When he was the mayor, Buddy Cianci used to joke that he could be driven around Providence blindfolded and tell what neighborhood he was in by the sounds and smells.

Now, with his prison-issue ankle bracelet off, Buddy might not recognize parts of his town, even without the blindfold.

Providence has changed a lot in the five years that Cianci has been away.

Cranes dot the downtown skyline. New hotels and condos and apartment buildings have sprung up. The Westin Providence is sprouting another tower. The glassy GTECH headquarters has risen from the mud flats that sat vacant for years across from the Providence Place mall. The Masonic Temple, abandoned for decades, recently opened as a lavish hotel.

In the heart of the old downtown, Westminster Street is the artery of a livelier neighborhood of renovated lofts and shops. At Caffe Tazza, students, artists and business people mingle at sidewalk tables and, on certain summer nights, people can pull up chairs to watch movies al fresco — last week’s offering was Life Is Beautiful.

There are also changes in the neighborhoods — from cultural offerings such as opera on Federal Hill to the nearby Eagle Square development to a planned greenway in Olneyville to the construction of more affordable housing units in South Providence and other areas.

Now that Cianci is free to wander about the city that he ruled, for better or worse, over four different decades, the debate will surely follow.

Is the new city that Cianci beholds his creation — or the work of the new mayor, David Cicilline, made possible only after Cianci’s corrupt administration was deposed by the feds?

Cicilline boosters speak of a healthier business climate that has attracted more private investment, and an honest and efficient city government that doesn’t play favorites.

Cianci defenders say that it was Buddy who built the foundation for the latest advancements, and that his vision and promotion of the Providence Renaissance transcends any stains on his jacket.

Perhaps the most striking change is the number of people who have moved into the city in the past five years — residents who have never lived under Mayor Cianci, never had their photo taken with him, never endured the corruption probes and daily City Hall dramas, never had him show up at a backyard barbecue, never saw him hold court at WaterFire, never heard him hawk his Mayor’s Own Marinara Sauce for his scholarship fund.

“One in two Providence residents has been here for 10 years or less,” says Cliff Wood, who was elected last year as the Ward 2 councilman from the East Side. “I must have rung 4,000 doorbells running for council, and I met a lot of people who have been here two, three, four years. These are people who have no direct memory of a Mayor Cianci. The man’s been gone for half a decade.”

Developer Joseph R. Paolino Jr., the former mayor and onetime Cianci adversary, has become one of Cianci’s biggest boosters. When Cianci needed a work-release job after his recent transfer from prison in Fort Dix, N.J., to home confinement, Paolino hired him to help market The 903 Residences, Paolino’s upscale condominium complex in a once-derelict district behind the Providence Place mall.

It was a project that began, fittingly, when Cianci was mayor. Now working at the complex, which features a concierge, swimming pool, gymnasium and movie theater, Cianci has in a sense picked up where he left off before his “troubles,” says Paolino.

“He was very impressed with the project — especially after where he’s been living,” said Paolino, who became a partner in The 903 last year. “I’d love to have him buy a condo there. We’ll see.”

IF THE DEBATE over who deserves credit for the Providence Renaissance becomes tangled, it’s because the city at the head of Narragansett Bay has been a work in progress for nearly four centuries.

There was no WaterFire to greet Roger Williams when he paddled his canoe up the Providence River in 1636, seeking a safe harbor for tolerance and religious freedom. Much of what would become downtown was marshland and the Great Salt Cove.

In time, farming gave way to commerce, seafaring to manufacturing. The Industrial Revolution brought prosperity, along with a wave of immigration that would further transform the city’s cultural and political landscape.

In the late 1800s, the powerful railroads filled in the remnants of the Great Salt Cove. Further development covered over large swaths of the Moshassuck and Woonasquatucket rivers, which flowed into the Providence River to the Bay.

Early in the 1990s, some of Cianci’s staffers gave him an old black-and-white photograph of downtown Providence, bisected by unsightly railroad tracks and freight yards, with the inscription: “Prov – B.C. – Before Cianci.”

By then, the rail yards were gone, replaced by the glittering Waterplace Park and the resurrected rivers, which had been uncovered and moved during the 1980s in an ambitious, $40-million project financed primarily by the federal government.

