Harbour Island is also a state of mind
An article about Harbour Island's history and charm
Providence Journal, Friday, November 9, 2007
I can’t tell you how many times over the years I’ve driven down Point Judith Road, on the way to Aunt Carrie’s or Spain or George’s of Galilee, or to catch the Block Island Ferry. But it never occurred to me to turn down any of the little side streets off the busy four-lane highway, or to wonder what was back there behind it. Not until last week, that is. That was when I found the hidden little treasure that is Harbour Island.
I was there because of a blunder I’d made the previous week. In a column about retired South County editor Gerry Goldstein, I’d misspelled the island’s name, carelessly assuming the American “harbor” instead of the British style preferred by the area’s developer. Both Gerry and his eagle-eyed former colleague Rudi Hempe, who lives just up from Harbour Island, spotted the error; Rudi suggested that to make amends, I write about the place.
And so here I was, in the airy cathedral-ceilinged living room of Nancy and Bill Bivona, with its sculptures and stained glass and dramatic floor-to-ceiling picture windows overlooking sparkling Point Judith Pond. (“Salt Pond,” as it’s known locally; but then, it seems that most every salt pond in South County carries that moniker among its neighbors.)
The Bivonas are part of a close-knit bunch, of which Nancy is co-president, called the Harbour Island Garden Group. (Not “club,” says Nancy, who is retired from URI’s Cooperative Extension Service; “we didn’t want rules.”) The group was founded 11 years ago to beautify the island, and over the years has planted 14 gardens and a dozen barrels of flowers. Last year, it gave away hydrangea bushes; this year, it bought and distributed 1,200 daffodils.
A gaggle of the group’s members had gathered to talk to me, including the Bivonas and Hempe, who lives on nearby Foddering Farm Road, a name that recalls a time when cows used to graze on the fodder there. Stu Mason, a retired chef who is president of the Harbour Island Improvement Association, which deals with such questions as sewers, traffic lights and docks, was there, too, with his wife, Betty, who belongs to the garden group. And all of them had stories to tell, including one about the late broadcasting personality Salty Brine.
Salty had a place on Harbour Island, right on the pond, they recall. And the tour boat, Southland, used to point out his house when it sailed by.
He had a boat, too, as many islanders do. “You know the name of his boat was ‘No School Foster-Glocester,’ ” puts in Carol Measom, a recent retiree from Providence’s Groden Center, recalling the catchphrase with which Salty delighted generations of Rhode Island schoolchildren on snowy days.
You could hear the Southland from the shore, day after day, giving its narrated tour, pointing out Salty’s house. And one day, Nancy says with a smile, the mischievous star of local radio and TV turned the tables.
“Salty went out to the Southland in his boat, and said, ‘Here’s Salty Brine himself.’ ”
LIKE SO MANY of the houses in Harbour Island, the Bivonas’ started out much smaller, and has been added onto several times since 1962, when Bill’s parents bought it. “My big advance was to know you could move plumbing,” Nancy, who raised three children in the house and now periodically plays host there to seven grandchildren, says with a smile. “Once I found that out, the world opened up to me.”
A world opened up to her children as well — and not always as she had expected.
The Bivonas had first brought their son Billy to the island “when he was eight weeks, I think,” she says. When he was 13 years old — he’s now 45 — they bought him a 13-foot Boston Whaler, a little motorboat.
They were used to having Billy out on boats, but one day “he didn’t come home and he didn’t come home. And finally, he came in.”
Nonchalantly, he told his parents: “Boy, the water gets rough when you get out to Block Island.”
How had he gotten to the island, a dozen miles offshore, his mother wanted to know. Oh, he said, he’d followed the Block Island Ferry through the breakwater, down the pond at Galilee.
“What made you do that?” asked his surprised mother.
“Well, you didn’t say I couldn’t.”
THE ISLAND WAS called Foddering Place until real-estate agent Jack Walsh renamed it after a ritzier-sounding spot where he’d vacationed in the Bahamas, according to The Way We Were, a book the Garden Group published in 2004.
