All tagged Newport
While the Goelet name is readily associated with number of familiar gilded age mansions and estates, due to them often living within a stones throw of each other and the preponderance of males in the family with the name Robert, sometimes confusing to know which Goelet actually lived where!
Many are familiar with the tales of Newport’s most famous gilded age cottages and the bold-faced names who lived in them; the Breakers and the Vanderbilts, Clarendon Court and the von Bulows, and so on. Part of what makes Newport so interesting for me is also discovering the stories associated with some of the lesser known ones. Each has their own interesting tale to tell. This is the story of one of them.
It’s an all too familiar story. A gracious older home is purchased in a wealthy enclave or resort frequented by the rich. While seemingly perfectly adequate, it is torn down, replaced by a bigger, brasher mega-mansion seemingly out of context with the landscape, natural beauty, and character of the neighborhood…
In my last installment on the Fahnestocks, a family whose contributions to the architectural legacy of the Gilded Age are often overlooked, I focused on their townhouses. In this post, I will visit some of their country places....
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.
I never thought much about the Harrison Avenue area around Halidon Hill as being a hotspot during Newport’s Gilded Age, aside from a few stellar holdovers like Bonniecrest and Harbor Court. Over time the began area popping up more and more often during research in association with various gilded age luminaries including Whitneys and Vanderbilts who summered there. Delving a little deeper I found while it may not have achieved the same degree of popularity as Bellevue Avenue or Ochre Point, this enclave overlooking the harbor had its own cachet, populated by a mixture of Old New York Society names with enough “Nobs” and “Swells” thrown in to keep it chic.
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.....
The Newport Cottages of Vanderbilt siblings Cornelius, William K, Frederick and Florence Twombly play a large role in shaping people’s perception of life there in the Gilded Age (and rightly so). To understand just how wide and pervasive the influence of the family was at the resort as the next generation became adults (when it wouldn’t have possible to spit in Newport and not hit a Vanderbilt) it is helpful to look beyond the “Big Four “ at some of the other homes associated with the family. This post will look specifically at those of the five children of Cornelius and Alice Vanderbilt
