The Breakers: The Seventy Room Summer Cottage

At the end of Ochre Point Avenue off Bellevue stands the largest and grandest of Newport's Gilded Age mansions. The Breakers was built for Cornelius Vanderbilt the Second, grandson of the railroad baron Cornelius Vanderbilt, and completed in eighteen ninety five. It was designed by Richard Morris Hunt, the most prominent American architect of his generation.

The cost at the time of construction was approximately seven million dollars, not counting the land or the furnishings, at a moment when a skilled worker might earn a few hundred dollars a year. The Breakers has seventy rooms, including forty eight bedrooms and nineteen bathrooms. It was built as a summer cottage, which is what the very rich of the Gilded Age called their seasonal residences regardless of size.

The house is modeled on the palaces of northern Italy, with a great hall rising to the full height of the building, a double staircase, and ceilings painted with allegorical murals. Hydraulic powered elevators, a technological marvel of the eighteen nineties, connected the floors. The kitchen was in the basement with an internal phone system to communicate with the floors above.

Cornelius Vanderbilt the Second died in eighteen ninety nine, just four years after the house was completed. His daughter Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, who became a sculptor and founded the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, eventually gave the property to the Preservation Society of Newport County, which has operated it as a museum since nineteen forty eight. The Breakers is now the most visited private historic site in New England.

On a summer afternoon the line of visitors stretches down the drive, all waiting to walk through the rooms Cornelius Vanderbilt the Second used for perhaps six weeks a year.