Episode two of The Gilded Age season two takes place in two places: the first, New York City, where the characters search for social prowess in ornate ballrooms around Manhattan. The second? Newport, Rhode Island – where they found the exactly the same, but in tennis matches. ‘Can you come to Newport on Friday? There’s a tennis tournament at the casino and I’d like to introduce you to someone,” Aurora Fane tells Marian Brook as she sits in her living room. “His parents have a house in Newport and a house on East 56th.” (Marian’s aunt, the very socially minded Agnes Van Rhijn, agrees on her behalf.)
When Marian arrives in the Narragansett Bay enclave, she realizes that half of New York’s upper crust is there with her, including her cousin Oscar, as well as Gladys and Larry Russell. She soon realizes that this is the summer spot where you can see and be seen, and maybe even meet her husband.
The Gilded Age is a piece of historical fiction that borrows heavily from actual events… and in this case, the choice of Newport as a seasonal hotspot for Manhattan’s elite is heavily based in reality. During the 19th century, the wealthiest families in New York – including the Vanderbilts, Astors and the Morgans – built summer homes (read: mansions) of exceptional grandeur. Cornelius Vanderbilt’s The Breakers, for example, had 48 bedrooms, 50-foot ceilings adorned with Baccarat chandeliers, and an Italian Renaissance-style exterior. Meanwhile, William K. Vanderbilt’s home, made of 500,000 cubic feet of marble, cost $11 million at the time to build – somewhere more than $300 million today.
Why Nieuwpoort? Part of that was the temperature, maritime climate, and proximity to New York: Rhode Island City and New York City, a major shipping hub since the Revolutionary War, were connected by both rail and road. Yet it was city slicker Ward McAllister (played here by Nathan Lane) who turned it into a bona fide hotspot of the Gilded Age. In the 1850s the lawyer bought a house in the area. During the warmer months he regularly entertained his high-profile guests by the sea. According to the New England Historical Society, “McAllister then made the place famous for his ‘picnics.’ Soon many were convinced to join him.” After the leading architectural firm of the time McKim, Mead & White built the Newport Casino in 1879 – a recreational complex that included tennis, squash, billiards and bowling – the magnates of the time began to grab land and raze the more modest houses to the ground to make. , and building their own palaces, often designed in tribute to European palaces. During the pre-income tax era, the city became a shrine to flourishing capitalism: seaside high society.
