Historically distracted by Gilded Age mansions, Atlantic sea melancholy, and my first season in Newport: An essay
The keeper at the Mill Street Inn handed me a paper map of Newport and drew a faint black line in ballpoint pen from the tiny dot where I was standing toward Bellevue Avenue and the Cliff Walk, an appropriately analog introduction to a city where so much of the present exists because somebody bothered to keep something from the past. I folded it carefully and protected it almost immediately because that little black line knew the route home. Another map, picked up near the beginning of the Cliff Walk, would become the expendable one, free to be folded into my hand, consulted in the rain, and eventually sacrificed to whatever the Atlantic decided the weather would become.
Newport seduced the hell out of me, which is precisely why I needed a map in the first place. Church spires appeared between colonial rooflines, enormous summer “cottages” hid behind iron gates, and the Atlantic kept turning up at the ends of streets like it knew something. Newport has the peculiar quality of a place where American history got dressed for dinner, wandered outside for some sea air, and never entirely went home.
Naturally, I followed.
I had crossed the country from Seattle for the Newport Jazz Festival, which was reason enough to come. It was my first time at Newport Jazz, although the place had lived in my musical imagination long before I arrived. More than seventy years earlier, pianist and Storyville owner George Wein had come to Newport at the invitation of Elaine and Louis Lorillard with the improbable idea of bringing jazz to a city better known for mansions and summer society. The first Newport Jazz Festival followed in 1954, beginning a history that would eventually include Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and generations after them.
The festival did not begin until Friday morning, leaving me one full Thursday to meet Newport before hearing a note at Fort Adams. Exploration is my best quality, so I went looking for history. I have been fascinated by architecture since childhood, particularly buildings old enough to retain evidence that somebody else was here. Put me inside one and I become socially inconvenient almost immediately, the museumgoer everyone else is waiting for because they have progressed into the next room while I am still investigating a door hinge. Even as a little girl I wanted to know who opened it, who polished it last, and whether it sounds the same now as it did a century ago. According to a Myers-Briggs assessment administered sometime in my youth, I was supposed to become an architect. Alas, she became a writer.
Close enough.
The Breakers was my first Newport mansion, which now feels significant because one should be careful about the first house one visits here; standards become unreasonable almost immediately. Richard Morris Hunt designed the Italian Renaissance-inspired house for Cornelius Vanderbilt II and Alice Vanderbilt, completing it in 1895, when a fortune could apparently be translated into Indiana limestone, marble, carved wood, glass, gold, acreage, and ceiling height with remarkable fluency. The Great Hall rises fifty feet. The Vanderbilts called it a summer cottage…… Sure. Summer cottage.
Inside, nothing appears content merely to function when it could instead make an entrance. The Music Room became my favorite room on the first floor, its elaborate interior fabricated in France, shipped across the Atlantic and reconstructed in Newport. Red and gold fabric sweeps across the room beneath elaborate ornamentation, and somewhere there exists a photograph of me sitting there with an umbrella in one hand, my other palm turned upward, mouth open in complete delight. I value this photograph as documentary evidence against any later attempt to portray myself as a critic immune to wealth made beautiful. This shit works on me.
As a little girl, I never merely looked at houses like this; I took possession imaginatively and at once, assigning myself a bedroom, a staircase and some vaguely “Anastasia”-like existence involving dinner entrances, tragic windows and the unnecessary seriousness of a woman from “Swan Lake.” Adulthood has mercifully failed to cure me. So I chose my bedroom. Then I became interested in the details. Historic houses maintain a nearly universal institutional position that I should please not touch, a preservation principle I understand intellectually and oppose temperamentally because texture is information. A little French boy ahead of me apparently shared my methodology and stole the occasional swipe whenever the adults looked elsewhere.
I did not rat him out.
His family and I had fallen into the peculiar choreography of museum touring, repeatedly passing one another as I stalled and caught up again, at one point because I had been intellectually detained by wallpaper featuring Greek goddesses. They read the interpretation aloud in French and English while standing inside an American mansion assembled from European architectural vocabulary. America had built herself a Europe, and Europe had returned to inspect the results. I desperately wanted their review. The joke also revealed the more interesting problem inside the house. The Vanderbilts built The Breakers is grammatically efficient and historically inadequate. They commissioned it; other people converted their capital into stone, wood, textile, metal, and glass. Names on deeds survive remarkably well. Hands are harder. I could stand inches from carved wood and inspect its precision without uncovering whether the person responsible was proud of it, exhausted by it, thinking about dinner or simply trying to finish the damn thing. The work survives with greater fidelity than the worker. Meanwhile, the privileged life of the house remained remarkably easy to reconstruct: choose a bedroom, acquire the gown, descend the staircase.
Outside, Newport changed scale and my imagination followed. Bellevue Avenue gave way to clapboard, brick, churchyards, crooked rooflines, and cobblestones shining in the rain until chronology ceased to be particularly useful; one surviving building pulled me backward and the next threw me forward again, several centuries occupying the same walk with very little concern for historical order. I became preoccupied with the obvious and strangely useful fact that George Washington had physically moved through some version of this landscape.
George Washington had feet. George Washington got rained on. Maybe he stood somewhere around here. Maybe he stared at the same corner or leaned against the black iron Artillery Co. 1770 lamp post. Maybe he was tired. Maybe old Georgie got hammered in one of these very buildings. Who knows?
