9.26.99
After shock of Navy pullout subsides, Newport remakes itself with tourism

By SCOTT MacKAY and JODY McPHILLIPS
Journal Staff Writers

The news came with the speed of a sneak attack, and it was met by gasps of disbelief. ``I couldn't believe it; nobody could,'' says then-Governor Philip Noel. ``Rhode Island was the birthplace of the U.S. Navy. Wehad always had this tremendous naval presence -- it had been in Newport since the Revolutionary War.''

But on April 17, 1973, President Richard Nixon's administration announced that the U.S. Navy's Atlantic Fleet was pulling out of Newport. What the announcement did not say was that the bottom was about to fall out of Newport's economy.

The Navy had been Newport's meal ticket. Through the end of World War II, more than 2 million sailors had trained in Newport. The 21,000 Navy personnel stationed there in 1973 plus an additional 4,000 civilian workers anchored the Aquidneck Island economy. Just about everybody in the area had been in the Navy, worked for the Navy, or depended on business generated by the military.

And the Navy defined Newport, as much a part of the city as the smell of sea salt in the air.

Journal files OH SAY CAN YOU SEE? Images of billowing sails set against the sky lured thousands to the waterfront for the Tall Ships celebration that marked the nationÕs bicentennial in 1976.

Newport's waterfront had changed little since Melville's time. It was home to a slew of sleazy bars and tattoo parlors that catered to randy, thirsty sailors. Thames Street was known as ``Blood Alley,'' for the boozy fisticuffs that sometimes erupted.

As writer William Least Heat Moon wrote shortly after the Navy left:

``When I saw Thames Street the first time in the sixties, it was still a dark little guttery thing filled with the odor of beer and fried food and dimestore perfume; the noise was music, shouts, laughter, gull screeches. The Navy remained its main order of business. At five o'clock on a summer evening, when the Alley really came to, you saw pressed white uniforms of the gobs, shining black oxfords, and faces wiped down with Old Spice; but as the streets emptied in the dark morning, the uniforms now smudged and rumpled and stinking of beer, there would be vomiting and sometimes fights.''

Gloom and defiance descended over the picturesque city of 34,500. A group of business and political leaders -- in the naive belief they could stop the pullout -- organized letter writing campaigns and ``Save our Ships'' trips to Washington to protest.

Politicians fought over who ``lost'' the Navy, which also closed facilities in Quonset, in North Kingstown, at about the same time. Democrats blamed President Nixon -- a Republican who had trained to be a World War II naval officer at Quonset -- for shifting Rhode Island's naval facilities to southern states.

Republican John Chafee, who had been Nixon's Secretary of the Navy until a year before the pullout, also drew blame. But Chafee pointed the finger back at the Democrats -- there were no Republicans in the state's Washington delegation --who represented Rhode Island in the Congress, saying they did little to support the military.

The state's political establishment was stunned because the announcement, part of a national military cutback, came without warning. ``All we got was a telephone call the same day they told the press,'' recalls Noel.

Says State Rep. Paul Crowley, a Newport restaurateur, ``At first there was this sense of denial; we had always been a Navy town and some people just couldn't believe it was gone.''

Finally, after the ships sailed and unemployment hit 18 percent on Aquidneck Island, the business community got down to reinventing Newport.

``We still had the mansions and America's Cup,'' said Crowley. ``We had the summer festivals, the music festival, the jazz festival. We finally said, `Let's get out and promote the city and see if we can get some business.' ''

Now, Newport would sell its history and sailing. And it would throw a theme party every weekend, catering to tourists who would pay to see how their fabulously wealthy betters lived.

Eventually, a portion of hotel taxes paid by the tourists was channeled into promotion and advertising to attract more visitors.

There were some missteps. ``A first round of hotels were built on the waterfront without a lot of planning,'' said Crowley. ``When the Navy first left, people here were so fearful, they let any developer come in and build, no matter what it looked like.''

Change started with the city's waterfront. Several years before the fleet left, Bart Dunbar, a Harvard-educated former Navy lieutenant, paid $100,000 for shabby Bowen's Wharf.

``The talk around town was, `You hear a guy paid $100,000 for Blood Alley.' Everybody thought he was crazy,'' recalls Joe Houlihan, a Newport lawyer.

There were ``at least'' two houses of prostitution on the waterfront when Dunbar moved in. A fishmonger rented a storefront for $35 a month. (That space is now occupied by Michael Hayes, a tony clothing store that sells $1,000 suits.)

