Backdated Birthday Post - Day 3

Today was a really full day. Karaoqueen and I decided to tour ALL of the open mansions. It was ridiculous. 

Me and Karaoqueen excited and ready to tour!

Here are the highlights of each one:

The Breakers
Since this is the biggest mansion, we decided to go here first. The Breakers was owned by the Vanderbilts. They had central heating and also functional fireplaces. They had electricity which was really exciting back in those days, but they also had gas as a backup since electricity was new and unreliable. The house has 14 bedrooms and 20 bathrooms. The bathrooms each had four taps - hot and cold regular water and hot and cold salt water because salt water was believed to be therapeutic back then. There are hidden servent's corridors and hidden doors connecting some of the rooms so that the servants could slip unseen between the rooms to do their jobs. Mrs. Vanderbilt alone had four clothes closets because she would change clothes up to seven times per day. If you look closely around the mansion you will se recurring theme of acorns. This is because when the architect R. M. Hunt asked Mrs W. K. Vanderbilt for a Vanderbilt Family Motto in 1883, she gave him the David Everett quote "Tall oaks from little acorns grow."

Main hall of the Breakers.

Karaoqueen in the Breakers main hall.

Look at how gorgeous this is!

This ceiling is amazing.

Random indoor pool under the staircase.

Music room.

Bedroom with call buttons for summoning the servants.

One of the hidden doors.

I have some serious kitchen envy.

This is the butler's pantry with Karaoqueen in it to give a sense of the scale.

This is why they were called the breakers.

The Elms

The Elms was owned by the Burwinds. They had 40 servants with the accompanying system of call buttons, phones, electric dumbwaiters, a special servant's driveway covered by wisteria so it's invisible from the main house, two kitchens (a cold kitchen and a hot kitchen) etc. Fun fact: apparently in this time period the phone was considered rude and was only used for summoning servants - hand written notes sent by the post or delivered by servants was considered more proper. Another thing I learned is that ladies' servants would put on their fancy silk buttons before each dress wear and then cut them off again before washing to preserve them. They would also add things like ribbons or lace to a dress before it was worn and cut it off again after to reuse differently so that each time the woman in question wore the dress it looked different. 

Stairway from the first to the second floor.

Bedroom.

Dining room.

Me on my tour!

Random statue.

I am IN LOVE with these light fixtures. I want them!

Pretty room.

The hot kitchen. 

Marble House

This house was also owned by the Vanderbilt family and I really love the owner of this one! Mrs. Alva Erskine Smith Vanderbilt Belmont (1853-1933) was first married to William K Vanderbilt in 1875. She got divorced – which was super rare at the time. She then met Anna Howard Shaw, a noted suffragist and she dedicated the rest of her life to working with the most militant groups of the suffrage movement. The “Votes for Women” motto was used in 1909 at the famous suffrage open house held at Marble House (she even had “Votes for Women” plates made!). Mrs. Belmont later married her husband’s friend and moved down the street. Keeping up with the family trend, her daughter also divorced her first husband the 9th duke of Marlborough (though she had to pay him alimony because he made less money than her). 

Some of the original "Votes for Women" plates - you can buy reproductions in the gift shop if you're so inclined.

The house itself is made of 500,000 cubic feet of marble and contains 50 rooms. The grand salon is a guilded room covered in 22-K gold. The gothic room was designed around the art inside it. Fun fact: Back then rick people used to buy artwork in blocks for furnishing their houses. Weird, right? This house had only one guest room because all of the wealthy people would just rent entire houses if they were coming down for a visit rather than staying in friends' houses. The chef at Marble House was chef Rameau – a famous French chef who was paid $10,000/year which was a TON of money at that time. The other interesting thing about Marble House, which we didn't get to see due to the season, is the Chinese tea house which was built on the other end of the lawn. Maybe next time?

Stairway to the second floor. 

More of the stairway.

Dining room.

Bedroom. I want this room.

Guilded room.

Amazing chandelier closeup.

The gothic room.

Rosecliff
This was the last house we visited and my personal favorite. It was owned by Theresa Fair Oelrichs and built by Stanford White in 1899 (completed in 1902 at a cost of $2.5 million). Ms. Oelrichs was the daughter of an Irish immigrant known as the "Bonanza King" because he made his fortune by unearthing the Comstock Lode - the single largest deposit of gold and silver ever found. Ms. Oelrichs married Hermann Oelrichs, the steamship tycoon but despite her father's wedding gift of a million dollars she didn't invite him to the wedding. She then purchased Rosecliff and hired architect Stanford White to renovate it. The ballroom in this house is the largest single private room of any house in Newport. And as you would expect from a house with a gigantic ballroom, this house was a party house and Ms. Oelrich's parties were famous. Despite the happy front they put on for guests, Ms. Oelrichs and her husband were estranged and lived apart. They never got officially divorced and she always hoped they would reconcile but that didn't happen. She went mad eventually and the stories honestly make her sound a bit like Miss Havisham, the orphan Estella's wealthy and eccentric elderly adoptive aunt from Great Expectations by Dickens. Fun house fact: Cole porter wrote part of the musical Anything Goes and the song Night and Day while staying here.

The staircase to the second floor. I may have done a stately walk down here pretending to be wealthy and famous.

The ballroom.

More of the ballroom.

Gorgeous indoor fountain.

Living room.

Another living room. Look at that chandelier!

Same room without the view of the chandelier.

Unexpectedly, the top floor of the house had been turned into a museum and the main exhibition was Pierre Cardin: 70 Years of Innovation. Clearly this exhibit made my little fashionisto heart sing! We got to see 42 of his designs from the 1950s to today. Some of them fabulous, some of them utterly ridiculous, and all of them incredibly original.