That was in 1949, when the island was a collection of families’ little “summer camps” strung along dirt roads. Walsh’s boss, developer Roland E. Beauregard, soon erected billboards on Point Judith Road to point the way and help stimulate sales, but neighbors considered them “unsightly,” and they came down in 1967.
These days, there’s no indication of Harbour Island on the main road; you have to drive up Foddering Farm Road to the causeway leading there to find a sign welcoming you to it.
House lots on the island started at $249 in 1950, and Hempe says that his late boss, North Kingstown Standard-Times publisher Frederick J. Wilson Jr., told him he’d had a chance to buy the whole island — all 350 acres — in 1952 for $25,000. “But that was a substantial amount of money,” Hempe says, and Wilson turned the deal down — “he said it was too much money.”
Now individual houses on the island, on their narrow lots, go for $1 million or more if they’re on the water.
BUT IT’S NOT the money their houses might fetch that seems to motivate the members of the garden group. It’s a sense of pride, and in some cases of longstanding family history.
Christine MacManus, a retired art teacher at Wickford Middle School and the group’s other co-president, moved to the island in 1985. She and her husband, Richard, built a house on property that had belonged to his grandparents.
Richard’s family had gone to the island for years in the summer — “all the way from Wakefield,” she says with a laugh; it’s a distance of three or four miles — and eventually a “little fishing shack” stood on the land. It belonged to her husband’s aunt, who was upset that the Town of Narragansett had raised her taxes a few dollars. “And being a Swamp Yankee,” she didn’t want to pay it.
So she gave the shack away; it was moved off the property, the MacManuses never found out where. And she sold them the land, offering a price so low that they felt obligated to talk her up a bit.
“We didn’t have a lot of money,” MacManus recalls, “but we emptied our bank account of every penny and bought that lot.”
She has not regretted the move. It took four years to build a place to live, but when they finally moved in, “I felt like we had won the lottery.”
THE ISLAND’S population is small — there are 321 taxpayers, including a few owners of empty lots — but “there’s a lot of people here in the summer,” says MacManus. “If you live here, you feel like you’re running a bed-and-breakfast. ‘I have company this weekend.’ ‘Well, who doesn’t?’ ”
“We ran out of kayaks this summer,” says Betty Mason, who is retired from her work as a part-time preschool teacher. The Masons have five boats, but it wasn’t enough for all the grandchildren arguing over them. “My daughter said, ‘Do I have to make a reservation?’ ”
Betty and Stu have been coming to the island since 1958, but they moved down full-time 11 years ago from their home in Warwick, not far from the old Great House restaurant across from T.F. Green Airport, where Stu had been a chef.
“It was a big choice, you know,” Betty says facetiously, “staying near the noisy airport or moving down to Harbour Island.”
Eventually, the Masons plan to pass the property on to the next generation.
“We have four children, so it’ll be a big fight!” she says with a laugh. “They all love it down here.”
TO SHOW THEIR own love of the island, the Garden Group’s members have done more than plant their gardens, pick up trash — Bill Bivona and Bob Onosko go out every day gathering garbage along the roads; “it’s amazing the amount of stuff that shows up every single day,” says Nancy — and publish their book. The last couple of years, they have put out photo calendars.
This year’s calendar showed scenes from the island’s gardens. The 2008 calendar, hot off the press, combines a couple of Sherry Leonard’s pretty garden shots (on the pages for June and July) with more general views of the island through the seasons. There’s a lovely view of sunset over the pond by Stu Mason (September), for example, and a shot of a rainbow over Foddering Farm Road by Ron Sienkowski (August).
Copies of the calendar, put together by Betsy Dunton, go for $10, and are expected to be hot sellers; last year’s printing of 230 sold out, and this year’s was expanded only to 250.
To get a calendar, call Gloria Roman at (401) 782-6653 or Betty Mason at (401) 789-1002.
“We think they make nice Christmas gifts,” says Nancy Bivona.
And the money will benefit the island’s upkeep and beautification, to which its residents have contributed in so many ways.
