The Claiborne Pell Bridge provides the backdrop for a house on Bayside Avenue. Nearby is a small waterfront park popular with residents. The Providence Journal / Glenn Osmundson

Named for one of Newport’s founders, Nicholas Easton, and a point of land that has since eroded, Easton’s Point, more commonly known as The Point, is one of Newport’s most historic residential neighborhoods.

It is within walking distance of the restaurants, shops and nightlife of downtown Newport, but this compact neighborhood of streets in a grid pattern near the water is also quiet and low-key.

After Nicholas Easton’s death, his farmland was passed on to Quakers who sold the property for house and garden lots in 1725. Quakers had built the nearby Friends Meeting House at Farewell and Marlborough streets in 1699.

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The Point

Washington Street runs along Narragansett Bay and is also home to The Point’s most lavish houses, including a number of large 18th-century mansions. But many houses in The Point are modestly sized by today’s standards, built for the artisans and tradesmen who worked and lived there.

Harbor House, a collection of historical houses, including 111 Washington St., once owned by the Auchincloss family, is now used as housing for senior citizens. There are 37 studio and one-bedroom units at the Harbor House, and they are made available to people age 62 and, above at all, different income levels.

Washington Street is also home to a Victorian bed-and-breakfast inn, The Sarah Kendall House, and the Stella Maris Inn, an 1852 stone mansion once used as a convent before opening in 1990 as a bed-and-breakfast.

The Newport Restoration Foundation, which was formed in 1968 by the late Doris Duke to help preserve the city’s impressive stock of 18th- and 19th-century architecture, owns 27 houses in The Point. The foundation owns and maintains more than 70 houses in the city, and rents them out, but there are waiting lists for people who want to live in one of the Duke houses.

Today, many of the houses in The Point are kept as summer homes, according to Ilse Buchert Nesbitt, an artist who owns The Third & Elm Press. She has lived and worked in her house in The Point for more than 40 years.

In the years since the 1950s, when the neighborhood was a neglected district, The Point has become attractive to second-home owners.

This gentrification means many houses “are well taken care of,” but The Point seems “less like a neighborhood,” Nesbitt said.

There were 16 single-family houses on the market last week, ranging in price from $325,000, for a three-bedroom, one-bath cottage at 211 Third St., built in 1930, with 1,470 square feet of living space, to $5.6 million for a 1985 shingle-style Colonial, at 100 Washington St.; the house has seven bedrooms, seven full baths, three half-baths and 7,000 square feet of space.

There are also a number of condominiums for sale in The Point, including two in the former Callender School building, built in 1862, at 11 Willow St. Unit 1 is for sale at $629,000, and Unit 5 is listed at $557,000. There are also two freestanding condos on the market, each priced at $380,000, at 26A and 26B Poplar St.

According to statistics from the Rhode Island Association of Realtors, Newport was one of the few communities in Rhode Island that saw an increase in the median sales price for single-family houses last year. The median price last year was $459,000, up nearly 5 percent from $437,450 in 2006.

POPULATION:

(Newport, 2000) 26,475

MEDIAN HOUSE PRICE:

(Newport, 2007) $459,000

INTERESTING FACT:

The Townsend and Goddard family of furniture makers made their home on The Point. Many of their creations are considered masterpieces; a mahogany secretary-bookcase made by Christopher Townsend in 1740 sold for $8.25 million, and a desk-bookcase made by John Goddard for Nicholas Brown was sold by the Brown family in 1989 for $12.1 million.

cdunn@projo.com