Nicest Place in America - Providence

From the Editors: Sometimes a simple gesture can morph, almost by accident, into a powerful connection between residents who don’t know each other. That’s how Providence’s “Good Night Lights” project came to be a beacon—actually, dozens of beacons—of hope.

In 2010, Steve Brosnihan, a resident cartoonist at the Hasbro Children’s Hospital, was saying good night to a teenage patient when he had an idea. Brosnihan told the teenager to wait until he left, then look out his hospital room window towards the corner near the bus stop. The cartoonist biked to that spot in the India Point Park area, turned around, and flickered his bike light up toward the hospital. To his surprise, the teen flickered his own room lights in response.

Every night after that, the cartoonist flickered his light and kids flickered back, and before long, local businesses, law enforcement officers, even tugboats on the Providence River joined in, giving a sort of incandescent good night wave to kids who are going through scary situations and sleeping in a strange place, maybe for the first time.

“It is all I look forward to basically all day,” said Abigail Waldron, 10, who has seen Good Night Lights during two extended stays for leukemia treatment. “It just shows you that somebody is helping you through your whole experience in the hospital.”

Providence has a history of finding ways to connect people together. Last year, a local photographer took billboard-sized photos of residents—an Iraqi war veteran, a mother nursing her baby, a Haitian bus driver—and mounted them on walls around the city, prompting discussions on community in immigrant-rich Providence. “I just think it’s a project that really describes the city in a really understated, beautiful way,” Lynn McCormack, former director of Providence’s Department of Arts, Culture + Tourism, told the Boston Globe.