Fountain of Life

When I first moved up to Newport from Miami, almost thirty years ago, the one single place I recall making the biggest impression on me was Spring Street. We didn’t HAVE streetscapes like that in Miami. Beaches we had. Tourists we had. Big fancy houses and traffic and large showy boats and rich seasonal inhabitants we had. But Spring Street? This was something new under my personal sun…this was out & out exotica to me.

Then as now, every building was quirky in its own way and every building hailed from a different era. A tiny little 19th century artist’s cottage stood in the shadow of Trinity Church, which was itself a product of the early 1700s. A clump of grand mid-17th century houses rubbed elbows with wood frame storefront commercial buildings from the late 1800s, the second & third floors of which had long since devolved into rental apartments. An exuberantly, eccentrically shingled Dudley Newton house faced off with a utilitarian looking locksmith shop that appeared to have been there since George Washington was in office. Buildings from all eras were jammed together, all mixed up, incongruously thrown together like some demented jazz riff on three centuries of American vernacular architecture. That first summer I was here, I remember being stuck in Spring St’s merciless summer traffic somewhere between Church and Mary Streets and seeing it, REALLY seeing it for the first time, and thinking to myself, “My god - this is absolutely amazing”. Thirty years later, that same stretch of Spring St still manages to inspire in me a frisson of that original feeling.

Spring Street has been there for getting on close to three hundred years now. An essential component of Newport from the town’s inception in 1639, Spring Street was so-called because it terminated in the town spring, the waters of which still travel underground, out of sight, somewhere beneath Coffey’s Citgo Station. That now-invisible and forgotten spring was why Newport’s founders chose the site in the first place, and why it was able to prosper as a settlement; their 17th century equation was brutally simple = no drinking water, no town. That spring was literally the Fountain of Life for early Newport, and the movement of its swirling waters is still eerily somehow visible in the traffic patterns behind the courthouse - all roads leading inexorably towards that center spot, cars restlessly & centrifugally circling, like water rushing down a drain. I never pass the spot without thinking how far we’ve come…and how little has changed.

Time-travel in Newport

Visitors to Newport always think it's going to be SOOOO expensive...Well, it isn't - or at least, it doesn't have to be. There are plenty of great ways to enjoy Newport with little or no money, and actually, many of them are the best ways to experience Newport, period.

My personal favorite is the Cliff Walk. Put on your sneakers, pack a sandwich & a bottle of water- if it's a really nice day, maybe even put on a bathing suit - and head over to the Chanler Hotel overlooking First Beach, which is where the famed 3.5 mile National Recreation Trail begins.

This scenic walk manages to incorporate the best of just about everything Newport has to offer. A rugged windswept coastline - lined with magenta wild beach roses - strewn with giant smooth boulders, perfect for lying back on and sunning - crashing waves - glorious world-famous 19th century "cottages" - impossibly manicured lawns - the empty heaving brightness of the Atlantic Ocean - and above it all, the seagulls, soaring and cawing over the heads of rich and poor alike. It's a place where past & present fuse...a place where for 150 years, people have been travelling just this path, for just these reasons, and now you too are one of them.