Gilded Grass: Lawn Tennis Serves Alongside Mansions In Newport

Lawn tennis has a remarkably late 1800s feel to it. Visitors can get all those feels in Newport, Rhode Island, home to one of the oldest lawn tennis sites in the world (yes, even older than Wimbledon’s current home).

What is now the International Tennis Hall of Fame opened in 1880—only three years after Wimbledon held its first championships, but Wimbledon later moved to its current location in 1922—as the Newport Casino. Located on seven acres along Bellevue Avenue amidst some of the most noteworthy Gilded Age mansions Newport had to offer, lawn tennis intertwined with the upper class of the day. Now over a century later, the International Tennis Hall of Fame sits alongside historic mansions, both preserved to give lawn tennis fans a real destination to enjoy all things gilded grass.

“I think it is incredible,” Nicole Markham, curator of collections at the International Tennis Hall of Fame, tells me about the link between the societal history of Newport and lawn tennis. “They go hand in hand.”

Early owners of Rosecliff, one of the 11 mansions now run by The Preservation Society of Newport County, had strong tennis ties, Bill Tavares, communications manager for the society, tells me. The home, one of many featured on HBO’s “The Gilded Age,” was completed in 1902 for Nevada silver heiress Theresa Fair Oelrichs by architect Stanford White. During a summer in Newport, Tessie, as she was known to her friends, met Hermann Oelrichs playing tennis at the Newport Casino. They were married in 1890 and a dozen years later had a “summer cottage” built just over a mile south of the tennis courts.

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Tavares says the high society mixed from youth to adulthood, with tennis played all the way through. “The Vanderbilts had plans and calendars,” he says about their stays in Newport, “and that involved tennis, the beach and parties. Many of them spent a lot of time at the [Newport Casino].” The hall’s archives include photos showing the Vanderbilt family playing tennis on the grass.

The Newport Casino opened in 1880, owned at the time by James Gordon Bennett. The property was convenient for Bennett, purchasing land across the street from his Stone Villa home to house his new social club. By fall of 1879 he’d worked with the relatively new architecture firm McKim, Mead & White to develop plans for the casino (the name derives from the Italian use of both a summer lodge and a place of entertainment). The relatively quick construction project broke ground Jan. 6, 1880, and opened to the public that August. Meant to evoke English design, the structure mixes shingle, stone and brick with gables, chimneys, small windows and open-air porches.

The Newport Casino began as a social club, with the ground floor facing Bellevue full of retail sites and a restaurant and the second and third levels the private club rooms, complete with billiards and reading rooms. But the property in back featured lawn tennis, a court tennis facility, a theater, archery, croquet and lawn bowling. The grounds then, as they do today, welcomed all Newport residents.

“The grounds were open to everyone, but you had to be a member of the club to get into the social club,” JT Buzanga, collections manager at the International Tennis Hall of Fame, tells me. “It was a leisurely sport of the rich.”

Markham says the site really served as a confluence of classes, much like how the city was laid out. The wealthy lived on one side of town and the remainder of the citizens on the other. The Newport Casino fell in the middle. “It was still at that time that you had to be more of a leisure lifestyle class [to play lawn tennis],” she says.

To this day the facility functions as a private club, but court space is open to the public.

The link between lawn tennis and Newport history has been around since 1880. “You’d get the carriages and get dropped off at the casino,” Markham says about the tennis site entertaining those living along Bellevue Avenue.

That link took on a new visual life when “The Gilded Age” debuted in 2022, not only depicting many of the summer cottages, but how the Newport Casino became a hub of social activity. The International Tennis Hall of Fame’s historic porches were shown overlooking a grass court. Markham notes that while there is a court there now—it is known as The Horseshoe Court—in the early years of the site that space was an area of fountains and the grass courts were all tucked behind the structures, as they still are today.

While a few of the small details get fuzzy for a fictional show, were it not for the preservation society’s founding in 1945 there may not have been homes to film in. Even if 50 mansions have been lost to development—Bennett’s the Newport Casino may still be around, but his Stone Villa cottage across the street is now a strip mall with parking—the society helped preserve what is the only mansion district left in the country.

The most visited property remains The Breakers, with 450,000 annual tours. This 70-room cottage on 13 acres overlooking the ocean was designed by Richard Morris Hunt for Cornelius Vanderbilt II. Following a fire that wiped out a much smaller cottage on the site, Vanderbilt had his new house built in just two years, opening in 1895 with a 50-foot-high ceiling in the Great Hall. European artists were called on to design everything from tile mosaics to chandeliers, even using platinum leaf paneling in the Morning Room. Many parts of the home were first constructed by Allard & Sons in France, then disassembled and shipped to Newport for reassembly inside the house.

The Vanderbilts proved key in the growing sizes of the cottages, seen most strikingly in The Breakers. But Marble House, the second most visited mansion in Newport, owned by Alva Vanderbilt with a Hunt design, is in a similar class. With 500,000 cubic feet of marble, Tavares says that of the $11 million it took to construct the house that opened in 1892 as a gift for Alva’s 39^th birthday from her husband William Vanderbilt, $7 million was spent just on the marble. Alva and William later divorced, and Alva remarried, moving to a new mansion down the street. She later purchased Marble House and moved back, adding The Chinese Tea House at the back of the property, a striking replica of a Chinese design sitting on the cliff overlooking the ocean.

It wasn’t just the Vanderbilts running Newport. There’s a range of summer cottages that existed along Bellevue, many lost and others still intact. Early houses such as Kingscote, built in 1841 with architecture by White, and Chateau-sur-Mer, built in 1852 with a Hunt design, remain and show how future cottages then took steps forward in architectural styles and sizes.

The Elms, built in 1901 for Edward Berwind with architecture by Horace Trumbauer—the society’s third most visited home—took expansive grounds to a new level. Rosecliff, the home of the Oelrichs, opened in 1902 with what is still the largest ballroom in Newport.

The mansions have more than a societal tie to tennis, as the Isaac Bell House, built in 1883, also featured the architecture of McKim, Mead & White and used the same shingle-style designs found at the International Tennis Hall of Fame.

The flavor of life during the Gilded Age was strong in Newport. There’s still a taste to be had, complete with a side of lawn tennis, thanks to the work of The Preservation Society of Newport County and the International Tennis Hall of Fame. Arguably the oldest lawn tennis site in the world thrives with a historical backdrop unique to Newport, creating an experience truly akin to gilded grass.