Public Parks Around Us – 2

I was talking about the public parks in Rhode Island and presented views from two of them in the previous post. This is a continuation of the same theme. Let’s go …

This post is dedicated to the memory of our dear neighbor Rick Denoncour who passed away a week ago Monday. His funeral service will take place this evening. We will all miss Rick.

Beavertail State Park and Lighthouse

Beavertail State Park is at the tip of the Jamestown island in the Narragansett Bay. It was the first lighthouse in the state. Built in 1749, it burned down and rebuilt twice. The current one was built in 1851. (More on Providence Journal) The granite lighthouse is also a museum and a reservable space for special events.

Until the last few years, we could drive around the lighthouse but because of land erosion, they stopped vehicular traffic after a certain point to protect the lighthouse. So, we parked on the west side of the lighthouse and walked up to it on the pedestrian walkway. The scenery was quite pleasant, the breeze, refreshing. Here is the Google Map capture of the park and the lighthouse. We parked in the parking lot slightly below the middle of the image. Many visitors were enjoying the park and the scenery on a cloudy day.

The following are the photographs we took at the Beavertail Lighthouse. Mine are all in infrared and the colors in some are false colors although they may look somewhat real. That is the flexibility of infrared captures; we don’t need to worry about color accuracy!

Collier Point Park

Although open to the public, Collier Point Park is privately owned by one of the power companies it used to fuel. It served as the fuel hub for the two adjacent power plants in its early days. Ships carrying coal (colliers) docked there and unloaded it on small local trains to transfer it to the power plants. Remnants of the old structures are still all around the park and some may even puzzle the visitors.

It is a small park but offers locals access to the water and a place to launch their boats for sailing. The old equipment and structures were converted to symbolic abstract art. It also provides surfaces for graffiti scribblers. Unlike the murals, these are not commissioned and haphazard.

It recently reopened after being closed for several months due to vandalism. We revisited it and found the vertical surfaces covered with graffiti. One piece grabbed my attention, sure enough, it was the same shape I saw earlier at another location. In the following gallery, look at the eleventh image and compare it to the first image in the gallery at the bottom of an old article from four years ago.

Several viewing platforms are also a part of the added industrial art pieces according to an article in GoLocalProv. We could view and photograph the I-Way bridge on the I-195 freeway. Coincidentally, there are two bridges side-by-side going east and west. The eastbound bridge, the one on the other side from our vantage point, is being demolished because of structural faults discovered about six months ago. A new bridge to replace that is in the plans but there is no estimated completion time yet.

After we left the park, we made a pit stop at an industrial area to see the several wind turbines. These were not particularly big but up close, they look much bigger than they appear from a distance. Now imagine the giant ones offshore! We tried to photograph some but they were obstructed by the buildings or the trees around. After that, it was time to return home.

In the Google Map capture below, the park occupies the central part of the image.

Below are the photographs we took at Collier Point Park and later of the wind turbines.