Bellevue Avenue Historic District, Historic district in Newport, United States
Bellevue Avenue Historic District is a protected historic area in Newport, Rhode Island, running along a tree-lined street from Memorial Boulevard to Bailey's Beach. The avenue is lined on both sides with large summer estates built in a range of European architectural styles, most dating from the second half of the 19th century.
Wealthy families from New York and Boston began building summer homes along this route in the 1830s, and construction intensified after the Civil War as fortunes grew larger and estates became more elaborate. The district was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1976, formally recognizing the quality of this concentration of late 19th century architecture.
Several of the former summer homes were designed by the same architects who shaped much of late 19th century American high society taste, making the avenue a kind of open-air catalogue of fashionable styles from that era. Visitors walking along the street can read those choices directly in the facades, gates, and garden walls that line the route.
Much of the route can be explored on foot, and the wide sidewalks make walking comfortable even though the distance from one end to the other is considerable. A few of the former estates are open as museums with interior tours, so it is worth checking in advance which ones are accessible on the day of your visit.
Several of the grandest estates along the avenue were used for only a few weeks each summer, making their scale all the more striking when you consider how briefly they were actually occupied. Those short seasonal stays were nonetheless filled with a packed social schedule that made Bellevue Avenue the center of the American social season for decades.
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