I'm lucky, I live in Providence and I work at a historic site so my daily commute takes me to College Hill and around the Brown University campus. I get to see Benefit Street (one of the oldest intact historic districts in the US; the Stephen Hopkins house--one of RI's signers of the Declaration of Independence--and China Trade mansions like the Sullivan Dorr house (his son fomented rebellion here in 1842 for expanded voting rights).

On Power Street is the house that Edgar Allen Poe's lover Sarah Whitman lived in. The Athenaeum Library where they used to meet is on Benefit Street (they have a bike rack). Across from that is the Rhode Island School of Design founded in 1877 and housed in a mixture of historic and modern buildings.

Weekends, I ride down to the head of Narragansett Bay at Fox Point, where China trade ships came in (the first from RI was 1788) and where slave ships docked as well. Down South Main to the site of Sabin's Tavern where the Gaspee plot was hatched, and then down the bay to Gaspee Point, where the HMS Gaspee was run aground and burned in what they like to call the first act of open rebellion in the colonies, June 10 1772.

The East Bay Bike Path runs from East Providence to Bristol, and from it you can see lighthouses, old men's clubs, historic homes and the old fishing/trading ports of Bristol and Warren. You can also ride past the Herreshoff Marine Museum, where Nathanael Greene Herreshoff designed some of the fastest America's Cup yachts.

There are lots of historic sites to ride past and to here, and you can do alot of it in one day. It's a great place to visit, but you do have to look out for the drivers!