Geography
The district encompasses an area of 606 acres (242 ha) bounded by Block Island Sound and Narragansett Bay to the south and east, respectively, Spring Street and Coggeshall Avenue to the west, and Memorial Boulevard to the north. This takes in the southeastern quarter of the developed portions of the city on the southwestern neck of Aquidneck Island. Bellevue Avenue itself runs north-south for over two miles (3.2 km) through the middle of the district.
Land use within the district is overwhelmingly residential. Most of its 63 buildings are dwellings either in use or originally built for that purpose. Institutional use is the next most common, with many of the historic mansions now used as historic house museums. One, Vernon Court, is home of the National Museum of American Illustration. Another, Belcourt Castle, is a privately owned house museum. Many others are owned by the Preservation Society of Newport County. Salve Regina University, home to some more historic buildings, including the William Watts Sherman House, is wholly within the district, and there is also a more modern senior citizens home built in the mid-20th century.
Commercial properties are clustered near the Newport Casino at the north end of the district, such as two contemporary strip malls opposite and to the right (respectively) of the casino itself. There are some small parks within the district, and the blocks just south of Vernon House on the east side of Bellevue are given over to Stoneacre, a once-private park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. Rovensky Park is further down Bellevue Avenue and is maintained by the Preservation Society of Newport County. Many of the larger mansions sit on large lots, leaving plenty of open space within the district.
Read more about this topic: Bellevue Avenue Historic District
Famous quotes containing the word geography:
“Where the heart is, there the muses, there the gods sojourn, and not in any geography of fame. Massachusetts, Connecticut River, and Boston Bay, you think paltry places, and the ear loves names of foreign and classic topography. But here we are; and, if we tarry a little, we may come to learn that here is best. See to it, only, that thyself is here;—and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels, and the Supreme Being, shall not absent from the chamber where thou sittest.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“Ktaadn, near which we were to pass the next day, is said to mean “Highest Land.” So much geography is there in their names.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)