This ridiculous ensemble was my absolute favorite. Utterly impractical and utterly fabulous.

Also on display was a room full of caricatures by the French Guilded Age artist SEM aka Georges Goursat (1863-1934). I've seen some of these in art books, so it was cool to see them in person.

After all of our mansion tours, we were pretty tired so we went for to a Pasta Beach, a restaurant recommended to us by a woman who worked in the gift shop of Marble House. No pictures of that, though. After eating, we went back to the hotel to see the view from the roof again. It was super cold and rainy.

Cold Karaoqueen.

Pretty view.

At this point, we decided it was time for a nap break. (Can you tell I had a cold?)

Naptime!

After our naps, we ventured out again. I wasn't hungry but Karaoqueen wanted dinner so we went to Mission, the other place recommended to us. Apparently it was very good. They didn't have any vegetarian options but I stole some of her fries so I can vouch for those.

From there we wandered the town a bit and got ice cream at Kilwins. It was AMAZING. Happy birthday to me!

Me and Karaoqueen with our ice creams!

Backdated Birthday Post - Day 2

Ok. Saturday. Day two of my birthday trip to Newport RI. This post has been backdated since I actually wrote it once I returned from my trip. 

I started my day by climbing on the roof deck of my hotel and surveying the view. It's lovely!

Me on the roof of my hotel.

View from the roof of my hotel.

View from the roof of my hotel.

My next step was to get a bracelet for Winterfest, since apparently that was going on all weekend and the bracelet lets you into events and gets you discounts on tours, restaurants, etc. I had to pick up the bracelet at a different hotel but that was fine because the walk to the hotel was pretty.

View of my hotel from the dock. 

Hotel.

Buoys by the hotel.

Seagull by the hotel.

Buoys by the hotel.

Chairs and a bridge over the water.

Cute little lighthouse.

I found a shell!

It turns out that hotel was also the location of the first event I wanted to attend that day: A Macaroni and Cheese Competition! I'll be honest with you - my Mac and Cheese Throwdown was better. Way better. Partly because everything there was vegetarian and partly because my friends and I are awesome cooks. So there.

Mac and cheeses.

Crowd eating mac and cheese. 

Time to vote! Me with the voting list.

Casting my ballot.

After stuffing myself and casting my vote, it was off to Fort Adams for a tour.

Fort Adams.

Fort Adams is HUGE. It's 20 acres and it could house 2400 soldiers and 468 cannons. They hired 500 Irish workers to build it which is why Newport has such a big Irish population. Who knew, right? The west wall of the fort seals off Newport harbor, which is the deepest harbor from RI to MA, and the east wall faces Narragansett Bay. This gives a pretty nice view if you go up on the walls of the fort.

View from the fort wall.

At the southern wall is a complex defense system with multiple defensive trenches and buildings creating “kill zones” to prevent enemies from scaling the walls of the fort.

Kill zone.

Another kill zone.

At one point between world wars it was called the “country club of the army” because it saw no action and the bored troops set up a baseball diamond and football field on the parade and a movie theater and bowling alley in the west wall. Random, right?

Look at how giant the middle of this fort is!

They've actually kept some of the old decrepit officer's quarters as is and you can wander around in them. I wish I'd had a ghostly model with tangled hair and a flowing ball gown. This place is just screaming for a ghostly fashion shoot. Clearly, this was one of the highlights of the tour for me.

Falling apart officer's quarters.

Chair by the window in the decrepit officer's quarters.

And now we get to my other favorite part of the tour. The fort contains 2400 feet of “listening” tunnels were dug 50 feet under the ground where the defenders of the fort can hear anyone digging under the fort. We were given flashlights and allowed to go into the listening tunnels! You have to crouch since the ceilings are under 5 feet high.

My flashlight.

Listening tunnel.

Me and my flashlight.

Basically my conclusion is that the fort designer Simon Bernard (a French military engineer) was a genius and if he were still alive I would hire him to build my fort if I ever needed one. Also, Fort Adams is a great go-to place in the event of a zombie apocalypse. It'd be really easy to re-fortify and the middle is giant enough to grow plenty of crops.

By the end of the Fort Adams tour it had started to rain, so I decided I should head indoors to the art museum. I did wander the town a bit on my way to and from the museum, though.

Mural I liked.

More of the cool mural.

Dolphin statue.

Wasn't sure what this tower was but it was neat!

Huzzah! The Newport Art Museum!

The art museum was exciting to me because it had not one but two exhibits I was excited about. The first was a group exhibit called Domestic Affairs: Domesticity, Identity, and the Home. This exhibit included some really talented contemporary artists and the idea was to explore issues of domesticity/the home and identity. Out of everything, my three favorite artists were:

Nancy Grace Horton:

This is from her Ms. Behavior series. 

Leslie M. W. Graff:

This one is called "Glass Ceiling (Lemon Cake)" from her Just Desserts Series in 2016.

Nadine Boughton:

This one is called "Rugged Men" and it's from her True Adventures in Better Homes series 2013-2018.

The other exhibit I was really excited about was Lissa Rivera's Beautiful Boy series. In this series, Rivera photographs her domestic partner, who is a male crossdresser. The series actually started when the two of them were friends and has continued as their romantic relationship developed. It explores issues of queer femininity through photographic portraits and the results are both gorgeous and interesting. Here are a few examples:

I stayed at the museum until closing. After that I decided it was time to chill out in the hotel. I took a whirlpool bath, watched TV, and just hung out until my friend Karaoqueen arrived. She got in late, and we were both so exhausted by the time she got there that we pretty much went straight to sleep. So much for being party animals.