A LOT OF AMERICA IN A SMALL SPACE: NEWPORT, RHODE ISLAND
Story and photography
by Eric Anderson & Nancy Allen

LODGINGS

With more bed and breakfasts per square mile than anywhere else in the United States, Newport offers lots of hotel choices from the old world Inn at Newport Beach,(800-786-0310/401-846-0310) "the only hotel on the beach in Newport," to the romantic Cliffside Inn on Seaview Avenue (800-845-1811/401-847-1811) located just half a block from the Cliff Walk that traces five miles of Newport's captivating coastline.

The Inn at Newport Beach has a comfortable feel for families. It's a fun place where those leaving often ask "Can we book now for next year?" The Cliffside Inn, built in 1876 by the governor of Maryland has some unusual art. From 1907 to 1948 it was the home of artist Beatrice Turner who seems to have been even more interested in herself than Caroline Astor: she painted 3000 self-portraits, 100 of which grace the inn's walls. The Cliffside stages an elaborate Victorian afternoon tea that is worth the stay in itself.

The art is different at Vanderbilt Hall (888-VAN.HALL/401-846-6200), a mansion house hotel on Mary Street, a great downtown location for walking Newport's Colonial past. The hotel is changing owners and its future may be less certain. Trompe l'oeil and whimsical paintings decorate the hotel extensively; all the exquisitely matched furnishings were brought over from England. The roof deck offers panoramas of the city and, when God smiles, breathtaking sunsets.

God seems to smile a lot these days in Newport. Although the crowd is younger and noisier down on the wharves and on the main drag Thames Street, elsewhere there is a nostalgic sense of a more elegant time, a suggestion that there was more to Newport than its narcissistic Gilded Age, that this was a place where simple wooden Colonial houses were built to last, that this is where real men went off to sea, that this was one of the places America built and which in turn built America.