Block Island Is the New England Retreat Old Families Picked Precisely Because It Wasn't Newport

Block Island, officially the town of New Shoreham, sits about nine miles off Rhode Island's coast and is reachable mainly by ferry from Point Judith, with seasonal services also running from Newport, New London and Montauk. It had its own Gilded Age moment in the 1870s and 1880s, when a wave of grand wooden hotels went up to serve summer visitors arriving by steamer, several of which, including the National Hotel and the Spring House Hotel, still operate today. Unlike Newport's mansion-building elite of the same era, Block Island's summer colony grew up around modest shingled cottages and unpretentious hotel verandas rather than architectural competition, a tone that has stuck.

Deliberately undeveloped

In 1991, The Nature Conservancy named Block Island one of its "Last Great Places" in the Western Hemisphere, citing the roughly 40 percent of the island held under conservation easements and land trusts. That figure is unusually high for a populated East Coast summer destination, and it is the direct result of long-standing local resistance to the kind of large-scale resort development that reshaped much of the nearby coast. For families who first came in the Victorian hotel era, that resistance has functioned as a quiet form of exclusivity in itself, no gates required.

View on Google Maps →

A lighthouse that had to move

The island's Southeast Lighthouse, built in 1875 atop the Mohegan Bluffs, came within feet of collapsing into the sea as coastal erosion ate away at the bluff through the 20th century. In 1993, engineers moved the entire 2,000-tonne brick structure 245 feet inland in a widely covered feat of preservation engineering, and it remains active today, a rare case of a 19th-century lighthouse surviving into the 21st only because someone was willing to physically relocate it.

Quieter than its neighbours by design

Block Island has never courted the same profile as Nantucket or the Hamptons, and its year-round population, numbering only in the low hundreds, keeps commercial development modest even at the height of summer. That combination of preserved land, working farms and a handful of surviving Victorian hotels has made it the East Coast's answer to old money's preference for understatement over spectacle.

Traveller tips

• The main ferry from Point Judith runs year-round; seasonal ferries from Newport, New London and Montauk operate only in warmer months.
• Block Island State Airport offers limited seasonal flights, mainly from nearby regional airports.
• Mohegan Bluffs, near the relocated Southeast Lighthouse, involves a steep staircase down to the beach; allow time for the climb back up.
• Much of the island's interior is conservation land with marked public trails; stick to them, as a large share of surrounding land remains privately held.