In 1974, when Cianci first ran for mayor against Joseph Doorley, he championed a plan by a Rhode Island School of Design professor to move the railroad tracks and uncover the river. But there was no money, and Cianci, faced with other challenges, never pursued it after he was elected.

Four years later, when the Federal Railroad Administration planned a major upgrade of rail service between Boston and Washington, the then-director of the Providence Foundation, Ron Marsella, suggested that the federal money be used to move the tracks instead of simply fixing them.

The idea caught on with then-U.S. Sen. Claiborne Pell, a railroad buff, who proved key in winning approval. Cianci and his political rival, Gov. J. Joseph Garrahy, both jumped on board and lobbied in Washington, even as they were preparing to run against one another for governor in 1980 — issuing dueling press releases about who deserved credit.

Moving the tracks opened up downtown land for redevelopment, including the site of the Providence Place mall.

The Capital Center Commission, a quasi-public agency whose members were appointed by the governor, the mayor and the nonprofit Providence Foundation, was created in 1980 to shepherd the development.

The project was moving forward in 1983 when the new director of the Providence Foundation, Kenneth Orenstein, saw the plans and panicked — Capital Center engineers had proposed paving over the rest of the Providence River for a new road. Orenstein turned to architect Bill Warner, who was studying potential waterfront uses, and Warner sketched out a plan to uncover the river and move the confluence of the three rivers 100 yards east, to its current location near the Citizens Bank building.

Cianci and Garrahy supported the idea, but it didn’t come at the best of times for the mayor. Minutes before he met with Orenstein and Warner and state officials to hear their proposal, he learned that he was going to be indicted for assaulting Raymond DeLeo, the suspected lover of Cianci’s estranged wife, at the mayor’s Power Street home with a lit cigarette, a fireplace log and an ashtray.

Cianci eventually pleaded no contest and was forced to resign. Corruption probes claimed several aides and supporters. Paolino, the City Council president and son of a prominent downtown developer, replaced Cianci as mayor as the river relocation moved forward.

When the project was finally finished in 1994, Cianci was once again the mayor, steering a motorized dinghy upriver for the dedication of Waterplace Park — and upstaging the governor, Bruce Sundlun, who waited on shore.

In 1999, another linchpin of downtown’s rebirth opened — the Providence Place mall.

Although it was primarily a state-backed project, Cianci was also involved. Paolino, then the state economic development director, recalls a trip that he, Sundlun and Cianci took to Seattle to meet with officials from Nordstrom’s, which became an anchor store at the mall.

But Cianci didn’t like Sundlun’s successor, Lincoln Almond, who was governor when the mall opened. Almond, who had investigated Cianci’s City Hall as the U.S. Attorney in the 1980s, pointed to Cianci’s grandstanding and governance as factors in scaring away some businesses, including the Pfizer pharmaceutical company.

ON A RECENT Saturday, Cliff Wood rolled downtown from the East Side on an electric moped.

Wood, elected last year as a city councilman from Ward 2, worked previously for Mayor Cicilline as the head of his arts, culture and tourism office. He now works for Cornish Associates, the downtown development firm started by Arnold “Buff” Chace, which has spearheaded the revival of the Westminster Street corridor over the past 16 years.

Wood stopped first at Market Square, near RISD, where a crowd of parents and children were waiting for theater events as part of First Works Providence. He then drove up Westminster to the Providence Market, a weekly arts and crafts bazaar in a lot on the corner of Union Street.

Sitting at a sidewalk table at Caffe Tazza, Wood people-watched as shoppers drifted in and out of the new shops along Westminster, including a bookstore and a furniture store. Several hundred people live above the shops in condos and apartments built by Cornish.

“Five years ago, you couldn’t get a sandwich downtown on the weekend,” said Wood. “Things are still evolving, but it’s night and day.”

One of Cianci’s strengths was his tireless promotion of the arts and historic preservation.

He didn’t create WaterFire — that was the inspiration of artist Barnaby Evans — but he supported it and helped sell it, pitching it on his frequent appearances on Don Imus’s national radio show and posing for photos in one of the Venetian gondolas that a private entrepreneur imported to give people rides. The mayor who would famously attend the opening of an envelope became a fixture at WaterFire, holding court at an outdoor table at Café Nuovo.

