Vacation 2013: Newport

The Breakers

“I love money. I love everything about it. I bought some pretty good stuff. Got me a $300 pair of socks. Got a fur sink. An electric dog polisher. A gasoline powered turtleneck sweater. And, of course, I bought some dumb stuff, too.”
--Steve Martin

This marks a Daily Affirmations a first. I'm using an iPad to write this post. So far I'm not a fan. I'm having to peck at this stupid keyboard because I can't rest my fingers on the keyboard. Slows down the brilliance.  I can't have something bottle necking all the brilliance, capisce? But we'll see.

Today I drove the 30 minutes down to Newport and spent most of the day exploring. And Lawdy, we sho is rich now!

This day, like yesterday, was overcast and grey. It rained off and on several hours before heavy fog set in. But after having lived in a drought for several years, I'm hardly going to criticize rain.

First I drove on US 1 through the small town of Wickford. It resembles Wimberley or Comfort. Several blocks of antique stores, soda shops, bars, and a couple of restaurants. Unlike those towns, however, this one lies on the water and features a picturesque New England harbor, with sailboats and lobster boats alike.  I stopped to photograph several very old, well preserved homes.  I also saw the old Narragansett Church, founded 1707.  After spending a bit checking out the harbor, I left as it started to rain.

A few minutes and one enormous toll bridge later, I made it to Newport.

So had everyone else.  Apparently everyone else decided to spend Labor Day here too.  One drawback to never doing any advanced vacation planning? I sometimes find myself in a crowd situation. After fighting through traffic and of course getting lost several times, I wound up driving down Bellevue avenue, where the old mansions live, and then to Ocean Drive to see newer mansions. Their enormity and opulence surpassed anything I've ever seen.  I spent about half an hour tweeting about it, cleverness like "Newport thinks the Kennedys are 'new money.'" Or "Newport lights its cigars with promissory notes." My favorite was "Newport thinks Bill Gates has done ok for himself."

Truthfully, these mansions resemble the huge houses along St. Charles Avenue on the New Orleans
streetcar line. They're probably somewhat larger, with larger attached estates.  But unlike their New Orleans counterparts, they lack the South's elegance, and their moonlight and magnolia-dominated landscape. And the gris gris.

I first needed lunch and wound up eating at some forgettable place next to the tennis hall of fame. Did anyone know tennis had a hall of fame? Oddly, it's a Globe Theater looking structure, with an authentic grass tennis court replacing the audience pit. I enjoy playing tennis about once a decade (I'd probably play a lot more if I had a partner and didn't have a 175 year old back), but not enough to spend several hours touring here. Besides, I may swing by the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass if I get a chance, fulfilling my hall of fame quota of one per vacation.

Instead, I headed for The Breakers, the old Vanderbilt summer home. Their main home was in Manhattan, at the spot that Trump Tower now occupies. A definite comedown. What can you say? Nice work if you can get it.  This place makes Monticello seem like a crack house. Other houses in its class include the Hearst Castle, Buckingham Palace, Versailles...that's about all that come to mind. Imagine Downton Abbey, but bigger, more Italian, and showier. Three stories, enormous rooms, gold leaf, porcelain tile, crystal, stained glass, marble, zinc, art at every turn, extensive grounds, greenhouse..this place makes the houses on Cribs seem like a joke.  It was the summer Capitol of a millionaire's paradise (billionaires in today's largely useless money). It was one of the first homes to have electricity, though it had a backup gas supply that could light all he rooms.  Curious fun fact, they had somewhat modern plumbing, by today's standards, but for the time it was state of the art. Every bathroom had fresh and salt water pipes because they believed bathing in salt water had curative properties. Still, they didn't have showers. And hot and cold water ran from different faucets (a bizarre practice the Brits have chosen to maintain- glacially cold water in one spout, scalding hot water burning the skin out of the other). It opened in the late 1880s, and shut down as a home in 1938 when the family couldn't keep it going. They ultimately did work with a local trust, the Newport Mansions Preservation Society (puff, puff),  to reopen it for tours and preserve the place, staving off the 1960's ill-conceived trend to destroy old buildings and replace them with futuristic, space agey Buckminster Fuller crap, err, architecture.  You know, that ridiculous style that looks so awful now? Like, half the University of Houston campus, much of which looks like a fallout shelter? Apparently that scourge was afflicting Newport, but the trust and favorable zoning ordinances prevented Newport from turning into checkerboarded Bellaire, Texas. The trust saved many Gilded Age mansions from the era, and runs tours daily.

