Talk:Providence, Rhode Island

Crime/Demographics

This is the second time I'm bringing this up, but I just want to ask again if there are objections to removing the crime stats from the demographics section. Crime stats are not demographics. So they do not belong in the demographics section. This shouldn't be controversial.

At first I was going to move it to the police section. But what is encyclopedic about any of the crime section? It cites primary sources and one-off statistics for 2019 and 2018. Not encyclopedic. Sativa Inflorescence (talk) 15:26, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

Seven hills

The paragraph is saved by saying "Claimed," but I have my doubts the citation says what it claims. If it does list those sevven hills, then I still don't think it's reliable enough to say anything more than the claim exists.

I can find many claims that providence was built on seven hills searching on Archive.org[1]. However, I can't find anything listing the hills, or giving a detailed history of the claim. I've definitely heard it growing up around here, but with the same ambiguity about what the hills were/are. It seems like a true urban legend.

This providence architecture site[2] hosted by brown has this to say:

Since the last decades of the 19th Century, when the prosperous city busily advertised its qualities, the notion of the seven hills of Providence was frequently evoked. While contours of these hills are perhaps not pronounced enough to be visually identifyable, the idea has survived to this day, and terms such as Smith Hill and College Hill are constantly used to identify locations.

For these reasons, I'm gonna reduce the paragraph to one sentence, without a list, and add this Brown ref. But if someone has a better source, that would be good too. Sativa Inflorescence (talk) 17:12, 15 January 2023 (UTC)

Feral Pigeons

While a very interesting bit of niche info, I don't think the existence of pigeons or their population genetics is "Geography," nor does it deserve such a prominent location in the article. This should go much lower down in the article, perhaps in a separate "fauna" section. It is also confusing because the population genetics refers to "providence," not the pigeons, and so readers who don't check the footnotes may well assume it is referring to humans. 68.230.153.193 (talk) 16:16, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

Fauna sections tend to be lumped in with Geography, so the positioning is an artifact of the high positioning of Geography. CMD (talk) 17:19, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

Then since the population genetics of these very important pigeons is shared with Boston, one can reasonably expect them to also make an appearance in the Boston article's geography section. Can you explain why they do not? 68.230.153.193 (talk) 02:25, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

I suppose no-one has thought to! I encourage you to consider raising a discussion there or adding it yourself. Perhaps that might attract more views here as well. CMD (talk) 03:38, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

Photo request

If anyone visits North Burial Ground and can find J. B. Blanding's headstone it would be wonderful to have a CC-licensed photo jengod (talk) 06:44, 16 December 2023 (UTC)