Have you ever heard of Shoo Fly Village in Providence? Here's its almost-forgotten story

The question started with a hazy memory, of being a kid in Providence, no older than age 11, and a small section of the city with a funny name: Shoo Fly.

This reader remembered being a young man and playing in Shoo Fly, even though there were no structures or activities there. He remembered some of the nearby businesses, such as a nursery school run by nuns.

But “Shoo Fly Village” is one of the places slipping from living memory, with only occasional mentions in the obituaries section. And so to help with his hazy memory, this reader wrote into What and Why RI asking what we could find out about the old Providence neighborhood.

Where was Shoo Fly Village?

The little village started, according to Providence Journal archives, when a wealthy Providence man built two cottages for his coachman and gardener on Grove Street in the 1870s. Then, at the junction of Ridge Street and the now-gone Croom Street, more cottages went up, built by the Sprague family, creating the two end points of the neighborhood. The railroad tracks created one boundary and Indian Hill served as the other. It’s also been defined more simply as the space between Ridge Street and the New Haven Systems railroad bed.

The Journal described it as “in Olneyville, but not of it,” saying the hill and the railroad tracks isolated it so that it “retained a certain individuality” instead of blending into the city as a whole.

The area was little, only growing to about 400 people, according to The Journal archives.

How did Shoo Fly Village get its name?

There are two schools of thought about it. Both have nothing to do with actual flies, and everything to do with the children’s song “Shoo Fly.”

The first story given was that “the character of the inhabitants was of such a happy-go-lucky and carefree nature, that the name of the popular song of the time, partaking of the same characteristic, was bestowed upon it,” according to a Journal article.

The second and more common story found in multiple articles was that kids playing in the neighborhood sang “Shoo Fly” so often that it took root as the community name.

“A number of boys used to play around the valley while much of the building was going on,” an unidentified young man who used to play in Shoo Fly told The Journal in 1911. “There was so much old lumber lying about, many of the houses being made of secondhand stuff, that the first name the place had was ‘Slab City.’ ‘Shoo Fly Don’t Bother Me’ was the song of the time, and it was sung morning, noon and night. Of course, the boys took to it and sang it so much that one day when we were looking for something to do, one of the lads spoke up, and indicating one of the houses that Sprague was building said, ‘Let’s go over to Shoo Fly.’ That was the beginning, and ever since the whole village was called by that name.”

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What was Shoo Fly like?

Shoo Fly started as a tidy little village for workers.

"There was a time when I came here when Shoo Fly Village was one of the best parts of the city," Catherine G. Riley told The Journal in 1911. "Nearly every house had a flower garden and all the people were decent bodies."

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But as her foreboding tone suggests, according to The Journal's archives, it got a little rowdy.

The first evidence of this was in a 1886 article complaining of “hoodlums” who didn’t live in Shoo Fly terrorizing the unlit neighborhood nightly with “malicious mischief.” A common prank was stealing the stairs from the neighborhood – exactly how this feat was accomplished was not explained – and piling them up at one end of the street for people to trip over. However, sometimes it exceeded pranks, and more serious acts of vandalism were committed and shots were fired.

And as it went on, that seemed to become more and more true. There were reports of drunken brawls. Stories of policemen being driven out of the village. People were even getting in trouble with the law for watering down the milk.

What happened to it?

People started leaving the village because they were looking for a better location, perhaps not so close to the train tracks. The Grove Street entrance to the village was right by the tracks and proved to be so dangerous that people called it the "Bloody Curve." The New York, New Haven and Hartford railroad closed Grove Street and built an overhead bridge that, while safer, wasn't particularly liked.

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As people started to leave, momentum took over.

The houses fell into disrepair. More people left. Soon, the railroad company started buying up the whole neighborhood.

In 1911, a little story ran on page 6 of The Providence Journal saying that a whole block of the Shoo Fly houses, 32 to be exact, had sold at auction, and the village was "a thing of the past."

What and Why RI is a weekly feature by The Providence Journal to explore our readers' curiosity. If you have a question about Rhode Island, big or small, email it to klandeck@gannett.com. She loves a good question.

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Providence's Shoo Fly Village: Loved by residents, plagued by danger