Dunbar restored the Colonial buildings to their original charm; where thirsty sailors once staggered, credit-card carrying tourists strutted. As Least Heat Moon wrote:

Navy outfitters were now women's shoeshops, tattoo parlors perfume boutiques. Where Jacktars [sailors] had walked with the sway the sea teaches, now coeds from the Seven Sisters waggled their precious butts atop Pappagallos, and permanent-press matrons, safe in tummy-control Spandex, their triceps swinging in the wind, lugged purses the size of seabags.

In 1976, the Bicentennial celebration brought a parade of Tall Ships and a visit by Queen Elizabeth II of England. Thousands thronged Newport to watch the majestic ships and catch a glimpse of the Queen.

Newport's Mayor, Humphrey ``Harp'' Donnelly III, is reputed to have welcomed the Queen by introducing himself as ``Humphrey the Third'' and telling her his family was ``so Irish my father didn't allow us to eat English muffins.''

The Donnelly story is part of Newport legend, but even his close friends acknowledge it may be apocryphal.

A year later, a champagne-swilling skipper named Ted Turner won the America's Cup on Courageous and put Newport on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

Soon, there was rarely a weekend that Newport was not hosting one tourist-fetching festival or another.

By the end of the 1970s, the mansions were drawing 750,000 visitors a year. The tourist business was thriving and the waterfront was a nonstop cocktail bash.

But many in Newport were aghast at the New Newport. Some preferred the gritty, genuine charm of the Navy ``swabbies'' to what they saw as the fern-bars brimming with the Izod-shirted nouveau riche. Other fumed that soaring housing costs were creating a city exclusively for the monied.

Over at the Irish-American Club in the old Fifth Ward, bartender Fred Quarry groused that ``Newport's nothing but a big tourist trap now. . . . The only people who can afford to live here are lawyers.''

Others lamented the passing of the Newport of their youth and the realization that there was little room in their gussied-up city for the working class. ``I grew up in a multi-ethnic, middle-class city of Irish, Greeks, Blacks, Jewish people,'' says Keith Stokes, executive director of the Newport County Chamber of Commerce. ``That's not so anymore; Newport has been gentrified and no one can deny that.''

Even the Navy went upscale. When the fleet left, the Naval War College, the Navy's graduate level military college, and the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, a submarine research agency, stayed in Newport. These installations were staffed largely by officers and high-tech engineers whose idea of a fine time out was definitely not a gin-soaked tattoo parlor.

``Some people say -- what about the good old days,'' says Stokes. ``Well, in the good old days the quality of life wasn't so good. Newport harbor and Narragansett Bay were polluted.''

In a celebrity-drenched and money-worshipping culture, the Claus von Bulow case would help define the New Newport.

``This case has everything,'' declared the prosecutor. ``It has money, sex, drugs; it has Newport, New York, and Europe; it has nobility; it has maids, butlers, a gardener. . . . This case is where the little man has a chance to glimpse inside and see how the rich live.''

Those were the opening lines of Reversal of Fortune , the movie based on the Claus von Bulow case. Von Bulow, a Danish-born socialite, was convicted and later acquitted of twice trying to murder Sunny von Bulow, his heiress wife, with insulin injections during the 1979 and 1980 Christmas holidays at their Newport mansion.

By the time the first trial began in Newport in 1982, hundreds of newspaper and television accounts of the case were sent around the world. Those datelines told of a Newport the business community had begun to tout in the mid-1970s -- a place of money, intrigue, mansions, and yachts, a lavishness out of another century.

It was odd, Stokes recalls, how the first Claus von Bulow trial -- the one at which he was convicted -- held in Newport in 1982, fueled tourism. Perhaps the von Bulow saga reinforced the old middle-class saw that the people in those big houses may be rich, but they weren't happy.

There was what Crowley calls a brief ``feeling of angst'' in 1983, when the America's Cup races were lost to Australia. But people kept coming. Now, Newport is looking to attract more visitors to the many European-style bed and breakfast inns that have sprouted in the city and fewer of the college-age carousers whose raucous parties are a bit too reminiscent of the old Navy hijinks.

Says Noel, who had barely taken over as governor when the fleet left: ``At the time I couldn't see any positives in the Navy leaving; a lot of people were hurt. But Newport is a better city without the fleet.''