Guides · Newport
Newport
43 places · 8 areas · a free route, then $4.99 for the whole city · offline map 3.3 MB
The free route
Free in the app, permanently, before you pay anything. 8 stops, 1 day, about 1.4 km, planned by the app's own engine.
Day 1 · ~1.4 km
1
Newport Tower
A round stone tower on eight columns in Touro Park, likely a 17th-century windmill, long tied to Norse legends
Walk all the way around the tower in Touro Park, looking up through its eight round columns and arches at the rough stone drum they carry, and picture the sails of a windmill turning on top.
2
Newport Art Museum
A three-acre arts campus around Richard Morris Hunt's 1864 Stick Style Griswold House, showing New England art
Look first at the Griswold House from Bellevue Avenue, its exposed wooden framing a textbook of the Stick Style, then walk the galleries for New England painters such as William Trost Richards, John Frederick Kensett and Gilbert Stuart, alongside changing contemporary shows.
3
Redwood Library and Athenaeum
A library founded in 1747 in Peter Harrison's classical building of 1750, with a 20-minute audio tour
Take the 20-minute self-guided audio tour, starting in the Harrison Room, which still holds most of the books first bought in London, then look into the later wings for the library's current exhibition.
4
Colonial Jewish Burial Ground
The Jewish burial ground bought in 1677, behind an 1843 Egyptian Revival gate, subject of a Longfellow poem
Stop at the corner of Touro and Kay streets and look through the granite Egyptian Revival gate and fence at the rows of old stones under the trees, then walk two blocks down Touro Street to the synagogue the same community built.
5
Newport Historical Society Resource Center
The historical society's archive, built around a 1730 Seventh Day Baptist meeting house, with a free Occupied! exhibit
Walk through Occupied! Newport and the Fight for Independence, the free exhibit on the British occupation, then ask to see the Seventh Day Baptist meeting house held inside the building, with its wineglass pulpit, carved balusters and a balcony clock by William Claggett.
6
Touro Synagogue
Peter Harrison's 1763 synagogue, the oldest synagogue building standing in the US, to which Washington wrote in 1790
Start at the Loeb Visitors Center on Spring Street, where two floors of exhibits cover religious liberty in colonial Rhode Island, then join the guided tour of the synagogue: twelve Ionic columns, each cut from a single tree, for the twelve tribes of Israel, in a room turned to face east toward Jerusalem.
7
Vernon House
Rochambeau's 1780-81 headquarters, with rare chinoiserie panels and a new library on an enslaved carpenter-soldier
Look for the chinoiserie panels found hidden behind the walls of a first-floor room in 1937, then walk through the Cato Vernon Freedom Library, a participatory three-room exhibit on the first floor about the enslaved carpenter who won his freedom as a soldier.
8
Trinity Church
Richard Munday's 1726 wooden church with its original box pews and a three-tiered wineglass pulpit in the aisle
Walk down the center aisle between the high box pews to the three-tiered wineglass pulpit standing in front of the altar, look up at the organ case with the English crown given by George Berkeley in 1733, then find the grave of the French admiral de Ternay in the churchyard.
More of the top sights
A few of the 43 places in the full guide. Each one has its own written guide in the app: what to do, what to notice, the history, and why it hits.
Marble House
Alva Vanderbilt's 1888-92 Hunt mansion of colored marble, with the cliffside Chinese Tea House of her suffrage rallies
The Breakers
Cornelius Vanderbilt II's 70-room Italian Renaissance palazzo by Richard Morris Hunt, finished in 1895 and open all year
Cliff Walk
A public shoreline path below the Gilded Age mansions; closed south of the Forty Steps since 2022
Areas
Washington Square and Colony House · Historic Hill · Bellevue Avenue North · Ochre Point and Cliff Walk · Bellevue Avenue Mansions · Thames Street and the Wharves · The Point and Farewell Street · Beyond Downtown
Illustrations are drawn for the app. Place descriptions are written by hand and checked against a primary source; facts draw on Wikidata (CC0) and Wikipedia (CC BY-SA). Maps © OpenStreetMap contributors.