Out of Connecticut

We went from the fourth smallest state to the smallest state in one of our adventures this week.  We hit the road to Newport, Rhode Island.  We joked that if the Connecticut road map was 1 inch equals 30 feet, well the Rhode Island map must be 1 inch equals 5 feet.  It didn't take long to drive half the length of Connecticut and then half the length of Rhode island - just about the amount of time it takes to drive from Hurst to Gainesville or Sun City to Flagstaff.  I wanted to see the summer cottage homes of the rich and famous of the Gilded Age.  Drake spent a lot of time on this outing being outraged and disgusted by the sheer waste of money.

We started with The Breakers, a National Historic Landmark, built by Cornelius Vanderbilt II in 1895.  It took three years to build.  In the 19th century Newport, Rhode Island became the summer escape from New York City of the rich and famous.  They built 'cottages' on Bellevue Avenue, a promenade extending the length of a peninsula into the Atlantic Ocean which afforded each side of the street an ocean view.  They used these elaborate mansions for only a few weeks of the year.  The Vanderbilt cottage shown above has 70 rooms and 20 guest bedrooms.  The building and its contents symbolize The Gilded Age, a term coined by Mark Twain to satirize a skin deep golden reality enjoyed by less than one percent of the population in contrast to a much dingier, darker, and poorer reality for the other 99%.

Both the 'cottages' we toured epitomize this excess and both are adorned with gild.  Gild is actual melted gold painted over plaster.  It can be 18 carat, 20 carat or 24 carat gold, but only the best for the Vanderbilt house - all 24 carat gold.  Everything that looks 'gold' in the picture is gild - or actual gold painted onto plaster.  It really annoyed me that they refused to allow indoor pictures.  At one point we went out onto a huge marble patio overlooking the sea.  The wall of French doors that opened onto the patio were from this central receiving room, and they actually had a person with a walkie/talkie stationed on the patio in front of the doors to keep us peasants from snapping a picture of the interior room. I suppose if someone had the audacity to take a picture, burly security personnel would have gotten an emergency call via that walkie/talkie.

Of course there was a library.  Those walls were covered in leather decorated with gold leaf or washed with gold.   

The sitting room was painted gray with virtually no gild at all.  The curators couldn't figure out for the longest time why silver insets in the corners of the room containing portraits of mythical beings never seemed to tarnish.  Once the technology was available, a small sample of the silver was analyzed, and it was discovered the material on which the paintings were executed was not silver but platinum which never loses its shine.  All the formal rooms were lavishly decorated.  The dining room was really over the top.  We're back to excessive gild in this room, but notice the chandeliers.Every light in this house is electric.  Now, in 1895 household electricity even for the wealthy was a somewhat hit and miss affair, so every light was also piped for gas.  If the electricity failed, they simply switched to gas lighting.  This room is also an example of craftsmanship.  The marble columns, the ornate carvings and the decorations carved in plaster and then decorated were done by Europeans craftsmen who were brought over to Newport in droves to work on this house.  Some rooms, such as the music roomwere actually built in France, disassembled and reassembled on site at the house.  It took only three years to build this mansion which is insanely fast considering not only the size but also the incredible interior finish work as well as the decorations, lighting, furniture and flooring.

The bedrooms were not nearly as lavish as the 'public' rooms, but The Breakers is unique in that each of twenty bedrooms in the house has a bathroom.  Interior plumbing wasn't terribly common in the 1890's, and in even in mansions, there might be only one or two bathrooms.  At The Breakers there was a 'stopcock' chart of seventy places within the house to turn water on and off devised by the property manager in the 1890's and still used today.  It took forty servants in residence to run this household.  Mrs. Vanderbilt managed all of them as well as the entertainment and food service.  That job was as demanding as a CEO of a small company.  And she did it all while changing clothes seven times a day.  

We also went to see The Marble House.  This was another Vanderbilt house built on Bellevue Avenue by a Vanderbilt daughter-in-law who actually divorced her Vanderbilt husband not too long after The Marbles was built.  The mansion was in HER name, so she retained it after the divorce.  Within three years of its completion, she moved out of it into her new husband's summer cottage - also just down the block, and she used The Marble House for its laundry facilities (which were better than in her second husband's house) and for storage.  It costs $10 million 1890 dollars to build. Here's the receiving room at The MarblesIt's pretty easy to understand how Drake's outrage grew as we looked at this excess.  The servant quarters in these houses were airless cubicles in the attics, and they often worked in excess of sixteen hours a day.  

The Breakers was used as a private residence well into the 1960's.  For instance, there was a 1962 dinner party given for President and Mrs. Kennedy.  It was finally donated to the National Historic Trust when the family, who basically squandered the Vanderbilt fortune in three generations, could no longer afford to keep it up.  The Vanderbilt family as a whole were not terribly philanthropic.  Only Vanderbilt University is left as an example of their somewhat miserly generosity   Commodore Vanderbilt, the patron of the fortune worth over 100 million dollars of 19th century money, only donated 10 million dollars to found the University - and he did that on a whim. Fortunately, one of his grandsons, Harold, left the bulk of his inheritance to the university.  

Newport is the perfect example of a resort town where I would hate to be a resident.  It has small narrow streets with houses crammed together, other than on 'mansion row' of course.  The traffic was horrendous, and the parking even worse.  Living here even temporarily would get on my every nerve within three days.  I'm sure Cape Cod and Nantucket are probably identical during June, July, August and even into September.  This was a wonderful place for a day trip, and even I could see that if you were a sailor, this would be heaven since the harbor and coves were dotted with yachts and sailboats.