Mansions and Mobile Homes: the Fate of Our Communities?

The Pell, or Newport, Bridge under construction
in 1968 with aircraft carrier U.S.S. Wasp
passing beneath.

The Claiborne Pell Bridge, named for the Senator who founded Pell grants to make college affordable for more students and rising above the mouth of might Narragansett Bay, opened in 1969.

It is by far the tallest bridge in southern New England and by the time I got my driver's license a mere 44 miles away in 1977 the bridge represented a big temptation for thrilling teenage escape.

In the summer twilight of late evenings, we'd cruise Route 1 in our rattletrap pickups and motorcycles and Beetles through the gathering fog past the broad ocean beaches we loved: Misquamicut, Quonnie, Matunuk. Poetic remnants of the indigenous past slaughtered and chased from ancestral fishing grounds, about which we learned nothing in our local schools.

Up into the sky we would soar across the bridge, having saved our pennies to pay the toll.

On the other side, we imagined ourselves to be in a Planet of the Apes where we wandered freely what is now the Cliff Walk and across the grounds of the famed but then-abandoned and deteriorating Newport mansions, "summer cottages"of the robber barons. Many of the mansions were demolished in the 1960's and 1970's due to the combination of declining fortunes and high maintenance costs.

The 70-room Breakers mansion of Cornelius Vanderbilt.

Our personal favorite was The Breakers, built by a grandson of railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt in the late 19th century. I have ghostly memories of peering in the windows at the black and white checked entry floors, smoking weed on an embattled veranda.

Newport is a grander version of Maine's Bar Harbor, also a site of gigantic "summer cottages" built by and for wealthy summer residents. Unlike Bar Harbor, Newport, founded in 1639, was at one time one of the most important port cities in North America through the 1700's, trading in whale oil, rum, and yes -- enslaved persons. With the decline of this commerce during the Revolutionary War, Newport -- also a site for religious freedom, home to one of the first synagogues in North America -- became a fashionable summer resort.

The transitions of communities to summer resorts when commerce fades -- from money-making machines to playgrounds for the wealthy, with the majority of United States' workers in service to one or the other -- has been or is becoming the fate of many U.S. communities. It is painful to observe and even more so to experience.

So many have so much, and so many more have so little.

The U.S. has been great at the creation of wealth but far less than great in the equity of its distribution, a trend continuing all-too-obviously today.

From the very beginning, during which southern planters enslaved and traded in human beings to create wealth from the land they stole from the continent's indigenous peoples, North American colonists have been on a quest for wealth. The "Christian nationalism" we are again experiencing is built into the foundation of this nation, on Calvinist doctrines in which wealth accumulation is seen as both a spiritual duty and sign of god's favor, i.e., a "prosperity gospel."

Meanwhile, nearly 8% of all housing units in Maine are mobile homes -- many of them representing "substandard" housing in terms of warmth, utilities, etc. Many times, these units are the only housing full-time workers can afford. For instance, my brother, who holds a commercial drivers license (CDL) and drives full time, lives in a trailer circa 1980's in a 150-unit "land lease" mobile home park developed in 1960. The unit is extremely difficult and expensive to heat -- and a stable, wonderful neighborhood. We were lucky to get him in there.

We can witness and understand this nation's patterns of inequity in the histories and lives all around us.

We only have to want to understand, and then to act.