Figure 1. Redwood Rovensky Delivery Room, 2021.
Back to the Future: Restoration of the Rovensky Delivery Room by Benedict Leca, Ph.D. We have a tendency to speculate about what historic structures might have actually “been like” originally, especially their interior spaces, which are far more likely to have sustained alterations than exterior architecture. On one hand, this helps us to locate in time aspects of what we’re experiencing during a visit, and to reimagine the past with greater accuracy. On the other hand, it speaks to false notions of purity and stasis—because buildings, particularly those of long vintage as the Redwood, are living things, emergent and adaptable to the needs of their users. The main structure of the Redwood narrates this very process: a series of extensions added along the west-to-east axis over 275 years. There are of course fixed points in a building’s evolution that allow for informed, historically sound restorations. Such is the subject here: the Historical Preservation & Heritage Commissionapproved restoration of the Rovensky Delivery Room, the interior of the extension designed by George Champlin Mason in 1875 and endowed in 2006 by the Grace family in honor of the family patriarch, the industrialist John E. Rovensky (1880-1970). Visitors will now notice the radical before/after difference (Fig. 1). Gone are the shelved walls implanted in 1914 by the architect Norman Isham that projected into the main space from near each corner 8 etc. Win ter 202 2
and which partitioned the room, one specifically designed by Champlin Mason as an open-spaced art gallery, the first in Rhode Island. The story begins earlier, with another Newporter who had a distinguished career and long involvement with the Redwood: the portrait painter Charles Bird King (1785-1862). For it was in late 1861 that Bird King’s precarious health had forced him to execute his will preemptively and to transfer some “fifty or more [pictures]” from his Washington D.C. studio to the Redwood. Even if the Library had likely from early on been the recipient of art works, notably portraits in the eighteenth century, it is the absorption of Bird King’s collection that set in motion the need for a new wing specifically conceived as an art gallery. Here is the June 1865 affirmation of the ‘Committee on the Enlargement of the Library,’ which established the bedrock purpose and subsequent design of the 1875 addition: “The valuable collection of pictures already in the possession of the Library, and the equally valuable collection of statuary proposed to be donated to the Library by Edward King, Esq., indicate the necessity for a suitable hall, to be used as a gallery for works of art.” Thus a decade later, in 1875, and after some deliberations about
