Newport. It’s more than Sag Harbor on steroids, no offense to Mrs. Russell (Margaret Olivia Slocum) Sage and her head-spinning philanthropy, a gift that keeps on giving, and good thing, the way concern for the commonweal from those of extreme wealth has died on the vine. And never mind the Rhode Island enclave’s better and more extensive preservation, all those handsomely clapboarded colonials painted in rich dark hues and not a McMansion in sight.
That is, you could be put in mind of other Gilded Age connections while strolling the estate district up there. Take Edward J. Berwind’s the Elms, completed in 1901 and inspired, in the spirit of one-upping one’s neighbors, by a 1700s French chateau. It’s grand, for sure, imposing, but as you gawk at the ne plus ultra in faux architecture, you do wonder what might’ve been wrong with, say, a Stick Style mansion of somewhat similar dimensions.
His brother John E. Berwind may have had a more sensible idea, building as he did 11 years later the Mediterranean-style but comparatively humble Minden on Ocean Road in Bridgehampton, later a Presbyterian Church retreat, later still a fat farm, and more recently the home of the man behind Barnes & Noble, the late Leonard Riggio.
The Berwinds’ money came from coal. They had the contracts to supply the U.S. Navy, the Cunard line, and who knows what else. (The family remains in the energy business to this day.) John Berwind settled in Bridgehampton so his wife, the former Katherine Murray Wood, could be near her family on her mother’s side, the Esterbrooks, of pen manufacturing fame. Down Ocean Road, they owned a Victorian beauty, Tremedden, disastrously one of the many deliberate takedowns hereabouts.
We may have been in Li’l Rhody to look at colleges with our youngest, but we stumbled upon a Newport absolutely thronged for a seafood festival — and so happily that you might wonder if they’d been following the news.
And here’s where the deepwater port of Sag Harbor compares favorably: It turns out sightseers were also prowling the streets having disembarked from a couple of cruise ships anchored in Narragansett Bay, one of them the size of a tipped-over skyscraper, as we saw from the Newport Bridge on the way out of town. Make that a city block.
But hey, that was some top-notch New England clam chowder.