04 This brief slide show is of the mansions at Newport RI. The owners, the super-wealthy, referred to them as 05 Chateau-sur-Mer is the first of the grand Bellevue Avenue mansion of the Gilded Age mansions in Newport, Rhode Island. Chateau-sur-Mer's grand scale and lavish parties ushered in the Gilded Age of Newport, as it was the most palatial residence in Newport until the Vanderbilt houses in the 1890s. It was was completed in 1852 as an Italianate villa for William Shepard Wetmore, a merchant in the China trade, who was born on January 26, 1801, in St. Albans , Vermont. (And, it is the only grand mansion that isn't on the waterfront. -DT) 03 Marble House. one of the Gilded Age mansions of Newport, Rhode Island, was designed by the architect Richard Morris Hunt, and said to be inspired by the Petit Trianon at Versailles (which it resembles in little more than pilasters and balustrades). Marble House was built between 1888 and 1892 for William Kissam Vanderbilt, grandson of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt. The house was a social landmark that helped spark the transformation of Newport from a relatively relaxed summer colony of wooden houses to the now legendary resort of opulent stone palaces. It was reported to cost $11 million, of which $7 million was spent on 500,000 cubic feet of marble. Upon its completion, Mr. Vanderbilt gave the house to his wife Alva Erskine Smith as her 39th birthday present. William Vanderbilt's older brother Cornelius Vanderbilt II subsequently built the grandest of Newport cottages, The Breakers, between 1893 and 1895. After the Vanderbilts divorced in 1895, Alva married Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont, moving down the street to Belcourt. After his death, she reopened Marble House and added a Chinese Tea House on its seaside cliffs, where she hosted rallies for women's suffrage. She sold the house to Frederick H. Prince in 1932. (I think it's the most beautiful. -DT) 06 The Breakers is a Vanderbilt mansion located on Ochre Point Avenue, Newport, Rhode Island, on the Atlantic Ocean. The Breakers was built as the Newport summer home of Cornelius Vanderbilt II, a member of the wealthy United States Vanderbilt family. Designed by renowned architect Richard Morris Hunt and with interior decoration by Jules Allard and Sons and Ogden Codman, Jr., the 70-room mansion boasts approximately 60,000 sq. ft. of living space. The home was constructed between 1893 and 1895 at the then-astronomical cost of more than seven million dollars. The Ochre Point Avenue entrance is marked by sculpted iron gates and 30-foot high walkway gates are part of a twelve-foot-high limestone and iron fence that borders the property on all but the ocean side. The 250' x 150' dimensions of the five-story mansion are aligned symmetrically around a central Great Hall. 02 The Breakers 01 A view from the Breakers lawn.

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