Providence Journal Building, Fountain Street, 1933- (Wikipedia)
I can find no other indication that David has passed away, beyond a phonecall from an even closer friend, to the effect that he passed away Thursday morning David was a prolific editorial writer and columnist for the Providence Journal in the 1990s and the early 2000s, among other newspapers even before he was hired by the Journal. I have been unable to discover the year of his birth. Wikipedia is silent (so far). I will add more as the facts find their way to me. Here is a short piece that showcases some of his strongly held opinions about his colleagues and friends (among whom I think I may count myself even in the latter category), the Journal, and the practice of its particular arts:
Friends:Today, the day after Labor Day, some 20 of my last, best former colleagues at The Providence Journal got the sack after 25 to 40 years of loyalty, diligence and skill. Most of them are writers who treated their subjects, their sources, their colleagues, the art of writing and the call of journalism lovingly – I know no other word to describe their methods.
In the editorial office in which I worked from 1998 to 2008, a staff of 11 in the earlier year is down to two. Boilerplate shall rule. [The editorial department has since been eliminated.] My grandfather was federal district attorney for Rhode Island under Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt. At six he had been terrified by his full-immersion baptism, and never willingly went to church again. It was said he didn’t believe in God, he believed in The Providence Journal! On April 9, 1960, at 84, he fetched The Journal from his stoop, took it inside and fell dead on the floor. As Shakespeare put it in Julius Caesar, “the valiant never taste of death but once.” You and I, it seems, are fated to “die many times before [our] deaths” as witness to the tortured death of good reporting and to the ingratitude of little men for faithful reporters.
–D.A. Mittell, Jr.
Architecture Here and There 