How Newport earned the score

Situation: the resort that outlived its own party

There is a stretch of Bellevue Avenue in Newport where the word cottage stops meaning anything. The Breakers, the summer house Cornelius Vanderbilt II commissioned from architect Richard Morris Hunt, was built between 1893 and 1895 with 70 rooms and about 138,300 square feet of floor area. It was designed for a season that ran roughly seven or eight weeks. The rest of the year it sat staffed, heated, and empty, which tells you most of what you need to know about the economics that built it.

The city underneath the money is much older. Newport was founded in 1639 and spent its first century and a half as one of colonial America’s busiest seaports. But the Newport everyone pictures was built in a single astonishing generation, roughly 1885 to 1902, when the families atop America’s industrial fortunes lined one avenue with marble. William K. Vanderbilt gave his wife Alva Marble House for her birthday in 1892; it cost about 11 million dollars, 7 million of which went to 500,000 cubic feet of marble. Coal baron Edward Julius Berwind finished The Elms in 1901, architect Horace Trumbauer’s copy of an eighteenth-century French chateau, for about 1.5 million dollars. These were called cottages without irony.

Then the world that paid for them ended. The federal income tax arrived in 1913, followed by a war, the Crash, and the slow disappearance of the armies of servants the houses were engineered around. Newport’s gilded season thinned decade by decade, and by mid-century the palaces had become liabilities their heirs could barely give away. When Julia Berwind, the last of her family to summer at The Elms, died in 1961, the contents went to auction and the house was weeks from demolition.

Task: what a city of 25,000 does with leftover palaces

Strip the romance away and mid-century Newport faced a plain civic problem in three parts. First, keep the buildings standing: seventy-room houses on salt-sprayed cliffs eat money even when empty, and the wrecking ball was the cheap option. Second, give them a paying purpose: a museum that cannot cover its own roof repairs is just a slower demolition. Third, keep a working town underneath: a city that becomes only a display case loses the year-round economy that makes the display case worth visiting.

Newport’s answer to all three, worked out over the next thirty years by a determined handful of people, was to turn preservation from a rescue operation into the city’s anchor industry. What follows is how they did it, and what it produces today.

Action: preservation, run like an industry

1945: a society formed to stop the wreckers

The institutional turn came in 1945, when Katherine Urquhart Warren and a small group of neighbors founded the Preservation Society of Newport County, initially to save Hunter House, a colonial merchant’s home on the Point, from demolition. The Society grew into the steward of 14 historic properties, seven of them National Historic Landmarks, and into what it is now: Rhode Island’s largest and most-visited cultural organization.

1948: a palace for a dollar a year

The decisive experiment came three years later. Countess Gladys Vanderbilt Szechenyi, Cornelius II’s youngest daughter, had inherited The Breakers and its impossible upkeep. In June 1948 she leased the house to the young Society for one dollar a year, keeping the taxes, insurance, and major repairs on her own account, and on July 1, 1948 the ground floor opened to the public at a dollar twenty-five a head. The tours never stopped. The Society finally bought The Breakers outright on December 28, 1972 for 365,000 dollars, less than the 450,000 dollars Cornelius Vanderbilt II had paid for the bare land in 1885.

1962: buying palaces at scrap prices

With the model proven, the Society moved fast when houses came up for grabs. It bought The Elms at auction in 1962 for 116,000 dollars, weeks before scheduled demolition. A year later it took on Marble House, purchased from the Prince Trust with funding from Harold Stirling Vanderbilt, Alva’s son. Each acquisition added rooms to tour, tickets to sell, and revenue to feed back into the roofs and stonework.

Preservation in Newport was never only about the palaces. In 1968 the tobacco heiress Doris Duke, who summered at Rough Point on the Cliff Walk’s southern bend, founded the Newport Restoration Foundation and bought and restored more than 83 endangered colonial houses in the Point and Historic Hill neighborhoods, leaving Newport with one of the densest stocks of eighteenth-century homes in the country. The city was saved at both ends of the income scale at once.

