Episode two of The Gilded Age season two unfolds throughout two locations: the primary, New York Metropolis, the place the characters jockey for societal prowess in ornate ballrooms round Manhattan. The second? Newport, Rhode Island—the place they do the very same factor, however at tennis matches. “May you be a part of us in Newport on Friday? There’s a tennis match on the on line casino and I’ve somebody I’d such as you to satisfy,” Aurora Fane tells Marian Brook whereas sitting in her lounge. “His dad and mom have a spot in Newport and a home on East 56th.” (Marian’s aunt, the very socially-minded Agnes Van Rhijn, agrees on her behalf.)
When Marian arrives on the Narragansett Bay enclave, she realizes half of upper-crust New York is there together with her, together with her cousin Oscar, in addition to Gladys and Larry Russell. This, she rapidly realizes, is the summer time place to see and be seen—and possibly even meet her husband within the course of.
The Gilded Age is a bit of historic fiction that borrows closely from precise occasions… and on this case, the selection of Newport as a seasonal hotspot for the Manhattan elite may be very a lot based mostly in actuality. Throughout the 1800s, the wealthiest households in New York—together with the Vanderbilts, Astors, and the Morgans—constructed summer time “cottages” (learn: mansions) of excellent grandeur. Cornelius Vanderbilt’s The Breakers, for instance, had 48 bedrooms, 50-foot excessive ceilings adorned with Baccarat chandeliers, and an Italian Renaissance-style exterior. In the meantime, William Ok. Vanderbilt’s house, fabricated from 500,000 cubic ft of marble, value 11 million {dollars} to construct on the time—someplace over 300 million {dollars} in the present day.
Why Newport? A part of it was the temperature, oceanside local weather, and proximity to New York: an essential delivery hub for the reason that Revolutionary Conflict, the Rhode Island city and New York Metropolis have been linked by each rail and street. But, it was man-about-town Ward McAllister (right here portrayed by Nathan Lane) who made it a bonafide hotspot of the Gilded Age. Within the 1850s, the lawyer purchased a house within the space. Throughout the hotter months, he’d continuously entertain his high-profile company by the ocean. In response to the New England Historic Society, “McAllister then made the place well-known for his ‘picnics.’ Quickly sufficient, many have been satisfied to hitch him.” After the main architectural agency of the period McKim, Mead & White constructed the Newport On line casino in 1879—a leisure complicated that included tennis, squash, billiards, and garden bowling—the tycoons of the period started snatching up land, razing the extra modest houses, and constructing their very own, typically designed in homage to European palaces. Throughout this pre-income tax period, the city grew to become a shrine to booming capitalism: excessive society by the ocean.
