Weybosset Street, viewed from turret of the Warwick Building (1891), with PPAC at right

Photo by David Brussat

CONSULTANTS and engineers are working on a strategy for the area outside the Providence Performing Arts Center, or so I’ve heard. I don’t know what the strategy will be, only what it should be. I can sum it up in two words:

Outdoor cafés.

The intersection of Mathewson and Weybosset, overseen by proud PPAC, seems tailor-made for café society. It has sidewalks wide enough for outdoor seating on long stretches. Across from PPAC, a pair of pizza joints, Saki’s and Pizza Queen, occupy downtown’s oldest building, the Benjamin Dyer Block, designed by John Holden Greene in 1820 (though heavily altered). Space exists near PPAC for at least a dozen more restaurants with al fresco dining. Businesses that close at night could “lend” their sidewalks to restaurants for café seating — or they could go into the restaurant business themselves. More space would open up if the Grant’s Block site were used fully as a plaza (part of it, in front of caffe tazza, already is; the rest is parking). Better yet, build a new building there with shops on Weybosset. The 1914 comfort station, now a police substation, offers a great opportunity for a fashionable see-and-be-seen outdoor café.

What this means is that the city could enliven the area outside PPAC without lifting its little finger and with its arm tied behind its back. My big worry is that the big idea of the urbanologists will be to raze the comfort station to make way for traffic. That puts the cart before the horse. Why not save taxpayers money by letting entrepreneurs open cafés instead?

I recall that years ago I would sit outside Intermezzo (long closed but operated now by PPAC as a café on show nights). I would watch people mill around before a performance. Hey, I was single, and it was fun. (Still is.) Friends would stop to chat. The proximity of patrons and pedestrians encourages a robust sociability. Now and then I’d even see a show.

Even more eons ago, I wrote a column, “Step lively, Providence!” (May 29, 1992), that advocated outdoor cafés near PPAC: “I can think of no single thing better calculated to ease the mad rush back to the car that is the chief goal of the theatergoer once the show is over. Without nipping that dire impulse in the bud, a visit downtown will continue to resemble a commando raid — a nighttime incursion into the theater zone and, mission accomplished, a swift return home.” That remains largely true even today.

And yet much progress to enliven all of downtown has been made. We have the mall, Waterplace, WaterFire, etc., etc. Outdoor dining has been successful at Union Station Plaza, with the Capital Grille, Union Station Brewery, Ri-Ra and Citron (lately minus Raphael’s, alas). At Waterplace Park itself are the Waterplace Restaurant and Ruth’s Chris Steak House. (An eatery devoted to dessert, Finale, apparently will not open until early next year.) But the newest buildings at Waterplace seem too cold and sterile to foster a really great outdoor-café society, at least not on the order of the best sidewalk-dining scene in Providence: DePasquale Square, on Federal Hill.

Just off Providence’s restaurant mile along Atwells Avenue, DePasquale Square assembles the best attributes of al fresco dining: a number of restaurants on a plaza with a fountain, lined on three sides by pleasant older buildings. Its urbanity brings Rome to mind. It’s “a little taste of Italy,” as they say. Hiring a troupe of musicians or a cabaret singer (such as Laurel Casey) adds even more ambiance.

But that’s on Federal Hill. In downtown, the plaza next to Hotel Providence at Mathewson and Westminster offers space most reminiscent of Europe. Yet there is room for only one restaurant. Aspire seeks to animate its lovely Grace Square, but its game effort suffers from tables that, while elegant, are too big and unwieldy — that is, they seat too few patrons and it is too hard for them to move tables and chairs around to accommodate a fluid sociability. It should trade in its tables for the small, Parisian-style tables that Bravo has used at its more restricted corner of Washington and Empire. In fact, Bravo, AS220’s Taqueria Pacifica and the little takeout China Star have turned Empire into quite a neat little outdoor scene. Nearby, Cuban Revolution’s sidewalk tables animate Aborn Street beyond Gracie’s. Tables outside of the Trinity Brewhouse likewise enliven upper Fountain.

But the best opportunity to transplant the delights of DePasquale Square downtown is near PPAC at the intersection of Weybosset and Mathewson. How fortunate that doing so would be such a snap!

Planning fuddy-duddies will worry, “What about winter?” I reply: “Quebec City.” There they use awnings and heaters to extend outdoor cafés. Other sticks-in-the-mud will ask, “What about parking?” or “What about traffic?” I reply: “New York City.” Parking and traffic problems are signs of success. In addressing them, please don’t put the cart before the horse. First, make places where people want to be.

“Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded,” Yogi Berra is said to have said. He had the right idea. He’d have made a great urbanologist.

David Brussat is a member of The Journal’s editorial board ( dbrussat@projo.com).