The Breakers Opens Controversial Welcome Center
A controversial Welcome Center debuted at The Breakers mansion on Thursday, despite public opposition from the Vanderbilt family.
The Preservation Society of Newport County, who spearheaded the project, purchased the National Historic Landmark from the Vanderbilts in 1972.
It was originally built as a summer "cottage" by Cornelius Vanderbilt II in 1983 and contains 70 rooms on 13 oceanfront acres.
Preservationists and members of the Vanderbilt family argued that the modern center would "desecrate" the historic property.
After more than 10 years of planning-including a legal battle that reached the Rhode Island Supreme Court-the Preservation Society of Newport Country opened its controversial Welcome Center at The Breakers on Thursday evening.
A bit of background on the controversy: The Preservation Society said a decade ago that its visitors to the largest and most popular of its 11 historic properties in Newport deserved a world-class welcome center. Members of the Vanderbilt family and other preservationists, along with the property's neighbors, fought to keep a modern structure off the grounds, arguing that it would "desecrate" and "permanently mar" the historic site. The neighborhood association lost a lawsuit that opposed the plan in 2015, and last year, the state's Supreme Court declined to intervene in an attempt to block the project's zoning approval.
While I had heard that at least one person planned to picket the center's debut, there were only supporters in attendance-about 600 of them, including the state's governor, Gina Raimondo-at the ribbon-cutting ceremony. It followed the non-profit's annual meeting, which took place under a tent on the grounds of the 70-room Gilded Age mansion Cornelius Vanderbilt II built in 1893.
The $5.5-million, 3,750-square-foot building includes an area with admissions ticket stations and interactive screens that show the history of The Breakers and other Preservation Society homes open for tours, along with bathrooms and a café.
"It was a long and winding road," said PSNC CEO Trudy Coxe, "but there have been so many great silver linings to this process because we have strengthened our board and we have created a magnificently beautiful building."
"We learned that we can do anything we set our minds to doing because we are strong, because we are committed, because we are strategic, because we are tough," Coxe told me. "We can do all of that, and so we will continue on."
The Opposition
The project faced opposition from the local neighborhood association and a group called Friends of Newport Preservation, which includes members of the Vanderbilt family.
One member, Mary Joan Hoene, is an attorney who previously served as an alternate on the city's Zoning Board of Review. On Friday morning she said she had not been in the building yet but had walked around it. "I think it would be fine if it were somewhere else," she said. "From a preservation standpoint you shouldn't take a remarkably original landscape and destroy it this way because of the impact on the property." (The Preservation Society says it considered placing the Welcome Center in its parking lot across the street from The Breakers but determined that doing so "would mean a substantial loss in much-needed parking spaces, particularly during the summer.")
Jim Moore, who was co-chairman of the Bellevue Avenue-Ochre Point Neighborhood Association, said that another cost of the Welcome Center is the foregone contributions. "There's a large community of people who are not giving millions of dollars, so the real cost is not the $5 million to $7 million," he said. "There's another real number that can't be quantified: the legacy gifts that will not be given."
One of the most vocal opponents is a former trustee of the Preservation Society himself. Ronald Lee Fleming-a Fellow of the American Institute of Certified Planners who bought the historic Bellevue House in 1999 and has since restored it and its surrounding gardens-called the situation "a cautionary tale." He said that his main problem with the plan was "not so much appropriateness of the design, on which we might disagree, but a question of the inappropriateness of the location and its impact on the historic fabric and also the landscape by Ernest Bowditch, who did the original plan."
Fleming also said that "if there had been an open process that allowed for constructive criticism in negotiating a change of the site, much of the resistance of the community would have been overcome and it would have been a win-win for the community and for the Preservation Society."
The New Landscape Plan
Following the ribbon-cutting ceremony, Coxe was eager to show off the beginning of a "serpentine path" that will follow almost the whole perimeter of the 13-acre property. It's a landscape feature that Bowditch designed and also installed at the adjacent Vinland and Wakehurst estates, and the Preservation Society received a grant from the van Beuren Charitable Foundation to restore the path at The Breakers.
When I asked if she had a message for Paul and Gladys Szapary, the brother and sister Vanderbilt descendants who occupied the third-floor apartment of The Breakers until earlier this year, she said, "I think Gladys and Paul will love this, because we are bringing back something that got lost in history."
“We have a huge opportunity and responsibility to bring back a piece of landscape history that could and would have been lost, but we’re not going to let it get lost,” Coxe said.
Gladys Szapary, who did not attend the ribbon-cutting, says that's not exactly the case. "The lists of original trees are known to many and have been ignored," she told me. "The budget during this administration for landscaping and maintenance repairs and replacements inside the houses has been slashed." She called Coxe's explanation "smoke and mirrors."
As for the other opponents of the plan, who included the Szaparys' relative Gloria Vanderbilt, Coxe said, "They were all invited, and I hope very much that they will come and visit he site." She believes "they will see that what we have created looks like it's been here for years-it's a beautiful design by Epstein Joslin and the landscaping [by Reed Hilderbrand Landscape Architecture] is beautiful."
Why Build a Welcome Center?
"You cannot ask the 450,000 annual visitors to this building to use porta-johns to go to the bathroom," Coxe said, "and believe it or not, people need bathrooms." Another area of the pavilion is the café, which Coxe says puts it in line with other museums that "have a place to sit down and have a cup of coffee."
She disputed reports that the building would be used to host corporate events. "No, that's not correct, and in fact that is in the legal documents in our relationship with the city," Coxe said. "There's no way you're going to have a corporate event in that building; it's broken up into two pods, and each one of the pods is actually quite small."
Coxe said the building is intended to provide modern amenities for today's museum-goers: "You have to treat them kindly and graciously. I think that's what the Vanderbilts would do, too."
"Let’s be honest, this wasn’t easy, was it?" Governor Raimondo told the crowd Thursday night. "Perseverance is the key to success in anything."
Even though members of Friends of Newport Preservation may not have been present, they're taking that sentiment to heart, too. They may have lost this battle, but they're looking for a doctoral student who can examine and write a white paper on the protracted process. Perhaps the fight isn't over yet.
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