Then, in 2000, he was hired to be Providence Mayor Buddy Cianci's official photographer, recording his eminence at lots of public events, including posing with every Little League team in town each spring. It was a demanding occupation, on call to make the mayor look good seven days a week. "He's a complicated man," Goldberg says. The job ended in 2002, after Cianci was convicted of one count of racketeering conspiracy. "The day he got sentenced, we all got fired and escorted out of City Hall."
Goldberg returned to commercial photography (his primary clients are now local colleges) with some photojournalism on the side — including a 2004 assignment from Rhode Island Monthly to photograph the combined sewer overflow tunnel construction, which was the start of what became his own project. Providence's sewer system was constructed in the mid 19th-century, when river pollution was not a pressing concern. Its "combined sewer" design channels runoff from rain and snow melt into the same pipes as sewage. So these days big storms — well, anything around half an inch of water in six hours — overwhelm the city's sewer system some 70 times a year, causing untreated sewage to overflow into the Providence, Woonasquatucket, Moshassuck, Seekonk and West rivers, polluting the water and shellfish beds.
In 1979, the US Environmental Protection Agency ordered the city to fix its lousy Fields Point sewer plant and do something about the sewer system's overflowing crap.
Slowly, the plant was repaired, and in 1994 ground was broken on a tunnel where the overflow could be diverted. It would be three miles long, running downhill, from the Foundry complex at Holden and Promenade streets to the State House, then turn toward the Fields Point plant, where a new pumping station would pump the stuff up for treatment.
It was designed to prevent sewage overflows when the city receives up to an inch and a half of storm runoff over six hours (the EPA guideline) by sequestering up to 65 million gallons of storm water, and, well, it's probably best not to picture it. "Theoretically," Narragansett Bay Commission spokeswoman Jamie Samons tells me, "four times a year we'll still get overflows."
A different place
"After the first trip I was just like, 'Wow, this place is wild,' " Goldberg says of the tunnel. "There was something just sort of timeless about it, for one. It didn't look like anything in Rhode Island. It looked like it was a different era and a different place."
The steely, gritty black and white photos that he's printed in his studio show silhouetted men walking toward bright lights at the end of tunnels, a couple workers hanging out in a makeshift underground lounge, a bearded driver of a boxy mine train snaking down the dark tunnel, a man wading in the water licking the top of the tracks.
One picture shows a man wearing headphones at the controls of the boring machine, which resembles the cab of an old locomotive. Another shot shows pipes and cables and train tracks running down a tunnel, which brings to mind one of those endless shafts that turn up again and again in the Star Wars films.
