Even on Block Island, when hotels such as the National, the Manisses and the Atlantic were boarded up and unused in the 1960s and ‘70s, the Harborside succeeded. In other seaside resorts, such as Narragansett Pier on the mainland, the big mansard-roofed summer hotels were burned or torn down. The Pequot-Waukesha-Royal-Harborside does have one great distinction. And never mind that the rest of the building’s sheathing was still horizontal. Being just a utilitarian, flat-roofed two-stories, that side has never been pretty - not at all like the original three-story mansard-roofed front.Īlthough the porch and eaves were given that era’s customary fanciful gingerbread treatment when built in 1879, the ornate porch was boxed-in a hundred years later, during the 1970s, with cheap plywood - the “Texture 111” variety, whose manufacturers went to the not-so-extraordinary effort of scoring the 4’ x 8’ sheets with vertical lines to simulate up-and-down boards.
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And the building’s depth was doubled about 1915, by constructing an addition the full length of the rear, along Weldon’s Way. What little land the Harborside resided on was used for an expansion of the front facade in 1888, from six windows across to 10 across. Unlike the nearby National Hotel, whose cupola was lost in the 1938 hurricane and replaced in 1985, the Harborside is still cupola-less.Īnd the Harborside never had the towers and imaginative architecture of the Surf Hotel, the Manisses, or the Hygeia - plus, being on a small lot on Water Street, there were no expansive grounds to embellish the structure, as around the Narragansett Inn, the Spring House and the Ocean View Hotel. Although given a very nice cupola when built, that accoutrement disappeared by 1900. Of course, for that purpose, the Royal was a first-class success.Īrchitecturally, the Harborside Inn doesn’t have a chance at greatness. The Royal’s reign over Water Street lasted for six well-lubricated decades, notably as a splendid place to drink for salt-of-the-earth patrons who, as the 1889 newspaper article put it, were “second-class” people. Other names were, in 1913, the “Waukesha,” and most famously, beginning about 1920, “The Royal.” The Pequot House, built in 1879, still exists as a hotel and bar on Water Street - since 1980 called the Harborside Inn. The Spring House’s method was for prospective guests to seek “rates on application.” The Ocean View burned in 1966, and the Hygeia in 1916, but the Manisses and Spring House are still first class.Īt the Pequot in 1889, rooms cost only $2 per night, slightly more than the island’s minimum available rate of $1.50, charged by the Bellevue on High Street.
Next in the hierarchy was New Harbor’s Hygeia Hotel for $3 to $4 per night, and Old Harbor’s Manisses at $3 to $3.50. ”īeing “second class” was not really a bad position for a hotel to be in, since the pyramidal economic scheme of affluence dictated relatively few tourists would request the island’s first-class accommodations, while a far greater number would be knocking on doors of cheaper places.ĭuring that summer 122 years ago, when the island’s great initial tourist boom was in full swing, first class rooms could be found at the gargantuan Ocean View Hotel at Old Harbor for $3.50 to $4.50 per night. Published by Annapurna Interactive.This week in history on July 31,1889, the local summer newspaper, Mid-Ocean, put its opinion in black and white: “The Pequot House is one of the largest of the second class houses.
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