Then I would turn another corner and encounter St. Mary’s, where Jacqueline Lee Bouvier married then-Senator John F. Kennedy in 1953, and Jackie promptly displaced Washington from whatever historical production was currently running in my head. Seeing the church’s steeple glowing against the purple and orange of sunset from the rooftop of my inn became one of my favorite views of the entire trip. History accumulated rather than proceeding politely in chronological order — Washington in the rain, Jackie leaving the church, a Vanderbilt woman descending for dinner, and some magnificently overdressed creature proceeding toward Bellevue Avenue while I wandered among them in a floating blue dress. Historical imagination, I decided, is world-building with better documentation.
By Friday morning, the Newport Jazz Festival had begun, and for the next three days my route through the city changed. Each morning I boarded the ferry for Fort Adams, an absurdly romantic commute made possible by the Discover Newport VIP card I had been given for the weekend. With complimentary daily ferry transportation and access around the city, the card gave me the useful luxury of following my curiosity without calculating the cost of every detour, particularly valuable on a first trip when I wanted to see absolutely everything.
From the water, Newport rearranged itself. Church spires rose above the trees, mansions dissolved into the coastline, and sailboats crossed the harbor as the city receded behind me. Among them was an enormous red boat, the sort of vessel that makes a girl immediately invent a nautical version of her own life aboard.
For three days, that was my commute: Fort Adams ahead, downtown Newport behind me, and music waiting across the harbor. And then I stepped onto the festival grounds. I had spent Thursday unable to pass an old lamp post without wondering whether George Washington had once stood beside it, so imagine what happened to my mind at Fort Adams. I arrived with more than seventy years of Newport Jazz history somewhere between my head and my bloodstream, “It Never Entered My Mind” playing softly through my headphones as the physical place began colliding with everything I knew about it.
Had McCoy Tyner walked here? Had Ella Fitzgerald ever stopped long enough to stare at this same stretch of salt water? Had John Coltrane stood somewhere nearby and looked toward the Atlantic?
These were ridiculous questions only until I put my own feet on the ground. Records have a strange way of preserving musicians outside ordinary physical life. A needle drops and suddenly Coltrane exists inside a saxophone forever; Ella arrives already singing; McCoy Tyner is sitting at the piano every time I ask him to be. Fort Adams returned them to bodies. They had carried instruments, crossed grass, waited for sets, gotten hungry, looked toward the water. The people whose records taught me, and generations of us, how to hear jazz had once occupied physical space here, if not on this field than in this city. The exhilarating gratitude and realization: Newport Jazz Festival was happening in the present tense, and I am here covering it. It is a feeling I am still living inside.
Yebba sang against the harbor air. Little Simz commanded the Fort Stage. Gotts Street Park and Olive Jones reached the end of their set and an audience rose to its feet. I spent the weekend moving between performances, interviews and conversations with musicians that continued after the recorder went away. The history beneath my feet enlarged what was happening in front of me. Newport had accumulated all those ghosts without becoming one. By Sunday evening, I understood that some of the weekend would be coming home with me alongside the map.
Then the festival ended, and Monday belonged to Newport again. With no stage schedule governing the day, I returned to the little black line and headed toward the Cliff Walk. This time the Atlantic was waiting on foot.
Near Rough Point, rain came sideways and the trail turned slick, the New England ocean feeling entirely different from my beloved West Coast water — my expendable map began softening in my hands until, eventually it resembled a paper meatball. Standing beneath an old tree, I remembered something my father-in-law had told us years earlier: A map is no good if it is wet.
Dear reader, my stomach dropped.
Soon the manicured path surrendered to fractured rock and my celebrated attention to detail became less charming personal eccentricity than immediate requirement for remaining upright. There are pieces of inherited knowledge one carries for years without realizing there will eventually be an examination; mine was apparently being administered on the Rhode Island coast while the Atlantic attempted to eat me. For all the money required to command an ocean view, nobody had managed to command the ocean.
By the time I made it through the worst section, I was soaked. Beneath another tree, a little brown dog found me and refused to leave, obliging his owner to stop. This woman I had never met took one look at me, brought me to her house and handed me two impossibly white, gloriously dry towels. Of all the magnificent houses Newport offered me, I remember the warmth of that one with particular clarity.
I am writing this at my dining table in Seattle wearing another light-blue J.Crew dress, one I thankfully left behind when I packed for Rhode Island because its double layer of muslin and built-in slip has since provided sufficient evidence that wearing it through Newport’s August humidity would have been idiotic. The romance survives the correction. This paper map crossed the country folded inside my things, folded inside a book. The line of pen is now a stretch of Newport I know well enough to miss. There are houses I passed without entering, windows I became nosy about, streets I never walked and histories I have barely begun to understand. The light-blue dress currently pooled around me would have been entirely wrong for the Cliff Walk.
For the yacht sailboat, however?
Perfect. I suppose I have to go back. I already know what I’m wearing.
Emily Steinhilber is a Seattle-based independent journalist and culture writer covering music, place, and the creative communities that shape them. Her work appears regularly in Earshot Jazz, the Jazz Journalists Association, and The New York City Jazz Record, among other Seattle-area publications. She also writes independently on music, culture, history, and whatever else captures her curiosity on Substack.
