All in Travel
A brisk walk around one of the squares and peeking down some side streets not only rewarded us with remarkably fine examples of mid-nineteenth century domestic architecture, but also the opportunity to take an up-close look at interiors by Charles A Platt, Stanford White, John Russell Pope, and Delano and Aldrich all on the same block!
Brendan and I were looking for someplace to visit on the drive back home from Boston recently. Our host suggested the Eustis Estate Museum, a mansion and eighty-acre grounds located about 10 miles southwest of downtown Boston operated by Historic New England. It was definitely worth the trip.
After studying its Gilded Age history (click here for my previous post), I decided to explore Harrison Avenue and Halidon Hill on a visit to Newport last summer, curious to see what if anything remained of its Gilded Age past. Much to my pleasant surprise, plenty does. While at a passing glance it might appear that most of the cottages are long gone and the former estates broke up, it pays to look beyond the later development and explore side streets. One will be rewarded by some of the Newport’s hidden gems, some still well-maintained and occupied as single-family homes. Even some vestiges of some long gone grander estates remain.
When imagining the scenes set in Newport from Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, it is all too easy to picture the characters swanning in and out of Marble House, Rosecliff, The Elms, or other mansions of their ilk. Yet the Newport from the 1870s and 1880s that she wrote of in her book looked quite different in reality. Fortunately, there is a neighborhood in Newport that still retains some of that "Age of Innocence" character.....
From simple tenant farmhouses to romantic storybook cottages to architect-designed fantasies, gatehouses are a defining element of the Hudson River Historic District. Marking the entrances to a number of grand estates that form the core of the district, they give the passerby a tantalizing clue as to what lies out of sight down the long tree-lined drives they guard.
spending a night at the former summer home of William Seward and Eliza Vanderbilt Webb on the shores of Lake Champlain just might provide an individual the closest opportunity to experience what it was like to live like a Vanderbilt (or more accurately, one of their guests) for a day
