Metalsmith Lu Heintz has been the talk of Olneyville, after the trash cans she crafted under contract with the city have been declined because of views she has expressed. Providence Journal photo / Andrew Dickerman

PROVIDENCE — The four trash cans that have divided a neighborhood sit in the window of a storefront in Olneyville, waiting for a fractured community to figure out what to do with them.

On the can farthest to the right, the words that have caused so much controversy are easily visible, carved into the side of the green and white receptacle titled “gentrification.”

“In the beginning of the 21st century, with the financial and political support of the City of Providence, private developers purchased much of the industrial property in Olneyville, creating luxury living in the city’s poorest neighborhood.”

Followed by: “How will we right this wrong?”

Those words surprised the organization that commissioned the cans, the Olneyville Housing Corporation; the incendiary statements are not what they ordered, they say. They thought they were getting a brief history of Olneyville carved into the metal cans. They rejected the set outright, contending that this is a neighborhood improvement project, not a work of public art.

“They’re not the cans we ordered or looked at so we didn’t feel obliged to accept them,” said Frank Shea, director of Olneyville Housing.

The metalsmith who built the cans, Lu Heintz, still wants them displayed. When she set to work on them, she didn’t know that some of the money backing the project came from the out-of-town developer that many in the neighborhood see as the cause of the very gentrification she decries. She and other artists and activists in the neighborhood are crying censorship.

“What I provided was a people’s history,” Heintz said. “Why is this text being suppressed and what does it tell us about the people that are suppressing it?”

OLNEYVILLE is a neighborhood in transition. But not everyone agrees with where it’s going.

In Olneyville, everything is seen through the prism of recent development — which boils down to whether you support or oppose Struever Brothers.

Struever Bros., Eccles & Rouse, a Baltimore developer, is responsible for two major mill redevelopments along Valley Street, the Rising Sun Mills and the American Locomotive Works, together worth almost $400 million in new development.

Local activists fault Struever for driving up property values and rents in the neighborhood. Led by the Olneyville Neighborhood Association they have come out regularly to city meetings to speak out against Struever.

This spring, ONA opposed a United Way plan to locate its new state headquarters in Olneyville, simply because they might occupy a Struever building. Struever has tried to work with the activists, and has donated money to a number of community improvement projects, but to a vocal segment, they are still not welcome. Bill Struever himself has said that he has never run into the kind of negativity and opposition he has seen in Olneyville.

Now these trash cans have become the next front in that conflict. On Sept. 25, 100 people came out to a public forum on the trash can issue at the Steel Yard, the nonprofit Olneyville arts collaborative that was hired to manage the can project. The American Civil Liberties Union has weighed in, pushing the city to display the cans. Other arts groups in the city have come to the support of the artist, lobbying for the cans to be seen publicly.

The debate about what to do with the trash cans will continue for the rest of this month. But to many, what happens with the cans is irrelevant; that this community could become so splintered over such a small issue is discouraging to those who see Olneyville as a special place in Providence.

“I feel like the community is kind of pulled apart right now,” said Drake Patten, director of the Steel Yard. “They’ve become a stand-in for issues we have for developers in this neighborhood, but they’re still just trash cans.”

OLNEYVILLE has long been one of the state’s poorest neighborhoods.

Located at the junction of Westminster Street and Broadway, just west of Route 10, Olneyville Square is a mÉlange of businesses selling goods in English and Spanish, of Rent-a-Centers hawking goods to those with poor credit, with a Western Union office right in the center for recent immigrants to send money back home.

Up Valley Street was the locally venerated Fort Thunder, an artist collective since demolished to make way for the Eagle Square shopping plaza. Traditionally, many artists have made their homes and studio spaces in the area, blending with the variety of immigrant cultures to give the area a vibrant, multi-layered personality all its own.

Inseparable from that, however, has always been poverty. Olneyville’s median sales value in 2006 for a single-family home was half the citywide average, and the area’s median income hovers around $20,000.

But things are changing.

The property tax revaluation conducted this summer sent single-family home property values shooting up by 35 percent, an average of $71,000 per property, higher than the citywide average of 26 percent. Multi-family homes also rose by a rate higher than the citywide average.

The cans were commissioned under a city program called Neighborhood Markets, according to Deputy Planning Director Amintha Cinotti. The program gives federal grant money to local merchants associations to organize neighborhood improvement projects. Last fall, Olneyville received more money than any other neighborhood, $45,000. The responsibility for using the money fell to the Olneyville Collaborative, an omnibus organization primarily run by the Olneyville Housing Corporation.

