The Marble House of Newport
The Marble House of Newport
Not that Bellevue Avenue along the Newport coast has any shortage of mansions, but the one that railroad tycoon William K Vanderbilt constructed for his wife Alva's birthday in 1888 stands apart. A monument to love, Mr Vanderbilt spent in excess of eleven million dollars -and these were 1888 dollars- on the mansion's construction, some seven million of which was for the cost of marble alone. Some five-hundred thousand square feet of it. It would be lovely to report that Mr and Mrs Vanderbilt live happily ever after in this stately marble manse, but alas, they did not. Alva Vanderbilt seemed to have a lifelong societal rivalry with a certain Mrs Astor (her next-door neighbor on Bellevue Avenue) and in her efforts at topping the gilded age's upper-crust ladder, eventually divorced Mr. Vanderbilt and married another wealthy neighbor, one Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont and lived out her days in his mansion down the street.
If visiting the Marble House piques your interest, by all means do-- in fact, you can make quite a day of touring Newport's historic and opulent Bellevue Avenue. Many of the east coast's highest-ranking society families made Newport their summer home, building insanely expensive mansions -which they charmingly referred to as their 'summer cottages'. Fortunately, many of these elegant old homes survive today and are well taken care of by the Preservation Society of Newport County, Rhode Island.
It's often fascinating to see how people lived in other times-- especially when their lifestyles are like a visit to another planet, sometimes. Have your tour driver take you and your friends around to Bellevue Avenue and either walk the street from end to end, stopping in mansions along the way, or make like a Vanderbilt and be driven to each and every one. Either way, you're in for a time-tripping treat, indeed.
