Rhode Island 1st District

The 1st Congressional District is the eastern half of Rhode Island, divided from the state’s only other congressional district by a boundary line that cuts through the state capital of Providence and then proceeds west and north to the Massachusetts-Connecticut border. It includes the eastern coast of Narragansett Bay and the small island chain off Rhode Island’s coast. In recent years, once down-on-its-luck Providence has been revived, with a more accessible waterfront, active night life, and restoration of neighborhoods around the state capitol. The district takes in much of the city, including the elite East Side and College Hill around Brown University. It also captures all of next-door Pawtucket, whose Slater Mill is known as the birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution. It is also home to Hasbro, the nation’s second-largest toy company. The onetime textile-mill towns of the Blackstone Valley, Woonsocket and Central Falls, are also in the 1st, along with high-income Barrington and Bristol. To the south on the ocean is the old city of Newport, with its restored 18th-century houses and summer “cottages” that are more like mansions. Newport was once home to the America’s Cup races and now hosts a famous jazz festival; it is also the site of the oldest synagogue in North America, where George Washington once told a congregation that the United States gives “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” Ethnically, this district is the more French Canadian and the less Italian of Rhode Island’s two congressional districts. Politically, it is strongly Democratic.