What to See in Newport - Top Sights and Attractions

Opulent, late-1800s Vanderbilt mansion. The Breakers is a Gilded Age mansion located at 44 Ochre Point Avenue, Newport, Rhode Island, US. It was built between 1893 and 1895 as a summer residence for Cornelius Vanderbilt II, a member of the wealthy Vanderbilt family.

The 70-room mansion, with a gross area of 125,339 square feet (11,644.4 m2) and 62,482 square feet (5,804.8 m2) of living area on five floors, was designed by Richard Morris Hunt in the Renaissance Revival style; the interior decor was by Jules Allard and Sons and Ogden Codman Jr.

The Ochre Point Avenue entrance is marked by sculpted iron gates, and the 30-foot-high (9.1 m) walkway gates are part of a 12-foot-high (3.7 m) limestone-and-iron fence that borders the property on all but the ocean side. The footprint of the house covers approximately 1 acre (4,000 m2) or 43,000 square feet of the 14 acres (5.7 ha) estate on the cliffs overlooking Easton Bay of the Atlantic Ocean.

The house was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1971, and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1994. It is also a contributing property to the Bellevue Avenue Historic District. The property is owned and operated by the Newport Preservation Society as a museum and is open for visits all year.^[1]

Building complex in Newport, Rhode Island. The Newport Casino is an athletic complex and recreation center located at 180-200 Bellevue Avenue, Newport, Rhode Island in the Bellevue Avenue/Casino Historic District. Built in 1879–1881 by New York Herald publisher James Gordon Bennett, Jr. it was designed in the Shingle style by the newly formed firm of McKim, Mead & White. The Newport Casino was the firm's first major commission and helped to establish the firm's national reputation. Built as a social club, it included courts for both lawn tennis and court tennis, facilities for other games, such as squash and lawn bowling, club rooms for reading, socializing, card-playing, and billiards, shops, and a convertible theater and ballroom. It became a center of Newport's social life during the Gilded Age through the 1920s.

The casino was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1970, and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1987. The complex, which was the site of the earliest American lawn tennis championships, now houses the International Tennis Hall of Fame. The Newport Casino also hosted the first Newport Jazz Festival in 1954.^[5]

Ornate house museum built in 1898–1902. Rosecliff is a Gilded Age mansion of Newport, Rhode Island, now open to the public as a historic house museum. The house has also been known as the Hermann Oelrichs House or the J. Edgar Monroe House.

It was built 1898–1902 by Theresa Fair Oelrichs, a silver heiress from Nevada, whose father James Graham Fair was one of the four partners in the Comstock Lode. She was the wife of Hermann Oelrichs, American agent for Norddeutscher Lloyd steamship line. She and her husband, together with her sister, Virginia Fair, bought the land in 1891 from the estate of George Bancroft and commissioned the architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White to design a summer home suitable for entertaining on a grand scale. With little opportunity to channel her considerable energy elsewhere, she "threw herself into the social scene with tremendous gusto, becoming, with Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish and Mrs. O.H.P. Belmont (of nearby Belcourt), one of the three great hostesses of Newport."

The principal architect, Stanford White, modeled the mansion after the Grand Trianon of Versailles, but smaller and reduced to a basic "H" shape, while keeping Mansart's scheme of a glazed arcade of arched windows and paired Ionic pilasters, which increase to columns across the central loggia. White's Rosecliff adds to the Grand Trianon a second storey with a balustraded roofline that conceals the set-back third storey, containing twenty small servants' rooms and the pressing room for the laundry.^[6]

Museum in Newport, Rhode Island. The Old Colony House, also known as Old State House or Newport Colony House, is located at the east end of Washington Square in the city of Newport, Rhode Island, United States. It is a brick Georgian-style building completed in 1741, and was the meeting place for the colonial legislature. From independence in 1776 to the early 20th century, the state legislature alternated its sessions between here and the Rhode Island State House in Providence.

The building has received little alteration since its construction. As one of the best-maintained surviving Georgian public buildings in the United States from the colonial era, it was designated a National Historic Landmark (NHL) in 1960. It is also a contributing property to the Newport Historic District, later designated an NHL itself. The building is still owned by the state, but managed as a museum by the Newport Historical Society.

Besides its political and architectural importance, the building was the site of many important Revolutionary events in Rhode Island. George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower have both been guests at the building. It has been used as a barracks, hospital, courthouse and a location for a Steven Spielberg film.^[8]

Memorial park in Newport, Rhode Island. Miantonomi Memorial Park is a public park between Hillside Avenue and Girard Avenue in Newport, Rhode Island.