Providence Journal, Friday, November 9, 2007
I can’t tell you how many times over the years I’ve driven down Point Judith Road, on the way to Aunt Carrie’s or Spain or George’s of Galilee, or to catch the Block Island Ferry. But it never occurred to me to turn down any of the little side streets off the busy four-lane highway, or to wonder what was back there behind it. Not until last week, that is. That was when I found the hidden little treasure that is Harbour Island.
I was there because of a blunder I’d made the previous week. In a column about retired South County editor Gerry Goldstein, I’d misspelled the island’s name, carelessly assuming the American “harbor” instead of the British style preferred by the area’s developer. Both Gerry and his eagle-eyed former colleague Rudi Hempe, who lives just up from Harbour Island, spotted the error; Rudi suggested that to make amends, I write about the place.
And so here I was, in the airy cathedral-ceilinged living room of Nancy and Bill Bivona, with its sculptures and stained glass and dramatic floor-to-ceiling picture windows overlooking sparkling Point Judith Pond. (“Salt Pond,” as it’s known locally; but then, it seems that most every salt pond in South County carries that moniker among its neighbors.)
The Bivonas are part of a close-knit bunch, of which Nancy is co-president, called the Harbour Island Garden Group. (Not “club,” says Nancy, who is retired from URI’s Cooperative Extension Service; “we didn’t want rules.”) The group was founded 11 years ago to beautify the island, and over the years has planted 14 gardens and a dozen barrels of flowers. Last year, it gave away hydrangea bushes; this year, it bought and distributed 1,200 daffodils.
A gaggle of the group’s members had gathered to talk to me, including the Bivonas and Hempe, who lives on nearby Foddering Farm Road, a name that recalls a time when cows used to graze on the fodder there. Stu Mason, a retired chef who is president of the Harbour Island Improvement Association, which deals with such questions as sewers, traffic lights and docks, was there, too, with his wife, Betty, who belongs to the garden group. And all of them had stories to tell, including one about the late broadcasting personality Salty Brine.
Salty had a place on Harbour Island, right on the pond, they recall. And the tour boat, Southland, used to point out his house when it sailed by.
He had a boat, too, as many islanders do. “You know the name of his boat was ‘No School Foster-Glocester,’ ” puts in Carol Measom, a recent retiree from Providence’s Groden Center, recalling the catchphrase with which Salty delighted generations of Rhode Island schoolchildren on snowy days.
You could hear the Southland from the shore, day after day, giving its narrated tour, pointing out Salty’s house. And one day, Nancy says with a smile, the mischievous star of local radio and TV turned the tables.
“Salty went out to the Southland in his boat, and said, ‘Here’s Salty Brine himself.’ ”
LIKE SO MANY of the houses in Harbour Island, the Bivonas’ started out much smaller, and has been added onto several times since 1962, when Bill’s parents bought it. “My big advance was to know you could move plumbing,” Nancy, who raised three children in the house and now periodically plays host there to seven grandchildren, says with a smile. “Once I found that out, the world opened up to me.”
A world opened up to her children as well — and not always as she had expected.
The Bivonas had first brought their son Billy to the island “when he was eight weeks, I think,” she says. When he was 13 years old — he’s now 45 — they bought him a 13-foot Boston Whaler, a little motorboat.
They were used to having Billy out on boats, but one day “he didn’t come home and he didn’t come home. And finally, he came in.”
Nonchalantly, he told his parents: “Boy, the water gets rough when you get out to Block Island.”
How had he gotten to the island, a dozen miles offshore, his mother wanted to know. Oh, he said, he’d followed the Block Island Ferry through the breakwater, down the pond at Galilee.
“What made you do that?” asked his surprised mother.
“Well, you didn’t say I couldn’t.”
THE ISLAND WAS called Foddering Place until real-estate agent Jack Walsh renamed it after a ritzier-sounding spot where he’d vacationed in the Bahamas, according to The Way We Were, a book the Garden Group published in 2004.
