Pawtucket Buildings by Joseph Giusti

 

City Painting Uncovered at DPW

A painting by Stephen Giusti, featuring Pawtucket buildings, was uncovered in the Pawtucket DPW and is now hanging at the Armistice Boulevard facility.


PAWTUCKET – A 60-year-old painting featuring some of the city’s landmark buildings was found in the records archive of Pawtucket’s Department of Public Works and is now displayed inside the department.

Geographic Information System Coordinator Alisa Morrison was going through the records archives at the DPW when she came across the painting inside a cardboard tube. She has since framed it and had it hung at the DPW. The painting appears to show the Slater Mill, Blackstone Valley Gas and Lorraine Mills, among others. It was an “awesome” find, said Andrew Silvia, chief of project development for the city.

Tim McDuff, librarian at the Pawtucket Public Library, said Stephen Giusti was the painter behind the piece. Two of Giusti’s watercolors are also at the Elizabeth J. Johnson Pawtucket Historic Research Center at the library. One of those paintings is of “the Counting House” on Broadway and the other is of South Street, he said. A third painting, still hanging in the kitchen of Johnson’s home on Fruit Street, which is owned by the Pawtucket Preservation Society, shows Fruit Street, according to McDuff.

Giusti was a commercial painter who lived at 40 Meadow St., near Betty Johnson’s home at 30 Fruit St., also known as the Joseph Spaulding House. Johnson, the famed local historian who created the Pawtucket History Research Collection now housed at the library, died in 2010.
The painting now hanging at the DPW has an inscription bearing Giusti’s name, so city officials are confident that it is his work.

By Ethan Shorey, Valley Breeze
March 27, 2018

http://www.valleybreeze.com

Stephen Giusti, b: June 29, 1909. D: March 1987.

 
 
 


 

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