Squabble Disrupts a Refuge for the Rich
Ryan Conaty for The New York Times
The Vanderbilt family’s “cottage” in Newport, R.I., draws 400,000 visitors a year. A proposal to build a visitors center on the grounds is
raising hackles.
NEWPORT, R.I. — Change has rarely been welcomed in this seaside haven of the uber-rich, where the
famously over-the-top mansions of the Gilded Age are still called “cottages.” Longtime residents weren’t
happy when the America’s Cup defected, or when Bob Dylan went electric at the Folk Festival, or when
Maya Lin designed a contemporary memorial to honor the heiress Doris
Duke in the village green.
Epstein Joslyn Architects Inc.
A rendering of the proposed visitors center at the Breakers. Portable toilets are there now.
And they’re not happy now that the local preservation society, in the
name of progress, has proposed a visitors center — with wheelchairaccessible bathrooms and prepared food — on the grounds of the most
visited mansion, the Breakers, where the Vanderbilt family’s carved oak
dining room table could seat 34 and at least one daughter changed her
outfit up to seven times a day.
Letters to editors are pouring in on both sides of the debate. Sleepy town commissions are suddenly
heated forums. Friends are not talking to friends.
In a letter in a Newport weekly in August, Gloria Vanderbilt, the fashion designer whose grandfather
Cornelius Vanderbilt II built the Breakers in the 1890s, made her case against the project, hailing the
house as “a reminder of a lost world.”
“People come to experience the fantasy, the wonder and beauty of that world,” she continued. “If the
first thing they see upon entering the gates of this magical kingdom is a new building selling plastic
shrink-wrapped sandwiches, it will forever change their enjoyment of the visit.”
In a column in May in The Providence Journal, David Brussat took an opposing view, praising the
proposed building, to be tucked into a grove of trees, as “sort of like a Gilded Age conservatory or
greenhouse that would fit like a glove into its context.”
Last month, the Newport Historic District Commission voted 4 to 3 against the society’s proposal. The
Preservation Society of Newport, a nonprofit organization that owns and operates the city’s mansions,
on Monday appealed the decision to the zoning board. A ruling is not expected until later this fall.
The strain on social relations is evident to Lisette Prince, a former trustee of the Preservation Society,
who opposes the center and says that Trudy Coxe, the society’s chief executive, isn’t speaking to her
anymore. (Ms. Coxe said, “That’s simply not correct at all.”)
Helen Winslow — widow of John Winslow, once president of the society — said she felt compelled to
publish a letter in The Newport Daily News opposing the project. Ms. Winslow, who is 94, said Donald
O. Ross, the society’s chairman, subsequently upbraided her as she was having Sunday lunch at her
beach club, after which she received a written apology from Mr. Ross’s wife, Susan. (Asked about this,
Mr. Ross said, “I just don’t think it’s relevant.”)
Perhaps only in a town where a 70-room Italian Renaissance-style palazzo like the Breakers is called a
“summer cottage” could a fight like this occur over a 3,650-square-foot glass pavilion. Part of the debate
focuses on whether the food service at the center should be considered a restaurant, thus violating
residential zoning laws. (The Preservation Society insists that the cafe would have no stove or
dishwasher and therefore is unequivocally not a restaurant.)
“Change is very hard for certain people,” Ms. Coxe said, “family members most particularly.”
Indeed, various members of the Vanderbilt family have weighed in against the project, partly because
they said they have felt excluded from the decision. Even after the Breakers opened for visits in 1948,
and it was sold to the society in 1972, Vanderbilts continued to live on the third floor; two members of
the family still do.
“The Breakers is one of the most important buildings in the Northeast, if not the East Coast,” said one
of them, Gladys V. Szapary, who added that her great-grandfather Cornelius “clearly wanted this
landscape to stay free of buildings.”
Ms. Szapary and others say they do not dispute the need for an improved tourist experience. “No one
cares about the visitors at the Breakers more than I do,” she insisted. They’re even accepting of the
design of the proposed pavilion. It should simply be placed elsewhere, they say, like the parking lot
across the street, or at the end of Newport Bridge, where people could stop to buy tickets to the
Breakers and other mansions on their way into town.
“The building looks like Tavern on the Green to me,” said Ms. Prince, who has long family ties to
Newport. “It’s fine, but not there. It doesn’t fit.”
They also say that tourists want to see all 13 acres of the Breakers as they were originally, and that the
house was designated a National Historic Landmark partly because of the landscaped grounds,
designed by Ernest Bowditch, a student of Central Park’s designer Frederick Law Olmsted.
“All of the property was considered to be what was significant,” said Robert Beaver, chairman of the
Bellevue Ochre Point Neighborhood Association, who has lived in Newport for nearly half a century.
He and his wife, longtime donors to the Preservation Society, will not be giving this year. “A modern
intruder should not be placed into the grounds of the Breakers,” Mr. Beaver said.
For its part, the society says that the visitor center will provide a more comfortable welcome and a more
comprehensive introduction to Newport’s other 10 mansions.
“We need a very high standard here in Newport,” said Mr. Ross, the society chairman. “Our visitors
deserve it.”
Supporters of the pavilion say it should be on the premises, as such centers typically are. “The Liberty
Bell, the White House, Mount Vernon — all of these places have facilities at the gate,” said Mark
Brodeur, the director of tourism at the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation. “If we’re
going to teach the Gilded Age to the consumer, we have to start doing that from the get-go.”
The center would be built to the left of the Breakers entrance, where a tent and portable toilets have
been for the last decade. These temporary accommodations are run down, the society says, and
inadequate for the Breakers’ 400,000 annual visitors.
“I want these people to enjoy themselves and want them to have an experience they will never forget,”
Ms. Coxe said. “I don’t know of any museum that makes you go to the bathroom in a port-o-john or
makes you buy a ticket out of a tent.”