Newport, Rhode Island Has Been America's Gilded Age Summer Address Since the 1890s

Newport's reputation as an old-money summer address predates almost every rival American resort town. By the 1890s, the city's Bellevue Avenue and its oceanfront had become the summer address of choice for New York's wealthiest Gilded Age families, the Vanderbilts and Astors among them, who built vast seasonal homes they insisted on calling "cottages" despite most running to dozens of rooms.

The Breakers set the scale

The grandest of these is The Breakers, a 70-room Italian Renaissance-style palazzo built for Cornelius Vanderbilt II between 1893 and 1895 by architect Richard Morris Hunt, replacing an earlier wooden house on the same site that had burned down. Modelled loosely on sixteenth-century palaces in Genoa and Turin, it remains the clearest single monument to how much money Gilded Age industrial fortunes, in the Vanderbilts' case built on shipping and railroads, were willing to spend on a house used for perhaps ten weeks a year.

A walk designed to be seen from

The Cliff Walk, a roughly 3.5-mile public path running along the shoreline from First Beach to Bailey's Beach, threads directly behind the mansions' ocean-facing lawns, meaning the properties were effectively designed with an audience in mind from the outset. It remains open to the public today, giving anyone the same ocean-facing view of the mansions that Gilded Age Newport's residents built their houses to project.

Why the address has held its status

Unlike some Gilded Age resorts that faded once their original families moved on, Newport's mansions were largely preserved rather than redeveloped, with several, including The Breakers, now operated as museums by the Preservation Society of Newport County. That preservation, combined with the town's continued pull as a sailing and yachting centre, has kept Newport's old-money reputation intact rather than turning it into a purely historical curiosity.

Traveller tips

• T.F. Green Airport in Providence, around 40 minutes away, is the nearest major air link; Newport is also reachable by seasonal ferry from several New England ports.
• The Breakers and several other mansions are open for tours through the Preservation Society of Newport County; combination tickets cover multiple houses.
• The Cliff Walk is free and open year-round, though sections nearest Bailey's Beach can be uneven underfoot.
• August's Newport social calendar, including major sailing regattas, is when the town is busiest and hotel rates peak.