When he first heard the news that state officials had condemned the Washington Bridge, Tom Bucci senior immediately thought: ice cream.
“Crumbling bridge, sorta like crumbling ice cream,” he mused.
On the spot, he came up with a name. Now he needed a flavor. The list of ingredients practically rattled off the tongue.
“So, we have vanilla ice cream, which is everybody’s favorite, swirled with black tar fudge, brownie cement, and crumbled peanut butter rebar,” he said.
Delicious!
Bucci has been an ice cream man his whole life. His grandfather Charles founded Warwick Ice Cream in 1930. A family-owned business to this day. These days, it’s a father-and-son business. Thomas Bucci Junior helps run the place. He too was all in on the crumbling bridge.
“It’s wild,” he said. “Because when you drive on the bridge and you launch a flavor after the bridge, it’s like wow.”
The frozen treats served up by the Bucci family are practically a love letter to the Ocean State. Warwick Ice Cream celebrates Rhode Island with several flavors, all of them made in the small factory on Bald Hill Road in Warwick. The equipment includes two 1,000-gallon tanks painted like cows. Warwick Ice Cream makes fresh products every day there.
“If we’re not churning, we’re not earning,” said Thomas Junior.
Their most popular concoction, Moonstone Beach Vanilla (“stripped down to its bare essentials”), is named after the former South Kingstown nude beach. That’s where Tom Senior first met his wife.
There’s Autocrat Coffee Milk, Del’s Lemon (NB not sherbet, but lemonade ice cream), and even Winter Blast of ’78. “Originally we wanted to call it Blizzard of 78, but then we got a cease-and-desist letter from another ice cream company,” Tom said.
Crumbling Bridge Is Falling Down isn’t even the only Warwick Ice Cream flavor inspired by Rhode Island’s deteriorating infrastructure. There’s also Bumpy Rhodes, celebrating the potholes on the Newport Bridge.
Weekends sometimes find Tom senior manning an ice cream, making deliveries with his grandson. That’s when he first noticed all the rough patches on the flyover to Newport. “I defy you to try holding a cup of coffee heading over that bridge,” he said. “It’s like driving on a washboard.” Naturally, Bumpy Rhodes has an espresso ice cream base. Plus, marshmallow-filled chocolate manhole covers, chocolate cookie asphalt, and broken toffee concrete chunks.
One week after Warwick Ice Cream launched Crumbling Bridge came a potential PR disaster. A container ship struck the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, bringing it down. The phone started ringing off the hook.
“Some people were angry,” said Tom senior. “But this wasn’t about that, it came out before that. We weren’t making fun of other people’s tragedy.”
Thomas Junior said, “We love Rhode Island, and even when it’s sometimes a little uncomfortable, we try our best to bring a little sweetness to it.”
These days, Crumbling Bridge is their second most popular flavor. After vanilla, of course.
This story is part of Breaking Point: The Washington Bridge, a community-centered project from Rhode Island PBS and The Public’s Radio.
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