The path between the lawns

Threading it all together is the Cliff Walk, a 3.5-mile public path pinned between the mansion lawns and the Atlantic surf, pieced together in sections from around 1880 and later designated New England’s first National Recreation Trail. It is the rare world-class attraction that is free, which makes it the front door of the whole visitor economy: you walk it once, then buy a ticket to see the other side of the hedges. It is also a standing maintenance bill. A 5.2-million-dollar restoration reopened the path in June 2014 after Hurricane Sandy, and a 20-foot section that collapsed in March 2022 had to be rebuilt again. Newport pays it, because the path is the product.

The soundtrack: jazz, folk, and a tennis lawn

The mansions gave Newport its architecture of leisure; a second generation of builders gave it a calendar. In 1954 Elaine Lorillard, wintering on the society circuit and bored by the season, hired a young Boston jazz-club owner named George Wein to stage the first outdoor jazz festival in America on the grounds of the Newport Casino, with her husband Louis underwriting it. Some 13,000 people came over two days. Five years later Wein and partners added the Newport Folk Festival, and both eventually settled into Fort Adams State Park on the harbor, where they still run every summer.

The Casino itself is the older story. Publisher James Gordon Bennett Jr. commissioned it in 1879, McKim, Mead and White designed it, and it opened on July 1, 1880 as the resort’s social clubhouse. The first U.S. National Championships in tennis were played on its lawn in 1881, and in 1954 Newport resident Jimmy Van Alen turned the complex into what became the International Tennis Hall of Fame, now holding 262 inductees from 27 countries, with the country’s signature grass courts still in play every July.

Result: the excess pays the bills now

Run the numbers on what the rescue built. The Preservation Society counted more than 863,000 tours across its houses in 2024, its strongest attendance since before the pandemic, according to CEO Trudy Coxe. The Breakers alone has drawn around 450,000 visitors a year, the most-visited attraction in Rhode Island. Eleven properties now operate as house museums, and the organization that started as a rescue committee is the state’s largest cultural employer of its kind.

The houses have even gone back to work as sets. HBO’s The Gilded Age films in the real rooms of The Breakers, Marble House, The Elms, and their neighbors, and returned to Newport in 2026 to shoot its fourth season, hiring local carpenters, drivers, and caterers while it works. The show functions as a rolling national advertisement for the very tours that keep the buildings standing.

The wider ledger is just as plain. Rhode Island logged a record 29.4 million visitors and 6 billion dollars in visitor spending in 2024, and the state’s own capital of that trade is this city, which Newport’s government describes as its principal tourist center, visited annually by millions. Down on the waterfront, Bowen’s Wharf, a working pier since 1760, now holds more than 30 shops, galleries, and restaurants beside an active marina, colonial commerce continuing under new management. The folk festival sells out annually, the jazz festival anchors a second summer weekend, and the Hall of Fame’s July tournament brings professional tennis back to the sport’s original American lawn.

Takeaway: durability is a decision

The tidy version of the Newport story is that the city got lucky with its inheritance. The truthful version is closer to the opposite. The inheritance was a liability: oversized, over-engineered houses that their own families could not afford, in a town whose signature industry had dissolved. What Newport actually monetized was a series of unglamorous decisions, a one-dollar lease in 1948, a 116,000-dollar auction bid in 1962, a foundation that bought 83 old houses nobody wanted, a public path rebuilt every time the ocean tears it, made by people who decided the city’s most excessive era could become its most durable product.

That is the transferable part. A town does not need a Vanderbilt to run this play; it needs one anchor it refuses to lose and the patience to institutionalize access to it. We have watched the same logic work from a cold start, as when Detroit Lakes, Minnesota built a brand-new anchor by commissioning Thomas Dambo’s troll sculptures in its lake woods. Newport simply ran it in reverse: the anchor already existed, and the work was refusing to let it fall down.

Seventy years into that refusal, a city of 25,163 residents hosts festival crowds, museum lines, and harbor traffic that most metros would envy, and it does so on the strength of buildings its own era judged obsolete. The Gilded Age ended in Newport. Newport, in return, made sure it never quite left.