Tour of Newport

Coming from a tourist town...Monterey...I notice many similarities in Newport.  But Newport became a large town much earlier than Monterey.  The Old State House, built in 1741, was used as a meeting spot for the Rhode Island legislature until the early 1900s.

The streets in central Newport have many old colonial houses, built in a simple style during the 18th century.

Trinity Church, a Newport landmark since 1726.

This is the Touro synagogue, the oldest syagogue building in the US...it was opened in 1763.  Rhode Island has a history of religious tolerance...it was founded by Roger Williams, who ran afoul of the Puritans in Massachusetts in 1636 and headed here to exercise his own religious freedom.  Well, relatively...though Jews were free to worship as they pleased, and became respectable residents of Newport, they couldn't actually become citizens of the colony until it became a state after the US gained independence.

The interior of the synagogue.  Three US presidents...Washington, Eisenhower, and Kennedy...have visited this spot.

A 1711 house in Newport.

This colonial home dates from the mid 1700s.  During the Revolution, Nathaniel Greene, Baron von Steuben, and Thaddeus Kosciuszko all resided here for a short time.

Rhonda and her mom Rosalie live in a great 'hood...right in the middle of Newport, but quiet...a couple blocks from the center of town.  These 1855 Victorians are on their street.

And of course, a trip to Newport wouldn't be complete with a visit to the summer "cottage" of Cornelius Vanderbilt II.  Constructed in 1895, it has 70 rooms and is a marvel of rococo and Victorian architecture.  The grand staircase was even constructed with the ladies in mind...the steps are two inches shorter than usual, and longer too, so the ladies could flow down the stairs and make a graceful entry to whatever soiree was happening.  The house cost about 12 million dollars in 1895...the equivalent of about 335 million today.  The Vanderbilt family occupied it until around 1940, when income and property taxes combined with divided inheritances to make the cottage uneconomical.  It was eventually acquired by the Newport Preservation Society, a foundation that maintains several of the mansions as reminders of a bygone age. 

Nearby is Marble House, the summer cottage of William Vanderbilt, like Cornelius II a grandson of the original Commodore Vanderbilt, who made the family fortune in shipping and railroads.  Opened in 1892, this modest hostelry cost 11 million dollars, 7 million of which were used to acquire 500,000 cubic feet of marble.  The interior is dazzling, especially the living room which has red marble from Algeria.  No pix allowed in the interior of either house.  William's wife Alva was a free spirit...she divorced him a few years after the mansion was completed...scandalous in that day...and later used Marble House as a meeting place for suffragettes in the early 20th century.