One slight sidebar. The tour explains that the Vanderbilt empire withered and died once the son of the old man, the Commodore, sold controlling interest in their shipping and railroad empire to an investment consortium led by J.P. Morgan. The investors failed to act with a unified vision and thereby didn't invest in the automobile and the airplane, to keep the company viable. That just left successive Vanderbilt generations to split up a fortune slowly deteriorating from mismanagement, taxes, and waste.  This shows once again what we're experiencing in our own times. Banks don't know how to run any businesses at all, except the banking business itself. The more they get into other businesses, the less they know what they're doing. But because they hold such huge banking assets, they'll always find ways to secure favorable regulation or outright skirt laws designed to prevent them from screwing up entire industries. Bankers only know bottom lines. They're naturally disposed against risk taking, and want nearly guaranteed returns before they'll commit. Businessmen and women, however, take chances. They'll put their entire nest egg into a venture. Sometimes it will fail miserably, other times it will become Apple or Microsoft or ExxonMobil or any of a string of enormously profitable and successful ventures. Or it will just make modest profits for many years and provide honest jobs to people who need them, and provide a useful product or service to others. Bankers seem to ruin everything they touch once they get away from counting the day's deposits and withdrawals and adding up interest. I suppose their ability to get into everyone else's businesses and screw them up will never change.

Unless you're a bank and want to hire me as your lawyer, in which case, Go Banks!! Woo hoo! Take over the economy!!!

OK, what else? After touring the Vanderbilt place it was time to check in to my hotel, the lovely Attwater Hotel in town. Oh, about that. Newport appears to resemble Galveston in at least one way. There's a town of Newport, then the huge enormous mansions populate the long stretch leading down to the sea (and alongside it). The town itself, where most folks (I'm trying to be more like our President, who uses "folks" whenever talking about his non-equals, err, constituents) live, is on one end somewhat away from millionaire's row. Now ratchet Galveston up economically by about a thousand and that's Newport. Slum homes around here probably go in the upper six figure range. While running last evening I saw countless restored and attractive Victorians and Craftsmen homes, many of which would do nicely as a San Francisco dot com millionaire's crash pad.

I got sidetracked before I could talk about the Attwater. I really enjoyed staying at this modernish sort of place, which ordinarily would merit my strong disapproval. Slightly kitschy, but bright, with fun designs, a strong breakfast, great location, and nice furnishings. It lacks an elevator, but that's ok. And they give you an ipad to use during your stay, accounting for this. After breakfast I finished this post sitting on a rocking chair on their front porch, enjoying the (finally) cool breeze on a (finally) sunny day. The same company also owns the more traditional Pomegranate Inn in Portland, Maine, where I also have stayed (Kimberly and Terry too), and enjoyed thoroughly. Strong endorsement for both.

After checking in and getting settled, I went to the Cliff Walk for a run. This non-imaginatively named path is a historic trail or some such, running along the cliffs by the sea, behind many of the seaside mansions. It would have provided some spectacular views, but by that time the fog began rolling in fairly heavily, obscuring the sights. But in some sense that improved things because it painted all these mansions with a kind of ghostly, back from the dead feel. Sort of like Somewhere In Time, but with a far less cheesy script (come on producers of that movie, everyone knows you can't travel back in time just by lying in bed and thinking hard, you have to have a flux capacitor, or you have to slingshot your starship around the sun at warp speed...what do you think we are, idiots?). Superstorm (eyeroll at that term) Sandy damaged the second half of the trail, so I went back via Bellevue and ran around town as other sights caught my eye. Running or driving through a town, mapless, is really the only way to learn your way around. Its how I learned my way around New Orleans, for example. You get lost enough, eventually you'll have been everywhere. An hour and fifteen minutes later, I finished in a really heavy dark fog. Just like my outlook on life.

After getting cleaned up, I walked to The Mooring, which the hotel recommended, and had an incredible meal. Lobster, shrimp, and scallops (which probably were in the water six hours earlier), in white rice with a tomato-butter sauce. As Aretha Franklin or half the boys in the French Quarter would say, ooh girl!  That was some good eatin'! As I waddled back to the hotel, I could hear the booming foghorn in the distance, warning ships (America's Cup-style yachts, perhaps?) of approaching land.

Like I mentioned earlier, the fog has lifted this morning, and its much drier and sunnier. I've enjoyed a rare moment of just relaxing on the porch, in the rocking chair, writing this. I'm becoming old Mrs. Dubose, the lady who sat in a rocking chair in front of her house and kept a Confederate pistol under her shawl and would kill you as quick as look at you. Or my Dad. Let's just say I'm becoming a lot more "you young folks get off my yard!" as the years go by. Hmmmpphh. Punks.

Oh, second fun fact. Last night I saw my second rabbit on this trip. First time was on the Brown University campus as I came back from the movies. Last night it was in Touro Park near my hotel. What's up doc?

And thumbs down to the iPad. Too hard to edit. Text just keeps disappearing on me. Too hard to link to other internet pages. And too hard to scroll or cut and paste. Laptop remains.

NEXT-the Elms mansion, coastal Rhode Island and Connecticut, and New Haven.