Cianci also helped rescue the Providence Performing Arts Center from the wrecking ball in the 1970s and then supported its expansion in the 1990s, so that it could attract bigger traveling Broadway shows.

“He was very good at putting the city in the spotlight … a very, very good salesman,” said Wood. “However, he wasn’t so good at sustaining things, working at the nitty gritty when the cameras were off. That’s part of the tragedy of Buddy Cianci — he had so much talent, but he squandered the public trust.”

For all his entertainment value, critics say, Cianci could also be a drag on Providence’s progress with his bullying nature, mismanagement and corruption.

Donald R. Sweitzer, a senior vice president for GTECH, praised the “new leadership” of Mayor Cicilline, along with Governor Carcieri, in helping to convince the lottery giant to move its headquarters and 500 employees from West Greenwich to Providence.

“I don’t know that we would have even considered it [under Cianci], but there was a new climate and a new environment in Providence that made it very attractive to a big company,” said Sweitzer.

Sweitzer recalls a Saturday morning meeting in the governor’s office with state officials and members of the Rhode Island congressional delegation, eager to keep GTECH from leaving the state. Carcieri, he said, looked out the window and said, “You ought to build your building right there.”

Asked if GTECH would have done so had Cianci been mayor, Sweitzer replied, “Probably not.”

James Procaccianti, president of the Cranston-based Procaccianti Group, has become very active in Providence since buying the Westin hotel in 2005. His company, which builds hotels and shopping centers across the country, is building a second Westin tower with retail, hotel rooms and condos, recently refaced the former Holiday Inn beside the newly renovated Civic Center and has plans for more development at the old police headquarters and Fogarty Building. He also wants to bring in a supermarket, to make it easier for people to “live, work and play” downtown.

Procaccianti said he would have been interested in buying the Westin even if Cianci were still mayor. But he praised Cicilline’s leadership.

“I couldn’t be happier with the support we’ve received from the mayor,” said Procaccianti. “From the first day of our relationship, we knew that we would get a quick answer.”

Laurie White, president of the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce, says the business community thinks “very highly” of Cicilline for his ideas and for running “a very predictable administration.”

“People know how to engage with Cicilline on economic development,” said White. “He’s brought a different dimension, focusing on business and economic development and not just tourism.”

Cicilline is actively engaged, she said, in working with Providence hospitals and universities, on a level not previously seen, to leverage their lucrative research grants to create good-paying jobs in such fields as health care and technology.

Another view, from WaterFire creator Barnaby Evans, splits the credit between Cianci and Cicilline.

“Both mayors have had great vision and faith in the potential of what the city can become,” said Evans. “It’s about everybody putting their own log on the fire, to make the city burn brightly.”

PROBLEMS, OF COURSE, persist in Providence — taxes, schools, poverty, drugs.

Paolino, who is frustrated that Cicilline has not followed some of his ideas for enlivening downtown, says that the mayor can’t keep raising taxes and relying on state aid that never comes. He needs to create jobs, grow the tax base.

And change is an organic process. A city evolves in cycles longer than a mayor’s term in office. The politician in office at any given time, notes Paolino, is bound to take the credit for good things that happen on his or her watch.

“It’s not fair to compare Cianci and Cicilline,” says Paolino. “They’re two different personalities. And one was in for 20 years, the other has been mayor for 5.”

Despite the urban woes, some point to signs of new life and spirit in Providence. A new wave of younger people, including many artists, are moving into funky lofts in the West End and Olneyville. Barbara Fields, director of a nonprofit group that supports affordable housing, the Rhode Island Local Initiatives Support Corp., says there is new energy with an influx of younger residents, artists, and immigrants from the Dominican Republic and Liberia.

She credits the leadership of Cicilline and his police chief, Col. Dean Esserman, for engaging community groups in ways that Cianci’s administration never did.

“One of the outstanding and astonishing changes is the unbelievable relationship we now have with the Providence Police Department,” said Fields, who has been with Rhode Island LISC for 16 years.

Community policing and a more professional police department, freed of the testing and cheating scandals of the past, have had an impact, particularly in addressing drug and crime problems in the West End and the South Side. And city planning officials have been more responsive in helping with affordable housing, which Fields says has been created at six times the rate of the 1990s.

