For 48 years, a woman named Pesaturo paid commercial taxes on a property along Mineral Spring Avenue. She ran a hair salon out of it. When she went looking for a new hairdresser to take over the space, the town told her no dice: the property was zoned residential, and a hair salon counted as a nonconforming use that couldn't simply be handed off to the next tenant. Her chair would sit empty, she was told, because nobody else had "looked at it."
If you live in the Highlands and have ever wondered why Mineral Spring Avenue looks like a working commercial strip but occasionally behaves like a bureaucratic maze, that story is the whole explanation. The corridor has functioned as a business district for decades. The zoning code just refused to admit it. That gap between what the street actually is and what the paperwork said it could be is the real story behind the new restaurants, markets, and shops that have been landing here, and it explains something that outsiders miss and residents feel every time they try to figure out what's legal to open next door.
A Corridor Zoned for a Different Era
A stretch of Mineral Spring Avenue near the Pawtucket line carried a "residential general" designation for years, even though businesses occupied most of the buildings on it. That mismatch meant something specific in practice: when a business closed, the space couldn't automatically be filled by a different kind of business. Each new use had to fit inside whatever nonconforming category the previous tenant had established, or the building risked sitting vacant. Pesaturo's hairdresser space is one version of that story. There were others up and down the same stretch, properties full of paying tenants that the town's own zoning map still called residential.
Earlier this year, the North Providence Town Council fixed part of it. The council voted to reclassify about 14 lots along that section of Mineral Spring Avenue from residential general to commercial village, a designation built for smaller-scale businesses rather than the heavier commercial intensity allowed elsewhere on the corridor. The building at 977 Mineral Spring Avenue was cited as the property that pushed the issue to a vote, but the fix covers a whole run of storefronts, not just one address.
Commercial village zoning isn't a blank check. Councilor Mario Martone noted during the debate that even on double lots, a business use can't extend more than 100 feet into the neighborhood behind the avenue, which keeps the zoning change from spreading commercial pressure into the residential streets that back up to it. The intent was narrow and specific: let the businesses that were already there, and the ones likely to replace them, operate without a legal cloud hanging over every lease.
The Businesses That Didn't Wait for the Vote
Here's the part that tells you more about the neighborhood than the zoning vote itself. The demand for new business space on Mineral Spring Avenue didn't wait for the town council to catch up.
A resident named Sofien Khachane moved into a home just off Mineral Spring Avenue in 2022 and noticed something specific: the corridor had a lot of overlap in its food options and real gaps everywhere else. Khachane, a native of France who grew up in Canada to Algerian and Moroccan parents, started filling those gaps himself. In early 2025, he opened Al-Madina, a halal meat market at 1860 Mineral Spring Avenue, in the space that had been Syroya Bakery before it closed abruptly the previous October. Next door to Ashur Cafe, the location put a new grocery option directly into a stretch that already had a food identity but not this particular one. Around the same time, Khachane also renovated space nearby for Puffy Puffs, a donut shop, choosing Mineral Spring Avenue specifically because of the traffic the road already carries.
None of that required the commercial village rezoning to happen. Khachane's businesses moved into spaces that already carried some form of legal commercial use. What the rezoning does is make the next round of turnover easier, for the buildings that were sitting in that same residential-general limbo Pesaturo's salon was in.
If you've lived in the Highlands for more than a couple of years, you already know the corridor's older anchors. Tumblesalts has held down the corner of Sweet Street and Mineral Spring Avenue since 2016, built around scratch cooking and a live-music calendar that's kept it a local gathering spot rather than a pass-through restaurant. Dominic's Place, the breakfast counter at 1270 Mineral Spring Avenue, opened under a longtime North Providence resident who named it after her son and built her menu around the kind of straightforward morning food that keeps a regular crowd coming back seven days a week before its 3 p.m. close.
None of these businesses fit a single zoning category or a single narrative. That's the point. Mineral Spring Avenue has been assembling itself as a business district through individual decisions by people who live here, ahead of the paperwork that was supposed to organize it.
The Quieter Half of the Neighborhood
A short drive up Douglas Avenue, the same neighborhood holds a completely different kind of inheritance: Governor Notte Park, built on what used to be the Wenscott Reservoir. The reservoir dates to 1835, created to power mills downstream along the West River, back when North Providence's economy ran on water power rather than storefronts. The park takes its name from John A. Notte Jr., a North Providence resident who served as governor of Rhode Island from 1961 to 1963.
What's there today includes a freshwater beach with lifeguards starting the weekend of July 1st, paddleboat rentals, tennis courts, a ball field, and a paved loop trail around the water. That last detail is worth a caveat: sources disagree on exactly how long the loop is, with figures ranging from a half mile to closer to a mile and a half depending on which trail map you check, and there's similar disagreement on whether dogs are allowed on the trails at all. If you're planning a specific outing around either detail, it's worth confirming on-site rather than trusting the first search result.
What isn't in dispute is the contrast the park offers to the avenue below it. Mineral Spring Avenue is loud, mixed-use, and a little improvisational, exactly the kind of corridor that produces zoning headaches because real demand keeps outpacing the categories built to contain it. Governor Notte Park is the opposite: quiet, deliberately preserved, and functioning almost exactly as it was designed to a century and a half ago, just with paddleboats instead of mill wheels.
What an Actual Saturday Looks Like
Put the two halves of the neighborhood together and you get a rhythm that a lot of Highlands residents already run without thinking about it:
- Breakfast at Dominic's Place before the morning gets hot
- A stop at Al-Madina or Puffy Puffs on the walk back, depending on the mood
- An afternoon loop around Wenscott Reservoir at Governor Notte Park, beach chair optional
- Dinner or live music at Tumblesalts to close the day out
None of that requires driving out of the neighborhood. It also isn't a routine that shows up on any tourism site or generic "things to do" roundup, because it depends on knowing which buildings on Mineral Spring Avenue are new, which ones have been there since before the rezoning, and which park nearby actually rewards a slow walk instead of a drive-by.
The rezoning vote earlier this year matters less as a policy story and more as confirmation of something residents already sensed: the Highlands' commercial strip has been ahead of its own zoning for years, filled in gradually by people like Khachane who saw a gap and moved on it before the town got around to updating the map. That's a better description of how this neighborhood actually grows than any single business opening or council vote could offer on its own.
If you're weighing what a home near this corridor is actually worth, or thinking through timing on a move in or out of the Highlands, the team at Cathy Sousa knows this stretch of North Providence block by block. Request a free home valuation or schedule a free consultation to talk through what's happening on your street, not just what the zoning map says.
