| I spend a lot of time there. It is a fairly quiet and boring city, although there are a few places to go downtown. Unfortunately, unlike Harvard, Yale, Michigan or UW-Madison, Brown is not right in the center of its host city. Instead, it is sited at the top of a hill and there is only one, boring street with any stores or anything up there. There's a Starbucks and some little restaurants and things, but it isn't a great "college town" like Ann Arbor by any stretch of the imagination - it's one little street and if I recall correctly, everything including the drugstore is shut down pretty early. A few people might go to downtown Providence every so often but it's not like Harvard, Yale, UW or NYU where you have literally hundreds of places to go, including giant clubs, enormous restaurants, new state-of-the-art 7-screen cineplexes, 24 hour diners and drugstores, theaters, etc., just within a couple of blocks of campus.
Also, the downtown area of Providence isn't as residential as some cities (and it is certainly not a "college town" like Cambridge, downtown New Haven, Madison, Ann Arbor, Charlottesville) so as a result, it is quieter late at night and not particularly safe. A few years ago, two students from a Providence university were carjacked there by a couple of robbers and shot to death after being dragged out to a field on the outskirts of town. But that's not too big of a deal because like I said, students at Brown are generally pretty confined up on their hill. While it is definitely not anything even remotely the "Renaissance City" that business boosters like to call it, on the other hand, downtown Providence is probably better than some people will describe it to you, because similar to every other Northeastern city (Boston, New Haven, Brooklyn, Portland, Pittsburgh), there has been a small growth in the number of people living in downtown areas and therefore a few restaurants have opened there now, it's not just boarded up places or Payless outlets.
Furthermore, Providence is pretty far from any other major city and it's not that close (like, not within a short bicycle ride or 10-minute bus trip) to cool places like the ocean beaches, either. Boston is about an hour away, but it's actually longer when you factor in traffic and parking and besides, Boston is not really a very interesting city when you compare it to a place like New York City. It shuts down very early.
Last edited by posterX : 05-04-2007 at 12:08 PM.
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