The Narragansett Indians used the area around the park for hundreds of years and the park (and the hill it is on) is named after Sachem, or Chief, Miantonomi. This hill was Miantonomi's seat of power until it was purchased by English colonists in 1637. The settlers used the hill as a lookout and in 1667 built a beacon on the hill. During the American Revolutionary War fortifications were built on the hill, fragments of which still survive. In 1921, the City of Newport received the property from the local Stokes family.

Miantonomi Memorial Park's 30 acres (120,000 m2) became part of the Aquidneck Land Trust through an easement in 2005.^[14]

Historic 1763 synagogue with tours. The Touro Synagogue or Congregation Jeshuat Israel is a synagogue built in 1763 in Newport, Rhode Island. It is the oldest synagogue building still standing in the United States, the only surviving synagogue building in the U.S. dating to the colonial era, and the oldest surviving Jewish synagogue building in North America. In 1946, it was declared a National Historic Site.

The first congregation was made up of Sephardic Jews, who are believed to have come via the West Indies, where they participated in the triangular trade along with Dutch and English settlements. They practiced a Spanish and Portuguese Jewish liturgy and ritual. In the late eighteenth century, when warfare threatened, the congregation transferred the deed and Torah scrolls to Congregation Shearith Israel in New York for safekeeping. Since the late 19th century, the congregants have been primarily Ashkenazi.

In 2012 the two congregations went to court to try to resolve which owned the synagogue and its contents, as the Newport congregation wanted to sell some items to raise money for restoration of the building. In 2017 the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit ruled that the New York congregation owned it; as the US Supreme Court declined to hear the case, this ruling stands.^[18]

Stadium in Newport, Rhode Island. Cardines Field is a baseball stadium located at 20 America’s Cup Avenue in Newport, Rhode Island. It is believed to be one of the oldest ballparks in the United States and has been called "a small urban gem of a ballpark". The field serves as a buffer between the residential and commercial sections of an older part of Newport. The oddly shaped outfield fence and dimensions are created by the close proximity of residential housing, while the spectator side of the park is contained by America's Cup Avenue and West Marlborough Street. Originally called Basin Field, references to the field can be found as early as 1893. At that time, the property was used by local railroads as a drainage and supply basin for steam engines. Complaints from neighbors about the stagnant water and mosquitoes prompted the drainage of the basin area, permitting baseball to be played. A local historical debate continues as to whether baseball was played prior to 1900, making Cardines one of the oldest existing ballparks in the country, or if play didn't begin until 1908, the earliest documented proof of stadium construction.

The Basin Field ballpark was later renamed for Bernardo Cardines, a Newport baseball player who was Newport's first citizen to die in World War I. Today, the ballpark continues to be the home of the historic Sunset League, as well as the Newport Gulls of the New England Collegiate Baseball League.^[22]

Lighthouse in Newport, Rhode Island. The Rose Island Light, built in 1870, is on Rose Island in Narragansett Bay in Newport, Rhode Island in the United States. It is preserved, maintained and operated by The Rose Island Lighthouse Foundation.

One of a group of New England lighthouses built to an award-winning design by Vermont architect Albert Dow, Rose Island Light has sisters at Sabin Point, Pomham Rocks, Esopus Meadows Light and Colchester Reef. The lighthouse stands atop a bastion of Fort Hamilton, which was built in 1798-1800.

The building was abandoned as a functioning lighthouse in 1970, when the Newport Bridge was constructed nearby. In 1984, the Rose Island Lighthouse Foundation was founded to restore the dilapidated light on behalf of the City of Newport, which had received it for free from the United States government. In 1987, the federal government listed the lighthouse on the National Register of Historic Places. In 1992 it was relit as a private aid to navigation.

The lighthouse is today a travel destination, reached only by boat. For a fee to the Foundation, visitors can spend a night as a guest or a week as the "lighthouse keeper," completing many of the chores required to keep the lighthouse in good condition.^[27]

Museum in Newport, Rhode Island. The Newport Art Museum, founded in 1912 as the Art Association of Newport, is located at 76 Bellevue Avenue in Newport, Rhode Island. The museum operates a gallery in the John N. A. Griswold House, a National Historic Landmark that is one of the first American Stick Style buildings. It was designed by the noted American architect, Richard Morris Hunt in 1864 and one was one of his first commissions in Newport. The museum purchased the house in 1915.