“We couldn’t build these kinds of relationships before,” said Fields, who said that whenever she would try to engage Cianci, “I’d get two minutes of serious discussion, and then it would go off to some other place.”

Cicilline, she says, is more concerned “with functioning city departments — the structural stuff that needs to change to make a city function. Those things were sorely lacking.”

AT HIS Caffe Dolce Vita on Federal Hill, Gianfranco Marrocco settles into a booth and offers a cappuccino.

The tables outside are crowded for lunch on this gorgeous summer afternoon. The fountain in DePasquale Plaza tinkles musically. A few nights earlier, several hundred people had thronged the square for the fourth annual Opera on the Hill summer series — part of Cicilline’s neighborhood arts series.

Marrocco also owns Mediterraneo, one of Cianci’s favorite haunts, Geppetto’s pizza and the Hotel Dolce Villa. Marrocco was close to Cianci, and hosted a farewell dinner for him at Mediterraneo before Cianci reported to prison in 2002.

“Buddy was the catalyst behind everything that’s going on today,” says Marrocco.

But he also credits Cicilline, for whom he held a fundraiser the month after Cianci went to prison, “for maintaining and executing and taking things to a new level.”

Marrocco reminisces about opening Dolce Vita in 1992, in a smaller, rented space with a crumbling kitchen ceiling and Tony the Fruit Man living upstairs. Winos slept outside on park benches that the city had recently installed, urinating where Marrocco hoped to serve expensive cappuccinos and pastries.

Shortly before that, he and his partner had gone to the mayor’s office, unannounced, bringing samples of the cakes they were importing from Italy.

“Buddy, in typical grandiose fashion, showed us in and said, ‘Let’s see what you got.’ He tasted the cakes and said, ‘This is incredible. This is fantastic.’ And he gave us his blessing — the whole nine.”

Later, Marrocco called the mayor about the drunks outside, and asked if the city could remove the benches.

“Are you crazy?,” he recalls Cianci’s response. “I just put those in — they cost X dollars.”

But Marrocco begged Cianci to come see, and the mayor did.

“All right,” he said, shaking his head. “But I’m not taking them all out — I’ll leave a few.”

Cianci became a regular patron at Dolce Vita — “bringing all the glamour and hype,” Marrocco adds — and even helped get the fountain working regularly again.

“He was the king of the one-liner and king of the insult,” says Marrocco. “He definitely had a way of — and he’ll hate me saying this — sugarcoating things. If the ProJo was going to have a bad story, he’d call a press conference and announce something, like the city was going to build an ice rink, and Fleet was sponsoring it, and it wouldn’t cost the city any money.”

One day, over a glass of wine, Cianci said, “Marrocco, you’ve gotta do a boutique hotel there.”

Now that Cianci is free, Marrocco doesn’t expect him to resume his regular table at Mediterraneo. The two men have gone their separate ways, he says, but he won’t say why.

IN AN INTERVIEW in the mayor’s office on Thursday, Cicilline tried to stick to his message about what has happened A.D. — After David — as opposed to B.C. — Before Cianci.

He ticked off his accomplishments: restoring public confidence, improving the police department, reducing the crime rate, increasing the tax base, $3 billion in private investment, new public parks, some progress in the schools, reducing the government by 7 percent, or 445 jobs.

Of all those things, he was asked, what would have occurred if Cianci had continued as mayor?

“None of it,” snapped Cicilline. Then, after a pause, he continued: “All of that was a direct result of a lot of people working very hard. I mean, I shouldn’t say none of it. I don’t know. That’s an impossible question. It’s a hypothetical question. It’s impossible to answer.”

In recent weeks, as Cianci prepared for his reentry into Providence, Paolino says, Cianci has been enthused about trying to promote The 903 condo complex and the surrounding neighborhood. He has been meeting with other developers and officials from the Coastal Resources Management Council, says Paolino, and also spoken to Barnaby Evans about possibly extending WaterFire up the Woonasquatucket.

“Everybody should just get over it — forget the paranoia about the past and look to the future,” says Paolino. “Buddy Cianci is a human being. He’s been a part of the fabric of this community for 30 years, whether you like him or not. He’s a citizen. He has his faults. He’s a smart man. He just spent five years in prison. And he’s coming back.”

With staff reports from Daniel Barbarisi.

mstanton@projo.com