This page: The most visited mansion in Newport is The Breakers, the summer home of Cornelius Vanderbilt II (above); the Green Animals Topiary Garden is the oldest in the country (below). Opposite page: The Breakers’ Great Hall, with the Vanderbilt family crest adorning the ceiling (above); Marble House features a grand staircase of yellow Siena marble (below).
Chepstow, Chateau-sur-Mer, and Green Animals, the beautiful Portsmouth topiary gardens and estate of the late Alice Brayton, a niece of the axe-wielding murderess Lizzie Borden over in Fall River. (Full disclosure: in the 1960s, your correspondent and other Priory incorrigibles would cross Cory’s Lane in the midnight hour, not to admire the magical topiary giraffes and elephants,
but to help ourselves to the deliciously ripe tomatoes growing in Miss Brayton’s vegetable garden). Phase one of the Preservation Society was advocacy for Colonial Newport. Phase two was preserving the historic Gilded Age piles when the economic and social situation of the 1970s threatened to turn them into extinct white elephants. In recent years, the Society has entered
into a new period in which it is concentrating, not only on the houses, but on building the collections within them, and on increasingly sophisticated landscaping and education programs as well. That, Ross says, is his proudest achievement—along with hiring talented new staff like Laurie Ossman as director of Museum Affairs and John Rodman, director of Museum Experience, to