The Bellevue Avenue Historic District is located along and
around Bellevue Avenue in Newport, Rhode Island, United States. Its property is
almost exclusively residential, including many of the mansions built by
affluent summer vacationers in the city around the turn of the 20th century,
including the Vanderbilt family and Astor family. Many of the homes represent
pioneering work in the architectural styles of the time by major American
architects.
It was declared a National Historic Landmark (NHL) in 1976. Several
of the mansions within the district had themselves attained NHL status as well,
or have done so since then. It has become one of Newport's major tourist
attractions.
The Preservation Society of
Newport County
The Preservation Society of Newport County is a private,
non-profit organization based in Newport, Rhode Island. It is Rhode Island's
largest and most-visited cultural organization. The organization's mission is
to preserve the architectural heritage of Newport County, Rhode Island,
including those of the Bellevue Avenue Historic District. Its fourteen historic
properties and landscapes—seven of which are National Historic Landmarks, and
eleven of which are open to the public—form a complete essay of American
historical development from the Colonial era through the Gilded Age.
The Preservation Society is led by CEO Trudy Coxe.
The Elms is a large mansion, or "summer cottage",
located at 367 Bellevue Avenue, Newport, Rhode Island, in the United States.
The Elms was designed by architect Horace Trumbauer for the coal baron Edward
Julius Berwind, and was completed in 1901. Its design was copied from the Château
d'Asnières in Asnières-sur-Seine, France. The gardens and landscaping were
created by C. H. Miller and E. W. Bowditch, working closely with Trumbauer. The
Elms has been designated a National Historic Landmark and today is open to the
public.
The estate was constructed from 1899 to 1901 and cost
approximately 1.5 million dollars to build. Like most Newport estates of the
Gilded Age, The Elms is constructed with a steel frame with brick partitions
and a limestone facade.
On the first floor the estate has a grand ballroom, a salon,
a dining room, a breakfast room, a library, a conservatory, and a grand hallway
with a marble floor. The second floor contains bedrooms for the family and
guests as well as a private sitting room. The third floor contains bedrooms for
the indoor servants.
In keeping with the French architecture of the house, the
grounds of The Elms, among the best in Newport, were designed in French
eighteenth-century taste and include a sunken garden. On the edge of the
property a large carriage house and stables were built, over which lived the
stable keepers and gardeners. When the Berwind family began using automobiles,
the carriage house and stables were converted into a large garage. The head
coachman, in order to keep his job, became the family driver, but he could
never learn to back up, so a large turntable had to be installed in the garage.
In 1961 when Julia Berwind died, The Elms was one of the
very last Newport cottages to be run in the fashion of the Gilded Age: forty
servants were on staff, and Miss Berwind's social season remained at six weeks.
Childless, Julia Berwind willed the estate to a nephew, who did not want it and
fruitlessly tried to pass The Elms to someone else in the family. Finally the
family auctioned off the contents of the estate and sold the property to a
developer who wanted to tear it down. In 1962, just weeks before its date with
the wrecking ball, The Elms was purchased by the Preservation Society of
Newport County for $116,000. The price included the property along with
adjacent guest houses. Since then, the house has been open to the public for
tours. On June 19, 1996, it was designated a National Historic Landmark.
A tour of The Elms can include, at a cost, a
behind-the-scenes tour which brings visitors to the basement to view the
coal-fired furnaces and the tunnel from which the coal is brought into the
basement from a nearby street. The tour shows the lengths to which Mr. Berwind
went to keep the servants out of view from guests on all floors of the mansion.
Visitors on the "downstairs" tour view the laundry room, steamer
trunk storage area, the giant circuit breaker box, ice-makers, galley, and wine
cellar below the main floor, and then ascend the three-story service staircase
to the servants' quarters (spartan but comfortable) at roof level, which are
furnished as they were at the turn of the twentieth century. The tour then
proceeds out on the level tiled roof and a small aluminum platform, where
visitors enjoy the view of the rear lawn, weeping beech tree—the American Elms
having succumbed to Dutch elm disease—and gardens, and the breathtaking vista
of Newport harbor in the distance.
