Posted in ECOLOGY, ECONOMICS, ENVIRONMENT, FEATURES, HISTORY, IN THE ISSUE, OCEANS, PLANNING, PRESERVATION, REGION, SAN FRANCISCO, SANDY, SHORELINE, WATER, tagged AKRF, algorithm, and Tourism Management, Anthony Veerkamp, Arcadis, architectural historians, Atlantic City, Avenida Menendez seawall, Boardwalk, CH2M, climate change, CMG Landscape Architecture, Conference, Department of Parks, developers, Dyke Marsh Wildlife Preserve, economists, Embarcadero, Erin Seekamp, flooding, Florida, Fred Halback, HISTORIC LANDSCAPES, history, Keeping History Above Water, Kevin Conger, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, Madeleine Helmer, Marquis Latimer + Halback, National Historic Preservation Act in 1966, NATIONAL PARK SERVICE, National Trust for Historic Preservation, New Jersey, Newport, Newport Restoration Foundation, North Carolina State University, objects and systems, OptiPres, Point, Preservation, Preservation Green Lab, Preservation Strategies, Randall Mason, recreation, Rhode Island, Saint Augustine, San Francisco, sea-level rise, Shantia Anderheggen, Superstorm Sandy, Teresa Crean, tides, Timothy A. Schuler, Tropical Storm Gabrielle, U.S. Geological Survey, University of Pennsylvania School of Design, University of Rhode Island Coastal Resources Center on July 26, 2018|
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As part of an ongoing effort to make content more accessible, LAM will be making select stories available to readers in Spanish. For a full list of translated articles, please click here.
Click above for a full PDF of the translated text, with English text available below.
BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER
On a chilly Sunday afternoon in the spring of 2016, a group of designers and preservation professionals wandered through one of Newport, Rhode Island’s oldest neighborhoods, visualizing what it would look like underwater. It wasn’t hard to imagine water flowing down the narrow streets and into the basements of the quaint, colonial-era homes located just blocks from Newport Harbor and a mere four feet above sea level. Some had already seen it.
In 2012, Hurricane Sandy sent floodwaters into many of the Point neighborhood’s historic homes, including 74 Bridge Street, a red-painted, two-story house originally built in the late 1720s. The basement flooded up to the first-floor framing and the kitchen took on at least seven inches of water.
Two years later, the Newport Restoration Foundation (NRF), a nonprofit preservation group founded by Doris Duke in the 1960s, purchased the house at 74 Bridge Street. As the house of one of Newport’s most notable cabinetmakers, a Quaker named Christopher Townsend, it had sat for years at the top of the NRF’s list of most desirable historic Newport properties. It was an important acquisition for the NRF, which currently owns 78 properties throughout the city and helps fund their upkeep. But the organization also knew that 74 Bridge Street would flood again.
“It’s in the lowest point in the Point neighborhood—literally, the lowest topographical point,” says Shantia Anderheggen, NRF’s former director of preservation. With sea levels on the rise—and in Newport they already had risen 11 inches over the past century—it was a statistical certainty that what happened in 2012 would happen again. And it wasn’t just the Townsend residence. The entire Point neighborhood, which has one of the highest concentrations of colonial-era structures on the continent, was under siege from the sea. (more…)
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