Gilded Age | Newport

Intricate ornates on Homes on Bellevue

If you want to experience the full display of American opulence, the kind where gold paint covers splintered wood, you have to run along Bellevue Avenue in Newport.

The trip to Newport had been inspired by HBO’s The Gilded Age, a show dripping with enough corsets, top hats, and European knockoffs to make you forget half the characters are deeply unhappy. We were staying on Goat Island so to reach Bellevue Avenue, I ran from the island into the downtown wharf area, where the clapboard buildings and salty air scream New England with every shingle and salt-stained brick.

Bellevue Avenue itself is a runway of extravagance rivaled by the Loire Valley in France . These mansions were built mid-19th to the early 20th centuries, starting right after the Civil War, during the so-called Reconstruction Era when America was a frenzy of railroad tracks, smokestacks, and robber barons.

Gilded Gates

As I ran, the whole absurd theater of it started to unfold in my mind. Imagine the world of the HBO series: American elites dressing like French and British aristocrats, importing European chefs, hairdressers, and nannies, all while trying to invent an "American spirit" that somehow involved emulating everything Europe ever did, just bigger, louder, and preferably with more ruffles.

Meanwhile, the social structures were harder than a burnt baguette. The Old Money crowd, those with “proper breeding”, clung to tradition like a life raft, refusing to believe that steel tycoons, railroad kings, and oil barons could actually buy their way into “society”. Spoiler: they could, and they did.

The Marble House

And all this "progress" was happening while women couldn’t vote, African Americans were given a fake taste of civil rights (the Civil Rights Act of 1875 briefly outlawed discrimination in public accommodations), only for it to be ripped away in 1883 when the Supreme Court struck it down, basically legalizing discrimination and setting the stage for the Jim Crow era. And Native Americans? Barely a footnote in the story, except when their lands were being "acquired" with the same enthusiasm as a Gilded Age family buying imported Italian marble for their bathrooms.

As I kept running, sweat rolling down my back, I couldn’t shake the question I wish I could ask Mark Twain reincarnated in 2025: “Are we still living in a Gilded Age?”

Cliff Walk (allow visitors to view the mansions from the backside)