A musical 'castle' rises in Olneyville

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) -- A couple of local businessmen have set up shop in a tough Providence neighborhood, and now they're welcoming some surprise customers; Students and dropouts.

It's a music class with a spin for 7th graders Community Prep. The students wrote the lyrics and are producing a song "based on their morals and ideals of the Community Prep school."

Some of them engineered the electronics, while their classmates performed in this Olneyville 'castle'.

Castle Entertainment is tucked away off Valley Street, which is known for being a high-crime, low-income neighborhood.

"There's a lot of stuff going on that's really negative," Castle Entertainment's Armande Milhouse said. "But there's got to be a beacon of light somewhere. Somebody's got to do something positive to show that it's not just all the bad stuff."

OTHER LYRICAL STREET STORIES

The Jazzman

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Castle makes records for Grammy winners and other professional musicians. They never expected to work with  the kids from Community Prep. But then came another surprise.

"We work with a lot of kids who aren't in school. You know, the kids who are just out there," Milhouse said. "14 and 15-year-old kids, saying, 'I don't want to be involved in drugs, I want to make music'."

Not being able pay, was not enough to shut the castle door on them.

"We let them push a broom around, run a vacuum, a little Windex here. You know, tying up some cables, and they work for a few hours, and we say 'alright, listen, you want to work on you music for a few hours?" Milhouse said.

Helping the kids who are part of the neighborhood was not part of Castle Entertainment's original business plan, but it is now.

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