The Wallpaper Chronicles

Wallpaper. As a child, I hated it. I hated the repetitiveness of the patterns, the way your eye would go round and round a room and always come to rest on the same exact thing. There was something disturbing about it, disturbing in a way I didn’t yet know how to put words to, an inherent uneasiness that hinted at larger uneasinesses as yet unexpressed. A wallpapered room was a room wearing a mask, creepy, claustrophobic, a room aiming to conceal something. However, my mother loved wallpaper, loved the crisp regularity of it, and she believed it to be an essential visual component of every well ordered home. In our house, wallpaper went up and down with the seasons. The routine never varied. First every last adhering molecule of the old paper had to be removed. By hand, with a pan of solvent, a paint scraper, and when we were old enough, by me and my sister. We might have enjoyed the geometric satisfactions of putting it up, but taking it down? Talk about despising a chore! The wet solvent dripping down your arm…the sickening gluey smell of the sodden paper…the wobbly ladder and its sudden, heart-stopping lurches…the stubborn, welded-on shreds that refused to give it up...and above all, the slow, frustrating stupidity of the paint scraper. God help you if you got the dull one.

So needless to say, as an adult, wallpaper is not a place I’ve ever cared to go.

And yet…and yet. There’s a nostalgia factor to old wallpaper that can’t be denied. Almost nothing evokes the reality of a vanished past more effectively than traces of old wallpaper clinging to a wall; the very fact of its decrepitude serves as poignant reminder that it was once fresh and new, applied with hope and good intentions, tempus fugit. These remnants out of time are windows into other lives, other minds, other experiences.

I ask you: Who in the world would opt to surround themselves with Leonardo’s “Last Supper” endlessly repeating like a stuck record, pieces of which to this day still adhere to the basement walls of a small, otherwise unremarkable white house on Broadway? Who would want to live with the rigors of a biblical toile pattern, featuring a stern patriarchal figure (Moses? Abraham?) vingnetted over & over, as seen in the attic of 17 Third Street? What would it have been like to sleep in a room like that every night, stamped as it was to infinity with themes of guilt and redemption? Did those messages seep into one’s very soul? Who plastered the planks of the attic walls at 17 Chestnut with discarded newspapers & handbills from the late 18th century? Décor - or insulation - or both? Was the sailboat pattern on the closet ceiling of that dilapidated cottage on Kerry Hill chosen by an indifferent workman or by an energetic young mother-to-be? What vanished romance inspired that floral pattern in the bedroom?

Once you start noticing it, the wallpaper evidence is everywhere, and can be found in just about every old house in Newport. Look at it; look closely. Newport is good at keeping its history everpresent. Let yourself examine these gorgeous shards of vernacular history, and the ghosts who are responsible for them will flame back into being for a split second - if only in your imagination - before vanishing back into the unfathomability of the past.

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.