Tourists walk up Dennison Street from Thames Street to Spring Street in the heart of Newport’s Yachting Village. Quaint houses, built close to each other, line the neighborhood’s streets.

The Providence Journal / Frieda Squires

During the summer, Newport’s Yachting Village is alive with tourists walking, shopping and eating on Thames Street and in the shops, boutiques, cafes and restaurants crowded on the edge of Newport Harbor.

Traffic is almost always busy, and parking is at a premium. Locals try to avoid the snarled streets during the seasonal rush.

This summer, tourists have to step carefully around a construction site on Thames Street. The International Yacht Restoration School is renovating the Aquidneck Mill building, which was built in 1831 as a textile mill and is on the National Register of Historic Places.

Here and there is a spot of calm, including the garden behind the Samuel Whitehorne Museum, a handsome brick federal Colonial on Thames Street, purchased by the Newport Restoration Foundation in 1969. It is 1 of the 80 Newport properties left to the care of the foundation by the late Doris Duke.

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Yachting Village

St. Mary Church, where Jacqueline Bouvier married John F. Kennedy in 1953, is on Spring Street.

Many of the houses in the Yachting Village were built in the 18th and 19th centuries, and they are compact and set close to each other on the streets rising up the hill from the harbor.

Today, some of the houses are rentals, second homes, or used as small inns and bed-and-breakfasts.

Before the Navy left Newport in the 1960s, the neighborhood had a rough reputation, and was known more for barroom brawls than sandal shops and jewelry stores.

Patricia Golder, a former wine importer, owns and operates the Spring Street Inn Bed & Breakfast. She bought the inn 13 years ago with her late husband, Jack Lang, who died recently.

Golder said they had traveled all over the world but decided to settle in Newport. “We really liked Newport,” she said, because it “combines a lot of the best qualities of both a city and a smaller town. It attracts a huge diversity of people … and there are so many cultural and historic possibilities. It’s just lively to walk around and savor it. You have great restaurants. The Yachting Village is kind of restaurant row.”

Golder said her inn often has guests from outside the United States, including Switzerland, Paraguay, Russia, Japan, Chile, Argentina, Spain, Portugal, Thailand and the Philippines.

“I think that’s what makes Newport so special,” she said. “It’s known all over the world.”

There were 11 single-family houses for sale in the Yachting Village last week, ranging in price from $365,000, for an 1870 cottage at 6 Pope St., to $795,000 for an 1870 Victorian at 490 Thames St. with “harbor views through Waites Wharf.” The property is also zoned for use as a boutique or bed and breakfast, according to the listing information.

The listings include a house on Dennison Street, the Baptist Meeting House, built around 1700-1710, that is owned by the Newport Restoration Foundation.

Pieter Roos, the group’s executive director, said the foundation needs to raise money to continue its work and decided to sell “seven or eight” less significant properties that are “redundant within the collection.”

But the newest homes in the Yachting Village are the luxurious and very highly priced Residences at Brown & Howard Wharf —16 new waterfront condos priced from $1.95 million to $3.7 million. Six of the condos have already been sold, according to representatives of the developers.

POPULATION:

(Newport, 2000) 26,475

MEDIAN HOUSE PRICE:

(Newport, 2007) $459,000

INTERESTING FACT:

Newport is one of the few communities in Rhode Island that had an increase in the median house price last year; the median was up nearly 5 percent, from $437,450

in 2006.

cdunn@projo.com