Newport’s New Hotel Would Be Fine Almost Anywhere Else, Omaha or Albany — Architecture Critic Morgan

Newport’s New Hotel Would Be Fine Almost Anywhere Else, Omaha or Albany — Architecture Critic Morgan

Newport is getting a new luxury hotel on the waterfront, which is good news for the grande dame of American resorts. The 57-room Brenton Hotel opening this summer at 31 America's Cup Boulevard is part of the city's attempt to make Newport a more attractive year-round destination.

The developers say that the "upscale property" is "in tune with downtown Newport's historic charm," but the hotel raises some issues about urban planning in the architecturally richest small city in this country.

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There was bound to some objection to a five-story building in a city whose scale and is overwhelmingly domestic, but the new hotel has to anchor a significant corner at the head of Long Wharf, an area already mauled by insensitive new structures.

Next door, the Humphrey "Harp" Donnelly III Newport Gateway Visitor & Transportation Center is as awkward a piece of civic architecture as its name is unwieldy. As the official entrance to Newport, this 1988 fortress-like lump is most unwelcoming.

Surrounding the Brenton on two sides is the Newport Marriott Hotel, also built in the late 1980s. Long Wharf was Newport's maritime commercial hub for over three centuries, so the paper-thin brick hotel, as described in the AIA Guide to Newport, is "an ill-advised attempt to mime the architectural texture and variety of the old chandleries and shops that were razed to make way for its construction."

The Marriott really fails to enrich the street life of Newport because its street-level key promenade along Long Wharf is devoted to parking, rather than for businesses and people that would contribute to town life.

The Brenton is similarly cursed, but now parking at ground level is all that can be located in this designated flood zone.

As one of the investors in the hotel says of the Brenton's design, "We obviously wanted to respect the heritage and the history of Newport, but also bring something that's a little more progressive," that will be "an icon" and "really excite our guests."

Those guests, at least those on the south side, will have a magnificent view of Newport harbor through floor-to-ceiling glass–a pleasant relief from all the oppressive brick at the Marriott–but the hotel design is neither iconic nor sophisticated.

The architects, Group One Partners, tout their hotel's "elegant design," noting that it "reinterprets a collection of details from prominent locales into a design that is uniquely Newport."

The Brenton's development team claims to have worked closely with the city, state, and local historic district commission "to ensure the contemporary architectural details of the hotel are consistent with Newport's historic character."

But which historic character is referenced here? The era of such radically new civic structures such as the Touro Synagogue and the Redwood Library, the Gilded Age mansions by some of America's greatest architects, or the soulless urban renewal of the 1960s that created America's Cup Boulevard, with its lanes of traffic separating the harbor from the town?

Notable 18th-century landmarks as the Colony House and the Old Brick Market are not far from the new hotel. But to reach them one must brave boulevard traffic and pass through Long Wharf Mall, a tee-shirt-and-candles sort development that has all the excitement of any suburban shopping mall.

The Boston-based architects are primarily hotel builders, so hiring hospitality specialists has positive benefits. But doesn't a national architectural treasure house like Newport deserve better than just competent value engineering?

I remember an earlier, somewhat down-at-the-heels Newport, a port town of boarding houses and mariners' bars, with no bridge to Jamestown. Architectural tourism–the restoration of neighborhoods and the opening of the great mansions–changed that and gave the town a new lease of life.

But it has been sort of a devil's bargain, as most of today's visitors are not cultural tourists, but day-trippers attracted to the kind of schlocky development that threatens the very character that made Newport such a preservation success story.

The Brenton Hotel would be fine almost anywhere else, say Omaha or Albany. But given all that is at stake, Newport deserved so much more: a knock-your-socks-off design worthy of its architectural heritage, as well as a future landmark.

 

GoLocal architecture critic Will Morgan is the author of Yankee Modern, a book about the work of Newport designers James Estes and Peter Twombly.