For 30 years James “Jim” Lappin, Sr. worked hard to make the City of East Providence a more beautiful place. On Sunday, Oct. 4 city officials and friends and family of Lappin gathered to posthumously preserve his legacy by naming a traffic island at Pawtucket Avenue and Centre Street in his honor.

A native of Pawtucket, Lappin was born in 1928 and served in the United States Navy following graduation from high school. Then he went to URI to earn a degree in agriculture, and ultimately moved to East Providence in 1960 when he took a job to become the city’s superintendent of parks, a job he held for the next three decades.
Lappin died on Dec. 1, 2020 at the age of 92.

“His job was his life,” said Lappin’s daughter, Martha Soderlund, in a recent interview. “He just loved East Providence and he put his heart and soul into everything that he did here. He was always improving the equipment and making sure the kids had the next best thing to entertain themselves and have a good time. He always made sure that all the islands in the city had color and beautified them.”

And so it was fitting to Soderlund that Lappin would be honored with a large memorial sign bearing his name and declaring one of those traffic islands to be forever associated with his name and his memory.

“Just knowing that my dad has a place in the city and that he left a legacy,” Soderlund said. “I go pick my grandson up every day and I drive by it now, and I just smile and I go, ‘There you go dad. You finally got you got something that you deserved.’”

Soderlund recalled with warmth her father’s personality, which she said people still remember well to this day.
“He was sarcastic, but in a fun way. Everybody loved Jim Lappin. Because Jim Lappin always had a story,” she said. “He commanded an audience, no matter where he was. Whether he was walking through the office in the parks department or in city hall or if he was at the grocery store. No matter where he was, he had a presence about him. And everybody just wanted to hear Jim Lappin tell stories. Because he would make you laugh all the time.”

After retirement, Soderlund said that her father, known as “Papa Jim” to his family, would “hold court” by his in-ground pool, and loved having people over to entertain them and enjoy the company of friends.

“Everybody loved him,” Soderlund said. “He just had that kind of personality.”