A musician and journalist, Bill Bartholomew cut his teeth for a decade as a musician in New York’s underground. After returning to his native Rhode Island, he launched “Bartholomewtown,” a podcast and syndicated radio show that reports and analyzes current issues.
Although a journalist, that was not his major at the University of Rhode Island. Bartholomew graduated with a degree in political science. He produced long-from stories at Rhode Island PBS Weekly and was an occasional contributor.
As a musician, Bartholomew has branched out with new material, using acoustic guitars and samplers. As an independent artist in New York, he appeared on MTV, Vice and NPR.
“What a life to be an indie artist!” he said during a 2023 interview.
Here is a conversation with Bartholomew. The full interview can be found here.
Bill Bartholomew said he was living with nine people in a loft space “in a doghouse” in New York City when he discovered Potion Cafe in the same building. The Brooklyn-based venue attracted a wide variety of people, ranging from experimental artists to hip-hop performers and storytellers.
“There was almost an anarcho-syndicalist type of mentality where people, if you were hungry, somebody was gonna feed you,” Bartholomew says. “If you didn’t have money, somebody was gonna find you a couch to stay on. Something about Potion that was very important was, it was not displacing the quote-unquote preexisting neighborhood.”
Then The New York Times found out about the cafe in the borough’s Williamsburg section and wrote about it.
“That positioned it as really — and I’m paraphrasing — ‘Oh good. This neighborhood, this building is now safe for gentrification,’” Bartholomew says. “These artists came through, they quote-unquote cleared it out. ‘Go ahead and invest in your fancy cafe. Go ahead and open up your hummus shop. Let’s turn these into luxury lofts. We’re all set.’
“And the New York Times basically ended it with that article. That was the turning point.”
Bartholomew says he briefly went from a solo artist to joining a band with his partner. They were touring in New Haven, Connecticut, when he noticed a car with Rhode Island license plates at the venue. Some men were playing Frisbee in the parking lot when he approached them.
“I was like, ‘Yo, guys, what’s going on? You guys from Providence?’ And they were like, ‘Providence, no, we’re from Newport,’” he says.
Something clicked. Bartholomew knew there was a music scene in Newport so the band checked it out.
“Within a very short amount of time, we were like, ‘We gotta leave New York and go to Newport,” he says. “Much like what happened in Brooklyn. Lo and behold, a bunch of artists come in, a bunch of activity starts to happen, venues pop up places, start having music and cool stuff and vintage shops and coffee shops and all that.
“And then it becomes appealing for the developer class to swoop in. And in the case of Newport, really turned it into just a giant Airbnb.”
Now working out of his loft space in the Elmwood neighborhood in south Providence, Bartholomew hosts the Elmwood Songwriters Club. He calls the monthly showcase, which is held on the second Saturday of every month a place for “some of the most unique artists in the area.”
“It’s eight artists and people play their songs and it’s a shared community experience and it’s authentic,” Bartholomew says. “But it’s really one of the most important things to me right now. Because as an artist, it continues to challenge me in the way that the Potion (Cafe) Brooklyn scene challenged me.”
Bartholomew says that Umberto “Bert” Crenca, who founded AS220, a nonprofit community arts organization in downtown Providence, told him not to feel guilty about identification as an artist “because the artist class is the last stop before gentrification.”
“And that’s something I wrestle with here in Elmwood. You know, I have family that grew up here in Elmwood and I’ve been here my whole life essentially,” Bartholomew says. “But if it’s going to continue to change, I don’t wanna be the one who is turning it into what other parts of Providence have become. I want to be the one who is the last, last person standing there pushing back against that turn to the unnatural gentrification.
“There’s something important to me about that. This is not intended to make Elmwood into Hipsterdom. It’s intended to make Elmwood, Elmwood.”