Berwind was interested in technology, and The Elms was one
of the first homes in America to be wired for electricity with no form of
backup system. The house also included one of the first electrical ice makers.
It was one of the most sophisticated houses of the time. When The Elms
opened in 1901 the Berwinds held a huge party.
During the next 20 years, Berwind's wife, Sarah, would spend
the summers there, the season being from the 4th of July to the end of August;
Berwind would come out only on weekends, for his coal-mining interests kept him
in New York during the week. Though the Berwinds had no children, their nephews
and nieces would come out to visit on a regular basis.
On January 5, 1922 Mrs. Berwind died, and Edward asked his
youngest sister Julia A. Berwind to move in and become the hostess of The Elms.
In 1936 when he died, he willed the house to Julia, who, not being interested
in technology, continued to run the house in the same way for the next twenty
five years: washers and dryers were never installed at the Elms. Julia was well
known in Newport. She would invite children from the nearby Fifth Ward (a
working-class immigrant neighborhood) to the estate for milk and cookies. She
had a love for cars and would drive around Newport every day in one of her
luxury cars. This was somewhat shocking to the rest of Newport society where it
was considered "unladylike" for women to drive themselves. It was
rumored that her social secretary would perform the "white glove
test" to make sure there was no dust on the steering wheel before Julia
got into the driver's seat.
Rosecliff built 1898-1902
Rosecliff, built 1898-1902, is one of the Gilded Age
mansions of Newport, Rhode Island, now open to the public as a historic house
museum.
The house has also been known as the Herman Oelrichs House or
the J. Edgar Monroe House.
It was built 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.
he commission was given to McKim, Mead, and White in 1898,
and the New York branch of Jules Allard and Sons were engaged as interior
decorators. Construction started in 1899, but the sharp winter slowed
construction; Mrs. Oelrichs' sister had married William K. Vanderbilt II that
winter season, and the house was required for parties in the following Newport
season; the eager Mrs. Oelrichs moved in July 1900, sending the workmen out in
order to give a first party in August, a dinner for one hundred and twelve to
outdo Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish's Harvest Festival Ball at Crossways. Ferns and
floral arrangements concealed the unfinished areas. The house was not completed
until 1902.
Rosecliff's brick construction is clad in white
architectural terracotta tiles. Stanford White's sophisticated spatial planning
offered unexpected views en filade through aligned doorways centered on
handsome monumental fireplaces with projecting overmantels.
The central corps de logis is entirely taken up with the
ballroom as it appeared on White's plans which, with the Louis XIV furniture
removed, could serve as Newport's largest ballroom at 40 by 80 feet . Its scheme of
single and paired Corinthian pilasters alternating with arch-headed windows and
recessed doorways echoes the articulation of the exterior. This is reached
through the French doors on either side, to a plain terrace dropping by broad
stairs to the lawn facing the ocean, or to a planted terrace garden with a
central fountain.
In the northernmost of the wings that project from both
sides of the central block, is a dining room and a billiard room separated by a
marble anteroom backed, on the service side, by a butler's pantry with two
dumbwaiters. These communicate with the all-but-subterranean kitchens below
which were lit, invisibly, from the sunken service yard on the north side of
the house. The main entrance, on the opposite south wing, is through a
vestibule where the exterior Ionic order is carried inside, now suitably
enriched, under an emphatic cornice that divides the height 2:3.
The vestibule is separated, by a tripartite screen with an
arched central opening flanked above the cornice by bull's-eye openings in
which baroque vases stand, from a grand Stair Hall. The Stair Hall projects
from the south block to accommodate a grand staircase that sweeps forward
through a heart-shaped opening into the floor space. This divides at a landing
to return in matched recurving flights to the upper floor.[
Beyond the Stair Hall is the Salon with the same proportions
as the Dining Room (3:4, or 30 by 40 feet ) and like it, originally hung with
tapestry. Its ceiling is coffered. Its overscaled Gothic fireplace of Caen
stone is the one eclectic anomaly in Rosecliff's interiors.
