Waterfront

A few years ago my friend Hayward, who graduated the same year I did, walked into work and announced that he'd just made his last student loan payment for Parsons School of Design. We laughed about how, when we signed our student loan papers at 17 years old and our mothers asked us if we knew what we were getting ourselves into, our response was, This signature alone will be worth millions!


The photos above show the beautiful tiles seen along the waterfront outside the bookstore. The tiles, and the waterfront itself, weren't there when I was in school. The whole area was filled with dirt and bulldozers, under construction for the four years I was at RISD. The piles of dirt and broken down waterfront served as sort of an unspoken barrier between real world Providence and our Ivy League hill side.


As much as I loved RISD, one of my strongest memories was the time I walked right past class. It wasn't that I didn't want to go to class, there was just something deep inside that wondered what would happen if I kept on going. I walked past the textiles building, down the hill, over dirt and around bulldozers, until I found myself at the edge of downtown Providence where I walked into a diner. As class began, a few locals sat at the counter drinking coffee and I ate pancakes with corn syrup syrup, wearing all black and feeling wildly alive.