The east facade of Belcourt Castle. is a former summer cottage designed by the famed architect Richard Morris Hunt for Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont. Construction was begun in 1891 and finished in 1894 — during the Gilded Age. It’s on Bellevue Avenue, in Newport.
The term for this period (1870s to about 1900) was derived from writer Mark Twain's and Charles Dudley Warner's 1873 novel The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, which satirized an era of serious social problems masked by a thin gold gilding. Many historians and economists call the period since the 1980s to today “The New Gilded Age’’ — a time of show-off wealth and ever more extreme income inequality.
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’ in GoLocal24.com
I have no interest per se in the beautiful movie star Jennifer Lawrence and the man she married the other weekend in a big bash at Newport’s Belcourt Castle mansion, owned by none other than Carolyn Rafaelian, owner/empress of the junk-jewelry empire Alex and Ani. The groom was Cooke Maroney, who runs a high-end New York art gallery and seems to usually be unshaven – in what we used to call the “Yasser Arafat look,’’ after the unshaven face of the late Palestine Liberation Organization leader. But that such “glamorous’’ events keep happening in The City by the Sea, even in the off-season, is good news for Rhode Island’s economy. Keep ‘em coming.
How wonderful that we have Newport, our mini but spectacular international city, chock full of interesting stuff.