When Struever heard about the program, the developer donated $25,000 for whatever displays the local organizations saw fit to create, with no conditions.

Among the ideas was a project to create a series of 20 trash cans, created by local artists, administered through the Steel Yard. The project would cost $16,875.

The Steel Yard’s Howie Snieder picked five of the group’s artists, and asked them for ideas.

“I selected five artists from the Steel Yard community. All had a personal connection with the neighborhood,” Snieder said.

Among them was Lu Heintz, who founded the blacksmithing program at the Steel Yard.

Heintz submitted several early sketches of the cans: she planned to use text, wrapping around the receptacle, to present relevant facts about Olneyville. One sketch gave the definition of the word Woonasquatucket, the former name for Olneyville. Another referenced the number of manufacturing workers the neighborhood used to have.

Shea said he was satisfied with this early design review of Heintz’s work.

Heintz continued her project, forging, fabricating, sand-blasting, and powder-coating the metal, and laser-cutting words into the four cans.

When she unveiled the final product this spring, Shea said he was surprised. He maintains that they rejected the cans because they differed so dramatically from the original sketch, not because some money came from Struever.

“The tone was very different than what was originally proposed,” Shea said. “The amount of text is significantly greater than in the design presented.”

The other artists’ work was consistent with the design review, Shea said, and was accepted. The Steel Yard did not charge Olneyville Housing for Heintz’s cans, but paid Heintz more than $3,000 for her work, and took possession of the cans.

Clay Rockefeller, a founder of the Steel Yard, thinks there is more his group could have done. “In essence I believe that we at the Steel Yard made an error in our management of this process,” he said. “There should have been a final text review… I believe it really took the clients aback.”

But to Heintz, it runs far deeper than that.

“I made this work for the public, for the community of Olneyville. I made this work for the people that live in Olneyville,” she said, telling their story from a “disenfranchised people’s economic, social, and political perspective.”

She said that she was the one taken aback — by the level of opposition.

“I was surprised by the weight of the objections of a number of individuals,” she said.

She didn’t like that she was pressured from many fronts to change her tune, and that she was not told initially that Struever had provided some financial backing for the project.

“It was significant to me that the full source of the funding wasn’t disclosed at the outset to the artists,” she said.

John Sinnott, senior development director for Struever Bros., said that he was only vaguely aware of the can controversy. He said that the company has nothing to do with rejecting the cans.

In the last few months, the story became known through the neighborhood, and it became about more than Olneyville. The Neighborhood Association rallied behind the artist, and also defined the conflict in class and racial terms. The ACLU sent a letter to the city pushing the issue.

“It would be a regrettable defeat for artistic freedom if the city were to allow this artwork to fall prey to censorship because some representatives of the Olneyville community find the political message offensive,” Rhode Island ACLU Director Steven Brown wrote.

Artists groups from elsewhere in the city backed Heintz as well.

“If I was walking around the streets of any other city and I experienced those trash cans, I would be awed by any city that had the boldness to speak about its history in that way,” said Umberto Crenca, artistic director at AS220 and a member of the Providence School Committee.

In an effort to clear the air, the Steel Yard organized the forum late last month about what they felt were the issues behind this controversy.

They wanted to address the bigger questions — what is public art, what are the responsibilities of the artist, what is the relationship of artist to community?

But while there was some talk of those issues, the night devolved into raised voices and accusations, another chapter in the regular back-and-forth about the future of Olneyville.

The neighborhood is not communicating well anymore, Patten said.

“We’re not listening. We’re not offering solutions. There’s something here where we’re not communicating,” she said. “We’ve gotten really good at yelling at each other. We’re not so good at hearing each other… It’s easier just to be upset and overwhelmed.”

The Steel Yard plans to make a final decision on the fate of the cans at the end of the month. To bring in public input, The Steel Yard has a link on its Web site, www.thesteelyard.org, where users can post their views. And Heintz is planning to put a suggestion box by the window where the cans now sit, in the window of the women’s art collective, the Dirt Palace.

Until then, they are visible in the storefront in Olneyville Square, important art to some passerby, just trash cans to others, a reminder to all that nothing is simple lately in Olneyville.

dbarbari@projo.com