I HAVE SPENT my entire life around Providence’s working waterfront. Having grown up in Washington Park, where I still live, I feel privileged to have the sights and sounds of shipping and industry in the Port of Providence right in my backyard.

I have always been fascinated with our maritime history. I love looking at old 19th and early 20th Century photos of majestic ships making their way up to wharves that once lined the Providence River all the way up to where Hemenway’s restaurant is today. The photos show a bustling waterfront, with lumber, coal, whale blubber, cotton and many other goods being offloaded by wheelbarrow and horse and wagon for distribution to the mills and factories that powered the Industrial Revolution and helped our capital city prosper.

While much has clearly changed since those days, the Port of Providence remains a vibrant waterfront, filled with activity and commerce. Today, the piers and wharves of the Providence River handle ships and barges that bring in gasoline, home-heating oil, cement, highway rock salt and coal. They also take on scrap metal for export to international ports.

For some reason, however, city leaders seem to think there is something unattractive about this scene. They have commissioned studies that show a future Allens Avenue waterfront without any marine or industrial businesses. Similarly, developers show off fancy renderings of waterfront condos, hotels and recreational marinas that leave out any views of the area’s piers, oil-storage tanks, and salt and coal piles.

I find many of these supposedly “ugly” and “noisy” businesses — boat repair, scrap-metal handling, and oil, coal and salt offloading — to be beautiful, and music to my ears. Why? Because those “ugly,” “dirty” and “noisy” businesses that the city seems so intent on doing away with represent commerce and good jobs that Rhode Island cannot afford to lose.

Take, for example, Promet Marine’s shipyard. Filled with U.S. Coast Guard cutters, fishing vessels, giant barges and the small army of tradesmen who repair the vessels, the yard is one of the most eye-appealing places on all of Allens Avenue. It is truly a sight to behold when a marine travel-lift picks up out of the water and transports a 400-ton, 70-foot fishing trawler. So is the sight of work on these vessels, with skilled blue-collar tradesmen working six days a week to repair the propellers, shafts, rudders and hulls, from stem to stern.

While the world may be moving toward an information economy, the work at Promet makes it clear that we still need small and large machinery of all types — gears, wheels, cables, chains, cranes, compressors, generators, pumps — and men to tend to all of these machines.

Quonset Point Naval Air Station was once one of the largest employers in Rhode Island, with 5,000 civilian employees, and a boon to businesses in our state. When Quonset Point was closed by the Navy in 1974, many local businesses got the ax. No one needed welding rods, lumber, nuts and bolts, rivets for aircraft, pumps or generators, batteries, hydraulic oil, air filters, transmission fluid, anti-freeze, lubricating oil, aircraft tires and aviation fuel. The loss of those 5,000 jobs set our entire state back, and to this day we have not been able to rebuild Quonset into the vibrant port that it once was.

We simply cannot allow the same thing to happen to the Port of Providence, and the thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars in economic impact that it generates. Permanently silencing the sounds of industrial commerce in the port and replacing “ugly” businesses with the glitzy façades of expensive waterfront condos would border on suicide for our already badly faltering economy.

When I go to bed at night, I often hear the scrap cranes loading ships at ProvPort’s Wharf No. 6 berth, and the big dump trucks scuttling about. Most folks probably think this is a nuisance, but to me it is a good sound, the sound of men working and stevedores loading cargo into warehouses. The clatter and clanking at midnight are truly a joyful noise. There is no profit in silence.

David Carroll has lived and worked around the Port of Providence all of his life.