ON SET with ‘ THE GILDED AGE ’
SET in STONE
Newport ’ s historic splendor is perfectly preserved today thanks to two enterprising women born during the Gilded Age .
ABOVE : Carrie Coon as Bertha Russell and Nathan Lane as Ward McAllister in a scene filmed at the International Tennis Hall of Fame ; BELOW : The former Newport Casino serves as a period-appropriate backdrop in “ The Gilded Age .”
ON SET with ‘ THE GILDED AGE ’
WITH ITS METICULOUSLY maintained architecture and original pedigree as one of Newport ’ s premier social institutions , it ’ s no surprise the International Tennis Hall of Fame was one of several venues around the city that appears in HBO ’ s “ The Gilded Age .” The characters visit the property in the first season and are seen promenading and playing tennis on what ’ s known today as the Horseshoe Piazza . It ’ s a scene straight from a photograph in the museum ’ s collection , with one notable difference : The piazza , not quite a regulation-size court , was not set up for tennis until later in the club ’ s history . “ Historically , [ it ] would have been a fountain ,” says Nicole Markham , curator of collections for the International Tennis Hall of Fame . “ The championships they were filming would have been played at the back of the property .” Crews returned to Bellevue Avenue last summer to film season two of the show . Rumor has it the Newport Casino makes another appearance , this time for an evening social event . “ They completely transformed it ,” says Megan Erbes , the hall of fame ’ s director of communications . “ The amount of flowers they had in here was insane .” — L . C .
NEWPORT HAS ONE ADVANTAGE OVER ITS PEERS WHEN IT comes to filming picture-perfect movies and TV shows set during the Gilded Age : The historic landscape and properties are almost entirely preserved as they existed more than a century ago .
That sense of traveling back in time is the result of careful , yearslong efforts by two women , both born at the end of Newport ’ s Gilded Age and determined to maintain its splendor for future generations . Katherine Warren , an art collector and socialite with a residence in Newport , founded the Preservation Society of Newport County with her husband , George ; while Doris Duke , the famous heiress of Rough Point , devoted the final decades of her life to preserving Newport ’ s history through the Newport Restoration Foundation .
“ It ’ s very rare to find in this day and age a place that has so much historic character and structures still existing ,” says Kristen Costa , senior curator at the Newport Restoration Foundation . “ It changed the way that Newport was able to market itself and bring tourism in and become a place that people wanted to come to to learn about the past .”
By the 1940s , many of the city ’ s mansions
Doris Duke at Rough Point . had been sold off or fallen into disrepair . The downtown area was in the early stages of an
Katherine Warren urban renewal effort that would fundamentally change the city ’ s streetscape , removing blight but also reconfiguring neighborhoods that dated back to Colonial times .
Enter Warren , who , upon learning the eighteenth-century Hunter House was slated for demolition in 1945 , organized a small group of citizens to purchase the house for the purpose of preserving it . For the next three decades , Warren led the Preservation Society in acquiring and restoring the historic mansions of Bellevue Avenue one by one . In the early years , the society offered tours of the Breakers by arrangement with the Vanderbilt family that still owned it to fund their restoration projects .
“ It ’ s amazing to think back in 1947 , the numbers of people who came to Newport to see the Breakers even though it was only fifty-plus years old ,” says Trudy Coxe , executive director of the Preservation Society .
Twenty years later , Duke would follow in Warren ’ s footsteps , founding the Newport Restoration Foundation in 1968 . Whereas the Preservation Society came to focus primarily on Gilded Age mansions , the Newport Restoration Foundation committed its efforts to saving the Colonial structures in danger of falling to the push for modernization . For twenty-five years , she used her personal fortune to purchase and restore more than eighty properties around Newport ’ s downtown .
“ For the most part , everything is almost exactly as Doris Duke wanted it . She picked out paint colors , she decided layouts , she worked with a great team of architects ,” Costa says .
Today , the two organizations own a large swath of historic Newport with the goal of keeping the homes — and the stories of the people who lived in them — alive for a new generation to enjoy . — L . C .
RHODE ISLAND MONTHLY l JUNE 2023 59