the houses were built, this much is known:

That entire block of Potters Avenue – which was farmland in Cranston until the city line moved shortly after the Civil War – was owned in the 1890s by James R. Hodges, who had amassed a small fortune as a carpet merchant and real estate investor.

After Hodges' January 1894 death, much of his real estate holdings went up for public auction in 1895.

Edward C. Wilde, who was listed in the 1900 federal census as a "fancy good merchant," at that auction bought the lot that would become 347-349 Potters Ave. for $1,260.

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Meanwhile, Elmer Stone, a silk stocking salesman, bought the lot that would become 353-355 Potters Ave. In 1898, Stone was issued a building permit to construct a house on the third lot from the corner of Potters Avenue and Niagara Street, which is where the house sits today.

Records dating to 1900 confirm that the houses were there by then. The federal census of that year shows all four addresses occupied, and a detailed private fire insurance map shows two houses of 2½ stories each.

Those census records show that Wilde lived in 347 as of June 14, 1900, with his wife, Ida, and his father, James, an English immigrant. Ida died of pneumonia that November, at age 36. Her father-in-law, James, died in 1912. But Edward, joined by an English immigrant housekeeper, Alice Gill, stayed at the house until his death in 1935.

In 1900, 349 was occupied by box manufacturer Frank Young, with his wife, two school-age sons and a Black servant from Virginia, 20-year-old Alice Cheeseman.

The flat at 353 was home to lawyer Washington Prescott; his wife; two sons and a daughter, ages 2 to 12; and his father-in-law, 68-year-old sea captain Jeremiah Hooper.

And Elmer Stone lived at 355. He was a traveling salesman, like Bloomer, who would follow him in the house. Stone was joined by his wife and their two sons and a daughter, who were all under 10.

Bloomer registered a low-numbered license plate at the house

Bloomer and his wife, Virginia (Whitford) Bloomer, moved to 353 Potters Ave. – the house on the left of the pair when looking from the street – by 1905, according to city directories and state and federal census records.

A couple of years after moving in, Frank registered a 15-horsepower Ford runabout to the address and was issued license plate 493.

Shortly before 1920, the Bloomers moved from the 353 address in the house to 355. At both addresses, the couple had live-in Black servants.

After three decades living in the house, Frank died there on March 29, 1934. Virginia moved to Danielson, Connecticut, where she lived with her widowed sisters, Lillian Atwood and Mary Moulton.

Italian druggist, teacher wife settle on Potters Avenue

In the 1920s, Egle Santopadre and Nicola Bilotti emigrated a year apart from Italy, landed in New York and made their way to Providence, where, on June 30, 1930, they were married. Before the decade was out, Nicola, who had training as a pharmacist in Italy, had bought the house at 347-349 Potters Ave.

Nicola ran Bilotti Medical Prescription for 46 years before his death in 1997. The couple moved to Cranston after about 20 years in Providence.

Big turnover in the 1930s

The 1930s were a time of unprecedented transition in Rhode Island, and the same was true of the two houses next door to each other on Potters Avenue.

Two longtime residents were out: Edward Wilde was replaced by Nicola Bilotti, and Frank Bloomer had given way to Russian immigrant families, an ethnicity that was often synonymous with Jewish.

353-355 Potters, which Bloomer had called home for three decades, was filled with families, spanning several generations, including jewelry workers. New Yorker Abraham Weinbaum, a transit bus driver, and his Russian-born wife, Sarah, moved in with their two sons, two daughters and a Massachusetts-born servant, Anna Morgan.

They were joined by William Cohen, a jewelry shop weigher, and his wife, Dorothy, who were both born in Massachusetts, along with their children, Rosalyn, Davida and Joel, ages 11 to 1, plus Dorothy's father, Louis Blum, a naturalized Russian immigrant and watch repairman; her sister Zelma Blum, who worked in a jewelry factory; and Dorothy's brother, Irving Blum, an auto accessory salesman.

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And, besides the Bilottis in 347-349, that house welcomed another family, Pennsylvania transplants Elmer and Florence Umstead and their adult children, also named Elmer and Florence. Among them: a shipping clerk at a wire company, a hospital nurse and a transit bus driver.

A widow and two of her daughters move in

353 Potters Ave. took on a medical tone in the late 1940s, when Evelyn Augusta (Wood) Ballou moved in. One daughter, Alice Wilson, worked in the accounting department at Rhode Island Hospital. Another daughter, Laura Schaffer, was a registered nurse.

Ballou died in the house at age 92 in 1956. Her daughters stayed in the house until at least 1959 before moving elsewhere.

An assortment of other residents over the years

While some stayed for decades, others came and went in a matter of years – or less.

They came from Rhode Island and all five other New England states, as well as immigrating from places like Scotland and Nova Scotia.

They were married and widowed, single and entire families.

Their occupations were varied, including telephone tester, streetcar motorman and senior clerk at the State House; a screw factory worker, truck driver for a chemical company, and an electrical contractor; a textile worker, auto repairman and a toolmaker; even a traveling yeast salesman.

The residents of those two houses over the last century or so typified the Rhode Island experience.

From carpet merchant to dry goods merchant to Italian druggist to Taveras family

The first members of the family of former Providence Mayor Angel Taveras to own 347-349 Potters Ave. fall in direct line to carpet merchant James R. Hodges, who owned it in the 1890s.

Edward C. Wilde bought it at an 1895 auction from Hodges' estate.

Egle Bilotti, wife of the Italian druggist Nicola Bilotti, bought it in 1937 as Wilde's estate was sorted out.

And, on Sept. 30, 1971, Egle and Nicola Bilotti sold it to the mayor's parents, Rafael and Amparo Taveras, one immigrant couple to another.

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: A century of stories: Potters Ave. has housed RI's melting pot culture