Ceilings of The Breakers

Visiting The Breakers built by Cornelius Vanderbilt requires that you must look up. 

The Great Hall, your first exposure to grandeur is 50 ft x 50 ft x 50 ft. The ceiling is well decorated including a painting of the sky.

Here's looking up under a chandelier.

The skylight on the ceiling of the 2nd floor Gallery.

The ceiling on the second floor Loggia is painted to resemble canopies stretched over the sky.

Below is the library ceiling - coffered.

The Dining Room

Ceiling of the Music Room.

Below the ceiling the the Billiards Room with a chandelier so weighty it's tied into the structure of the house.

I believe below is the Morning Room.

My neck is stiff from looking up!

Of course it was all for show.  None of the bedrooms had ceilings decorated like this.

The Breakers - Faces

 The Breakers - the 70 room cottage of Cornelius Vanderbilt II - was started in the spring of 1893 and finished in the summer of 1895.  Total square feet: 138,300!

This is the first of three posts.

What struck me right away were the faces.  Here are a few that peered at me.

And Cornelius himself:

He enjoyed this house for only four summer seasons.  He had a stroke in 1896 and then a second one in 1899 which killed him just before he would have celebrated  his 56th birthday.  His wife whom he had married in 1867 and who bore him seven children summered at The Breakers until her death in 1934.

View from Here

 It's clean up week.  A time when folks volunteer to walk along particular roads to pick up trash.

Daughter Emily signed us up for the road I live on.  From the township line north of here to its end at an intersection, it's just over 2 miles. Dan drove us to the starting spot and Emily, granddaughters and I picked up trash. Most of it was Bud Light cans. Who is drinking and driving?

There were long stretches thankfully where there was no trash.

Here's the one photo I took looking into the flat.

You can just see hints of green in the fields.

Cliff Walk

Thursday morning we set off from the apartment we rented to walk to the start of the Cliff Walk.  Fortunately we had a map picked up the afternoon before at the information office which was closed though sign said open.  They had maps available outside the door though. Most folks rely on the map on their phones but I am not plugged in to unlimited wifi. 

Again it was a very gray day but with no rain.

The Cliff Walk is paved for the most part of 3.5 miles along the coast. It did have a section fail this spring and we did come to that detour.

At the start was this former mansion, now a hotel.

 

The ocean stretched to our left and the wind blew furiously.

Some stretches were narrower with walls on one side and hedges on the other.

We soon came to the detour which was just as well.  The wind was too fierce.

We couldn't see the break ahead.  

We took the detour which took us through the campus of Salve Regina College and then on the The Breakers - the Vanderbilt "cottage".