Not enough in Newport

“Hypotenuse", which was the Newport home of Gilded Age architect Richard Morris Hunt (1827-1895)

“To me Newport could never be a place charming by reason of its own charm. That it is a very pleasant place when it is full of people, and the people are in spirits and happy, I do not doubt. But then the visitors would bring, as far as I am concerned, the pleasantness with them”

~ Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), British novelist and civil servant



Famed Trinity Church in Newport, designed by Richard Munday and built in 1725-26. It hosts the oldest Episcopal parish (founded in 1698) in Rhode Island.

“I once knew an Episcopalian lady in Newport, Rhode Island, who asked me to design and build a doghouse for her Great Dane. The lady claimed to understand God and His Ways of Working perfectly. She could not understand why anyone should be puzzled about what had been or about what was going to be.
And yet, when I showed her a blueprint of the doghouse I proposed to build, she said to me, “I’m sorry, but I never could read one of those things.”

 “Give it to your husband or your minister to pass on to God,” I said, “and, when God finds a minute, I’m sure he’ll explain this doghouse of mine in a way that even YOU can understand.”

~ Kurt Vonnegut, (1922-2007), American novelist, in Cat’s Cradle

'Vast aspiration of man'

The spectacular main, Renaissance Revival facility of the Boston Public Library, on Copley Square, Boston. Designed by the famed architect Charles McKim, the building was opened in 1895. It faces another masterpiece: Henry Hobson Richardson’s Romanesque Trinity Church (see photo below), which was opened in 1877. The two help make Copley Square one of America’s most beautiful public places.

“For no matter how they might want to ignore it, there was an excellence about this city {Boston}, an air of reason, a feeling for beauty, a memory of something very good, and perhaps a reminiscence of the vast aspiration of man which could never entirely vanish.’’

— Arona McHugh (1924-1996), author of two novels set in Boston — The Seacoast of Bohemia and A Banner with a Strange Device.

Medieval beauty in 'Suck City'

Boston's famed Trinity Church, on Copley Square.

“Trinity Park lies directly across from the {Boston Public} library, Trinity Church rising like a medieval thought amidst the glass and steel towers'' {around Copley Square in Boston's Back Bay}.''

-- From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, by Nick Flynn

Trinity Church and its parish house were designed by Henry Hobson Richardson, and built from 1872 to 1877, when the complex was consecrated. Trinity Church established Richardson's reputation. It is the archetype of the Richardsonian Romanesque style, with its  clay roof, polychromy, rough stone, heavy arches and a massive tower. This style was soon adopted for many public buildings, and some churches, across the United States.

The church is considered one of the greatest buildings in America.

The church was  structurally damaged in the ‘70s by construction of  the 60-story skyscraper at 200 Clarendon St., first called the John Hancock Tower, and still colloquially known as The Hancock.  Among other problems with the tower were that a few panes of glass  fell from it until engineering flaws were fixed. The flaws added the thrill of possible decapitation of visitors to Copley Square – one of the grandest public spaces in the Western Hemisphere.

The structural damage to the church was fully fixed, with the cost borne by the developers.

'A medieval thought'

“Trinity Park lies directly across from the  {Boston Public} library, Trinity Church rising like a medieval thought amidst the glass and steel towers.”  
 

― Writer Nick Flynn, from his memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, about his difficult early life in the Boston area. His mother killed herself and his father was homeless.

Trinity Church, designed by Henry Hobson Richardson and built in 1872-77  on the north side of Copley Square, in Boston's Back Bay neighborhood, is the birthplace and archetype of the Richardsonian Romanesque style, with a clay roof, polychromy, rough stone, heavy arches and a massive tower. The style  became popular across the United States, especially for  such institutions as schools, libraries and churches.

Mrs. Pell's traditionalist exit

Beautiful funeral service for Nuala Pell today at Trinity Church in Newport today. Dignified but not stuffy. Emotional but not unctuous.  The Episcopal service's cadence was soothing. There was just one eulogy, by her son Christopher Thomas Hartford Pell,  and that low-key, though he had to stop and collect himself several times. So much history there, too. I sat next to the pew where Washington and QE II sat.

 And even the controversial park next to church designed by Maya Lin did not feel at all controversial on the beautiful morning.

And as usual with funerals of old people (Mrs. Pell got to 89), the atmosphere inside and outside the church was not grim. Her death was treated as a graceful exit after a full life.

rwhitcomb51@gmail.com