That was in 1949, when the island was a collection of families’ little “summer camps” strung along dirt roads. Walsh’s boss, developer Roland E. Beauregard, soon erected billboards on Point Judith Road to point the way and help stimulate sales, but neighbors considered them “unsightly,” and they came down in 1967.
These days, there’s no indication of Harbour Island on the main road; you have to drive up Foddering Farm Road to the causeway leading there to find a sign welcoming you to it.
House lots on the island started at $249 in 1950, and Hempe says that his late boss, North Kingstown Standard-Times publisher Frederick J. Wilson Jr., told him he’d had a chance to buy the whole island — all 350 acres — in 1952 for $25,000. “But that was a substantial amount of money,” Hempe says, and Wilson turned the deal down — “he said it was too much money.”
Now individual houses on the island, on their narrow lots, go for $1 million or more if they’re on the water.
BUT IT’S NOT the money their houses might fetch that seems to motivate the members of the garden group. It’s a sense of pride, and in some cases of longstanding family history.
Christine MacManus, a retired art teacher at Wickford Middle School and the group’s other co-president, moved to the island in 1985. She and her husband, Richard, built a house on property that had belonged to his grandparents.
Richard’s family had gone to the island for years in the summer — “all the way from Wakefield,” she says with a laugh; it’s a distance of three or four miles — and eventually a “little fishing shack” stood on the land. It belonged to her husband’s aunt, who was upset that the Town of Narragansett had raised her taxes a few dollars. “And being a Swamp Yankee,” she didn’t want to pay it.
So she gave the shack away; it was moved off the property, the MacManuses never found out where. And she sold them the land, offering a price so low that they felt obligated to talk her up a bit.
“We didn’t have a lot of money,” MacManus recalls, “but we emptied our bank account of every penny and bought that lot.”
She has not regretted the move. It took four years to build a place to live, but when they finally moved in, “I felt like we had won the lottery.”
THE ISLAND’S population is small — there are 321 taxpayers, including a few owners of empty lots — but “there’s a lot of people here in the summer,” says MacManus. “If you live here, you feel like you’re running a bed-and-breakfast. ‘I have company this weekend.’ ‘Well, who doesn’t?’ ”
“We ran out of kayaks this summer,” says Betty Mason, who is retired from her work as a part-time preschool teacher. The Masons have five boats, but it wasn’t enough for all the grandchildren arguing over them. “My daughter said, ‘Do I have to make a reservation?’ ”
Betty and Stu have been coming to the island since 1958, but they moved down full-time 11 years ago from their home in Warwick, not far from the old Great House restaurant across from T.F. Green Airport, where Stu had been a chef.
“It was a big choice, you know,” Betty says facetiously, “staying near the noisy airport or moving down to Harbour Island.”
Eventually, the Masons plan to pass the property on to the next generation.
“We have four children, so it’ll be a big fight!” she says with a laugh. “They all love it down here.”
TO SHOW THEIR own love of the island, the Garden Group’s members have done more than plant their gardens, pick up trash — Bill Bivona and Bob Onosko go out every day gathering garbage along the roads; “it’s amazing the amount of stuff that shows up every single day,” says Nancy — and publish their book. The last couple of years, they have put out photo calendars.
This year’s calendar showed scenes from the island’s gardens. The 2008 calendar, hot off the press, combines a couple of Sherry Leonard’s pretty garden shots (on the pages for June and July) with more general views of the island through the seasons. There’s a lovely view of sunset over the pond by Stu Mason (September), for example, and a shot of a rainbow over Foddering Farm Road by Ron Sienkowski (August).
Copies of the calendar, put together by Betsy Dunton, go for $10, and are expected to be hot sellers; last year’s printing of 230 sold out, and this year’s was expanded only to 250.
To get a calendar, call Gloria Roman at (401) 782-6653 or Betty Mason at (401) 789-1002.
“We think they make nice Christmas gifts,” says Nancy Bivona.
And the money will benefit the island’s upkeep and beautification, to which its residents have contributed in so many ways.