Upstairs, three grand bedrooms of equal importance and guest
bedrooms of graduated sizes may be linked by opened doors or isolated by locked
ones, in a flexible arrangement of rooms or suites, all with baths, and all
separated from the wide corridor by intervening dressing closets for hermetic
privacy from the staff, who moved up and down stairs by means of two small
service stairs contrived in spaces smaller than the master bedrooms' walk-in
closets.
The most famous of Mrs. Oelrich's parties was the "Bal
blanc" of 19 August 1904 to celebrate the Astor Cup Races, in which
everything was white and silver.
Oelrichs family
Rosecliff stayed in the Oelrichs family until 1941, then
went through several changes of ownership before being bought by Mr & Mrs
J. Edgar Monroe of New Orleans in 1947. Mr. Monroe, a southern gentleman who
had made his fortune in the ship building industry, came to Newport with his
wife Louise every summer to escape the summer heat of the Deep South. The two
became well known for the large parties they threw at Rosecliff; many of which
had mardi gras theme, the Monroes loved dressing up in fancy costumes for these
parties. Unlike Mrs. Oelrichs' parties, which were stiff and formal, the
Monroes' parties were laid back and easy going. Because Hermann Oelrichs Jr had
sold off all the furnishings in 1941, nearly all the furnishings visitors see
at Rosecliff today are from the Monroe period of occupation. In 1971, Mr. and
Mrs. Monroe donated the entire estate with its contents and a $2 million
operating endowment to the Preservation Society of Newport County, who opened
it to the public for tours. Mr Monroe often would come back to the estate for
charity events up until his death in 1991.
The ballroom was used to film scenes for the 1974 version of
The Great Gatsby, The Betsy, High Society, True Lies, and Amistad
Marble House built between 1888 and 1892
Marble House is a Gilded Age mansion in Newport, Rhode
Island, now open to the public as a museum run by the Newport Preservation
Society. It was designed by the renowned society architect Richard Morris Hunt.
For an American house, it was unparalleled in design and opulence when it was
built. Its temple-front portico, which also serves as a porte-cochère, has been
compared to that of the White House.
The mansion was built as a summer "cottage"
retreat between 1888 and 1892 for Alva and William Kissam Vanderbilt. It was a
social landmark that helped spark the transformation of Newport from a
relatively relaxed summer colony of wooden houses to the now legendary resort
of opulent stone palaces. The fifty-room mansion required a staff of 36
servants, including butlers, maids, coachmen, and footmen. The mansion cost $11
million ($260,000,000 in 2009 dollars) of which $7 million was spent on 500,000 cubic feet
(14,000 m³ )
of marble. William Vanderbilt's older brother Cornelius Vanderbilt II
subsequently built the largest of the Newport cottages, The Breakers, between
1893 and 1895.
When Alva Vanderbilt divorced William in 1895, she already
owned Marble House outright, having received it as her 39th birthday present.
She remarried to Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont in 1896, and then relocated down
the street to Belcourt Castle. After his death, she reopened Marble House and
added the Chinese Tea House on the seaside cliff, where she hosted rallies for
women's suffrage.
Alva Belmont shuttered the mansion permanently in 1919, when
she relocated to France to be closer to her daughter, Consuelo Balsan. There
she divided her time between a Paris townhouse, a villa on the Riviera, and the
Château d'Augerville, which she restored. She sold the house to Frederick H.
Prince in 1932, less than a year before her death. In 1963 the Preservation
Society of Newport County bought the house from the Prince Trust, with funding
provided by Harold Stirling Vanderbilt, the Vanderbilt couple's youngest son.
The Trust donated the furniture for the house directly to the Preservation
Society.
The mansion was added to the National Register of Historic
Places on September 10, 1971. The Department of the Interior designated it as a
National Historic Landmark on February 17, 2006. The Bellevue Avenue Historic
District, which includes Marble House and many other historic Newport mansions,
was added to the Register on December 8, 1972 and subsequently designated as a
National Historic Landmark District on May 11, 1976.