The museum's second gallery space was built in 1919 and was designed by Delano & Aldrich. Dedicated to the memory of the artist Howard Gardiner Cushing, the museum added the Sarah Rives lobby and Morris Gallery to the building in 1990.

The museum's school is the Coleman Center for Creative Studies at 26 Liberty Street.^[28]

Washington Square is the geographical and historical heart of Newport Rhode Island. More trapezoid than square, it exists at the intersection of several major streets and what was the colonial long wharf, projecting into the harbor off Aquidneck Island and into Narragansett Bay. Although as a civic space it is colonial in origin, dating back to the first settlement of 1639, much of its present shape, form and name dates from the 19th century while a number of its most prominent buildings are of early 20th century design. Like most great civic spaces, it developed over time rather than being imposed by design.

The first group of Anglo settlers – among them William Coddington, John Clarke, Henry Bull, and the Easton family each clustered their house lots of about ten acres close to a fresh water spring and a short distance uphill from the shoreline. The spring still flows (although its course is now subterranean) but all the original houses are gone, the last, Henry Bull's, being destroyed by fire in 1912.

What remains from the areas 17th-century origins are adjacent street names (Coddington, Bull, Clarke, Dyer) and the street layout itself. Vectors lead along the residential hill and harbor (Thames Street, Spring Street), up island (Broadway) and northwest, out of town, toward the Common Burying Ground established by the 1660s (the aptly named cortege route of Farewell Street). These don't quite converge at the square but instead enter at various points onto an open space flanked by both residential and institutional buildings. By the nineteenth century, this spot came to be known as "The Parade" and became a more defined, park-like area with boundary fencing, trees, fountain and a bronze sculpture of one of Newport's military heroes, Oliver Hazard Perry.

Two of colonial America's most significant buildings are at either end of the square, Newport's Colony House, built by Richard Munday (1739) and the Brick Market designed by Peter Harrison (1772); as a public space, this "square" contained two important civic symbols: the impressively ornate seat of the colonial government and a fashionable Georgian symbol of Newport's economic success.

From 1995 to the present, Washington Square has been revitalized by The Washington Square Advisory Commission. Building on an original design by artist, inventor and restorer Howard Newman, the commission completely rebuilt the Square to more closely serve its original function as a gathering place for Newport’s citizenry, and dedicating itself to the square’s continued historic, architectural, cultural, and commercial significance. To accomplish the goals, the traffic pattern was re-designed, and a 19th century horse trough fountain was commissioned, recreated and installed as its focal point by Newmans Ltd. which recreated the trough in bronze, based on archival photographs from the library of the Newport Historical Society.

There are plans and proposals to continue to renovate and reinvigorate the square today but while other areas of Newport have become better known because of tourist marketing, Washington Square has long been the hometown "hearth" of the city. One testament to that status were the old Homecoming events, welcoming all native near and far back to Newport during which a triumphal arch was set up in the square and scores of former residents gathered to celebrate their hometown in that time honored place.^[29]

Museum. The Wanton–Lyman–Hazard House is the oldest surviving house in Newport, Rhode Island, United States. Built c. 1697, it is also one of the oldest surviving houses in the state. It is located at the corner of Broadway and Stone Street, in the downtown section of the city in the Newport Historic District.

The house "was damaged by Stamp Act riots in 1765 when occupied by a Tory Stampmaster."

The house has passed through several owners since its construction, and has been renovated and improved by some of them. The three for whom it is named were not the first, but they were members of a family, related by marriage that owned it for over a century, from shortly before the Revolution to 1911. Since the 1920s it has been owned by the Newport Historical Society (NHS), which renovated it and converted it to a historic house museum. In 1960 it was among the first National Historic Landmarks designated by the Department of the Interior.^[31]

Episcopal church in Newport, Rhode Island. Emmanuel Church is an historic Episcopal church at 42 Dearborn Street in Newport, Rhode Island. The church began as a mission of Newport's Trinity Church in 1841. In 1852, it was admitted into the diocese as Emmanuel Free Church in its own right.

The current building was designed by architectural firm Cram, Goodhue & Ferguson in Late Gothic Revival style. It was built between 1900 and 1902, thanks to a donation in memory of John Nicholas Brown I by his widow, Natalie Bayard Brown. Brown donated the reredos and murals in 1921 in honor of Armistice Day. In the early 1930s, E. Power Biggs served as its organist. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1996.^[32]