The Newport Skyline from Goat Island

Newport’s wharfs, from Long Wharf to Perry Mill evolved, from the late 1960s through the 1980s into a hectic carnival of boutiques, eateries, and hotels. A deliberately nondescript wharf-like vernacular has been cultivated even for outsized hotels, with carved signboards everywhere. Fragments of old stores and commercial buildings of some interest exist along Thames Street, but mostly gutted, altered, and faked that their integrity is gone. The necessity of routing traffic through a four-lane artery and of providing parking spaces has inevitably destroyed the old scale of things. The new center is all development, with neither imagination or regard for public amenity to stamp it as something unique -- to make it Newport.