The Breakers is a Vanderbilt mansion located on Ochre Point Avenue, Newport, Rhode Island on the Atlantic Ocean. The building became a National Historic Landmark in 1994, and is a contributing property to the Bellevue Avenue Historic District. It is owned and operated by the Preservation Society of Newport County and is open for visitation on a year-round basis. The Breakers was built as the Newport summer home of Cornelius Vanderbilt II, a member of the wealthy . It is built in an architectural style based on the Italian Renaissance. Designed by renowned architect Richard Morris Hunt, with interior decoration by Jules Allard and Sons and Ogden Codman, Jr., the 70-room mansion has a gross area of 125,339 square feet (11,644.4 m2) and 62,482 square feet (5,804.8 m2) of living area on five floors. The house was constructed between 1893 and 1895. The Ochre Point Avenue entrance is marked by sculpted iron gates and the 30-foot-high (9.1 m) walkway gates are part of a 12-foot-high (3.7 m) limestone-and-iron fence that borders the property on all but the ocean side. The footprint of the house covers approximately 1 acre (4,000 m2) of the 14 acres (5.7 ha) estate on the cliffs overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. The Breakers is one of the most visited house museums in America and in 2016 had 472,700 visitations. read more…
New England is a geographical region which comprises six states of the northeastern United States: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. It is bordered by the state of New York to the west and south, and the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick and Quebec to the northeast and north, respectively. The Atlantic Ocean is to the east and southeast, and Long Island Sound is to the south. The physical geography of New England is diverse for such a small area; southeastern New England is covered by a narrow coastal plain, while the western and northern regions are dominated by the rolling hills and worn-down peaks of the northern end of the Appalachian Mountains. With the Atlantic fall line lying so close to the coast, numerous industrial cities were able to take advantage of water power along the numerous rivers, such as the Connecticut River, which bisects the region from north to south. Indian summer is a period of unseasonably warm, dry weather that sometimes occurs in autumn in New England. The US National Weather Service defines this as weather conditions that are sunny and clear with above normal temperatures, occurring late-September to mid-November. read more…
Providence is the capital and most populous city in Rhode Island and was one of the first cities established in the United States. Located in Providence County, it is the third largest city in the New England region. The city proper population of 180,000 anchors the 37th largest metropolitan population in the country, with an estimated MSA population of 1,600,000, exceeding that of Rhode Island by about 60% because of its reaching into southern Massachusetts. This MSA in turn is part of the larger Greater Boston commuting area, which contains 7.6 million people. read more…
Block Island is part of the U.S. state of Rhode Island. It is located in the Atlantic Ocean about 13 miles (21 km) south of the coast of Rhode Island, 14 miles (23 km) east of Montauk Point on Long Island, and is separated from the Rhode Island mainland by Block Island Sound. The island is part of the Outer Lands region, a coastal archipelago. The Nature Conservancy added Block Island to its list of “The Last Great Places”; the list consists of twelve sites in the Western Hemisphere. About 40 percent of the island is set aside for conservation. read more…
