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.

A detail in the fabric of Newport

George didn't have one when he visited Trinity Church in Newport,

but Elizabeth did.

Needlepoint kneelers.

Every pew has them, and each kneeler is a work of art, lovingly made by the members of the Trinity Church Needlework Guild. The guild is back in session under the artistic direction of one of Newport's most beloved artists, Eveline Roberge .

The most famous kneeler may be the one featuring an intricately rendered ER II, for Elizabeth Regina, Queen of England. The Queen’s kneeler has an English rose embroidered on the side, as well as a crown and laurel leaves on the top surface, framing the initials ER, with the Roman numeral two stitched between the letters.

If you've never been, it's worth a visit to Trinity Church, it's been an active place of worship since the 18th century. Trinity is just one of many treasured sites in Newport.

I could go on about the memorial windows (one, the gift of Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt in memory of her husband) from Tiffany Studios , but they really need to be seen.

Sheep may safely graze

Reality is in short supply these days, and nowhere is that more true than in Newport, a town that makes it’s living by celebrating - and selling - its own history. Or versions of it. From Queen Anne Square (a fiction from top to bottom) to the beautiful but unfortunately reproduction 4500 square foot “colonial” McMansions to the quaintly cobblestoned “wharf” areas (a Timberland store is in keeping with the historical record of the wharves? I think not), the lies are so deftly intertwined with the truths that it sometimes seems like I live in some kind of Truman Show of the collective mind. What’s real? What isn’t? Even us townies can’t always tell.

Take for example Queen Anne Square, that bucolic & totally quintessential New England town green. There’s the perfect whitewashed steepled church…there’s the grassy commons…there’s the ring of centuries old houses and shops surrounding it. Can’t you just see the flock of sheep crossing it, bells sonorously a-twinkle? It’s all so perfect. So post-cardish. So exactly what you’d expect to find. And so totally fake.

Historically, Newport never had a commons or a town green – in fact, that was pretty much the whole point of the place. Towns in the Massachusetts Bay Colony had town greens featuring a church at one end because they were theocracies in which every facet of life was dictated by or organized around the Congregational Church. In contrast, Newport – and the rest of Rhode Island – was founded by renegades & exiles from that Puritan society, dissenters who opposed those autocratic beliefs with their very lives, who hacked their way down here through an Indian-filled wilderness all the way from Boston in order to institute their very radical, very utopian, “lively experiment”. Their goal was to found a community that was NOT organized around a single church, but in which worshippers of ALL faiths were welcome. Puritans. Jews. Quakers. Baptists. It’s the one single moment in this state’s history of which we can all feel unreservedly proud. No single church would be allowed to dominate in Rhode Island. The point of Newport was that there wasn’t a town green.

Except of course now there is. Queen Anne’s Square appeared about 40 years ago under the aegis of an urban redevelopment plan. The area in front of Trinity Church was bulldozed of dozens of old buildings, buildings consisting of exactly the kind of real “historical reality” that we’re all so sanctimonious about these days, and in its place, voila! An insta-green was created. And as if that weren’t enough to confuse everybody, this Disneyesque stage set was ringed with authentic 18th century buildings, a reinforcing of the false by means of exploiting the true, and then the whole illusion was cemented into place – rather brilliantly, actually - by branding the result of these efforts “Queen Anne’s Square”, a name of which effectively conjures up misty, vaguely Shakesperean images, of simple English folk wearing big white ruffs, wimples, leather helmets, big-buckled shoes. Sheep on the green.

But let’s not get too down on the enterprise. The entire construction reveals a lot more about the values of the 20th century than it does about the 18th. So I say, let’s keep it around. We’ve actually managed to create an artifact of ourselves for future generations, if they can only manage to sort through all the conflicting messages and layers of meaning - and if we can only manage to resist the temptation to tweak the truth just a little more.