The interior features a number of notable rooms. Entrance
into the mansion is through one of two French Baroque-style doors, each
weighing a ton and a half. Both are embellished by the monogram "WV"
set into an oval medallion. They were made at the John Williams Bronze Foundry
in New York. The Stair Hall is a two-story room that features walls and a grand
staircase of yellow Siena marble, with a wrought iron and gilt bronze staircase
railing. The railing is based on models at Versailles. An 18th-century Venetian
ceiling painting featuring gods and goddesses adorns the ceiling. The Grand
Salon, designed by Allard and Sons, served as a ballroom and reception room.
Designed in the Louis XIV style, it features green silk cut velvet upholstery
and draperies. The originals were made by Prelle. The walls are carved wood and
gold gilt panels representing scenes from classical mythology, inspired by the
panels and trophies adorning the Galerie d'Apollon at the Louvre. The ceiling
features an 18th-century French painting in the manner of Pietro da Cortona
depicting Minerva, with a surround adapted from the ceiling of the Queen’s
Bedroom at Versailles. The Gothic Room, in the Gothic Revival-style, was
designed to display Alva Vanderbilt's collection of Medieval and Renaissance
decorative objects. The stone fireplace in the room was copied by Allard and
Sons from one in the Jacques Cœur House in Bourges. The furniture was by
Gilbert Cuel. The Library is in the Rococo-style. It served as both a morning
room and library. The doors and bookcases, in carved walnut, were a collaboration
between Allard and Cuel. The Dining Room features pink Numidian marble and gilt
bronze capitals and trophies. The fireplace is a replica of the one in the
Salon d'Hercule at Versailles. The ceiling is decorated painted with a hunting
and fishing motif, with an 18th-century French ceiling in the center. Mrs.
Vanderbilt’s Bedroom, on the second floor, is in the Louis XIV style. The ceiling
in this room is adorned with circular ceiling painting of Athena, painted circa
1721 by Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini. It was originally in the library of the
Palazzo Pisani Moretta in Venice.
Marble House is one of the earliest examples of Beaux-Arts
architecture in the United States, with design inspiration from the Petit
Trianon at the Palace of Versailles. Jules Allard and Sons of Paris, first
hired by the Vanderbilt's to design some of the interiors for their Petit
Chateau on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, designed the French-inspired interiors of
Marble House also. The grounds were designed by landscape architect Ernest W.
Bowditch.
The mansion is a U-shaped building. Although it appears to
be a two-story structure, it is actually spread over four levels. The kitchen
and service areas are located on the basement level, reception rooms on the
ground floor, bedrooms on the second floor, and servant quarters on the hidden,
uppermost level. The load-bearing portion of the walls are brick, with the
exterior faced in white Westchester marble. Here Hunt adapted French
neoclassical architectural forms of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to
enliven the Beaux-Arts detailing.
The facade of the mansion features bays that are defined by
two story Corinthian pilasters. These frame arched windows on the ground floor
and rectangular ones on the second on most of the facade. A curved marble
carriage ramp, fronted by a semi-circular fountain with grotesque masks, spans
the entire western facade. The masks serve as water spouts. The center of this
facade, facing Bellevue Avenue, features a monumental tetrastyle Corinthian
portico. The north and south facades match the western in basic design. The
eastern facade, facing the Atlantic Ocean, is divided into a wing on each side.
These wings semi-enclose a marble terrace and are surrounded by a marble
balustrade on the ground floor level. The inset central portion of this facade
differs from the others, with four bays of ground floor doors topped by second
floor arched windows.
The interiors of the mansion have appeared in several films
or television series. Scenes appearing in the 1972–73 television series,
America, the 1974 film, The Great Gatsby, the 1995 miniseries The Buccaneers,
and the 2008 film 27 Dresses were shot here. More recently, Victoria's Secret
filmed one of their 2012 holiday commercials here.
