The Newport Cliff Walk: A 3.5-Mile Tour Past the Gilded Age Mansions Stand at Memorial Boulevard and look south. In front of you is 3.5 miles of raw Atlantic coastline, with cliffs rising as high as 70 feet above the surf and the back lawns of some of the largest fortunes America ever produced pressed right against the path on your left. There is no admission gate. The Newport Cliff Walk is free, public, and open to anyone, which is exactly why it has been fought over for more than a century. This self-guided audio walking tour follows the Cliff Walk from the sand at Easton's Beach to the marble palaces of Bellevue Avenue, stopping where the stories are: the fires, the feuds, the storms, and the families who called 70-room mansions "cottages." Here is a preview of what you will walk past in Newport, Rhode Island, and what most visitors never learn standing in the same spot. A public path the mansion owners couldn't close The ground beneath your feet looks obvious: a trail along the water, open to all. It has never been simple. The right to walk this stretch has been contested, barricaded, and litigated for well over a century, with the estates on one side and the public on the other. The Atlantic has its own claim too. Parts of the path you will stand on did not exist twenty years ago, because storms broke, buried, and rebuilt them more than once. The tour traces both fights at once, people against property and people against the ocean. The Forty Steps and Newport's oldest beach Cut into the cliff face is a flight of roughly forty stone-and-concrete steps dropping to a flat ledge where the Atlantic breaks against dark gray rock. The Forty Steps is one of the most storied spots on the entire walk, and you will hear why. Just up the shoreline, Easton's Beach, which locals still call First Beach, has been drawing people to this corner of Newport for nearly 140 years. Established in 1887, it is Rhode Island's oldest public beach, and its story runs counter to everything the mansions behind it stand for. The Breakers: a palace built from a fire What you see is not the original Breakers. On the morning of November 25, 1892, a fire broke out in the kitchen of the house that stood here, and the Indiana limestone palazzo that replaced it, five floors above the cliffs, was built to last. When it opened in the summer of 1895 it was the most technologically advanced private residence in the United States. It holds 70 rooms and 48 bedrooms across thirteen acres; Cornelius Vanderbilt II spent roughly $7 million on it, and the family lived in it for about two months a year. The tour also takes you up to the fourth floor, an attic the size of a small apartment building that belonged not to the Vanderbilts but to the staff who ran the place. Marble House: two-ton doors and a suffragist's stage Two French Baroque bronze doors front Marble House, each weighing a ton and a half, cast at a New York foundry and stamped with the interlocked monogram "WV." Behind them is a house that cost about $11 million in 1892, its white marble facade and two-story Corinthian pilasters built as an argument as much as a home. It also belonged to a woman who refused to vanish into it. Alva Vanderbilt Belmont built the Chinese Tea House on the grounds in 1908, perched directly above the Atlantic, and used it as a platform for the cause she gave the rest of her life to. The tour follows Marble House from private palace to public stage, including the sealed doors that some swear stay shut for reasons of their own. The Isaac Bell House: where Shingle Style began At 70 Perry Street, a house rises 52 feet to the top of a round tower, its upper walls wrapped in unpainted shingles laid in wave and diamond patterns rather than plain rows. In 1881 Isaac Bell Jr. handed the commission to a then-unknown New York firm, McKim, Mead and White, and a young Stanford White helped turn it into one of the founding works of American Shingle Style. Look up at the porch posts that taper almost to bamboo; the historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock singled out those exact details. The building has since been a cotton broker's cottage, a villa, a nursing home, and apartments, and survived all of it. From a casino scandal to the Tennis Hall of Fame The long shingle-style building on Bellevue Avenue does not read as a sports museum, because it was never built as one. The Newport Casino opened on July 1, 1880, as a Gilded Age social club. Today it is the International Tennis Hall of Fame, where 40 trophies line the Grand Staircase and thirteen grass courts, still played on, fill seven acres between Bellevue Avenue and Freebody Street. The tour explains how a clubhouse became the place an entire sport keeps its memory. Take the self-guided audio tour You can walk the Cliff Walk for free any day you like. What you cannot do on your own is hear the kitchen fire, the lawsuit, the storm, and the woman who turned a tea house into a podium, told right where each one happened. This is one of the most rewarding things to do in Newport, Rhode Island, and the audio plays at your own pace as you walk.
