Saturday, May 20, 2023

Will Morgan, Architecture Critic

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After loving the classic WAVE for nearly a quarter of a century, I am required to get a replacement license plate. As a design critic and believer in a well-designed state moniker, the thought displaying the new tag with its quintet of wavy little curls has created an existential crisis.

The new plate looks as though it were designed by a committee, or worse, a bureaucrat. The baby blue wash is too reminiscent of the Connecticut plate, as well as a toilet bowl cleanser. Worse than the Cooler and Warmer advertising slogan, our rolling Hallmark Card is an aesthetic embarrassment. But rather than taking my word for it, ask anyone from Westerly to Woonsocket: I have yet to encounter a fan of the new plate. People do not like this plate.

My dress designer daughter finds the wavelets “cute,” but as a vegetarian she was appalled at the idea I would choose the newly-introduced Atlantic Shark Institute’s plate featuring a hungry mako shark. “Creepy” was the usual response to my telling people I was considering the shark. But unlike states with dozens of charity plates from which to choose, Rhode Island’s choices are limited.

Ethnic diversity is one of the reasons we moved to Rhode Island, and much as I like my Portuguese neighbors, placing a Dia de Portugal on my Volvo seems almost as much of a stretch as adding the toothy predator. The Day of Portugal plate, alas, features a yellow strip that suggests that the bulk of water closet cleaner went to the wavelet plates. (Someday, maybe there will be a Welsh-American plate for my people, perhaps with a picture of a coal mine or a slate quarry on it.)

Of the few choices available to those who are not firemen, veterans, or recipients of the Purple Heart, there’s Plum Island Lighthouse, Conservation Through Education, Providence College, Rocky Point, and so on. Then there’s a messy redesign of the Patriots tag, with a miniscule resume of the six Super Bowl victories. And there’s the old standby of the community food bank’s Help End Hunger, with its curious use of Mr. Potato Head–maybe a reference to the Irish Potato Famine, an event commemorated in this state.

One contender for my new tag was the Gaspee Days plate (Patriots 1, Royal Navy 0). A patriotic and exciting bit of history, but imagine having a license plate with a flaming ship on it (where are the sailors jumping into the sea?). There are some confusing notes, such as a background that looks more like the Bay of Naples than Narragansett Bay, while one wonders for what the seven stars exactly stand? Maybe this is even creepier than the shark?

It is a sense of real frustration that there is no retro tag, such as California’s Legacy Plate, much less anything that speaks of Rhode Island as something other than a place where officialdom only knows how to peddle the state through tacky advertisement.

Even though I have despised scenographic license plates since their introduction a few years ago, I am sorry to report that the Beavertail Lighthouse charity plate was the least of all evils. There’s no rhetorical Ocean State, the letters are embossed, and plus the extra $20 goes towards preserving this nautical landmark.

GoLocal architecture critic Morgan has an undergraduate degree from Dartmouth and two graduate degrees from Columbia. He has taught at Princeton and at Brown. He likes to remind people that the Ivy League is merely a collegiate athletic conference.

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