Homicide at Rough Point by Peter Lance

Author:Peter Lance
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tenacity Media Books
Published: 2021-01-28T19:04:00+00:00

DORIS AND THE NRF MAKE A KILLING

In examining Newport property records I made an interesting discovery. In the decade following Doris’s initial restoration efforts, property values in the Historic Hill neighborhood of Newport had skyrocketed. By 1982, 13 years after the NRF’s purchase of the Y for $150,000, its assessed value had grown to $428,000. Then on November 24th, 1986, for unknown reasons, the NRF transferred the historic Georgian building to Doris Duke personally, along with two additional lots, for $514,000, while at the time, the assessed value of all 3 properties was $726,000.664

Four years later, the heiress, who had become a one-woman development force in Newport, transferred the 3 parcels back to the NRF, which then proceeded to sell them in 1996 to Lancaster Associates, a Providence-based for-profit real estate company that also used the trade name Vanderbilt Hall. The price: $1,303,500, representing more than 8 times the original $150K purchase price by the NRF. But as some measure of what the complex was actually worth, less than 3 months later, Lancaster Associates transferred the original Y and those two lots to an entity called Vanderbilt Hall, LP for $5,700,000 or 38 times what the NRF paid for it in 1969. 665 666

That raises the question of whether the Newport Restoration Foundation was dedicated solely to philanthropy and preservation or whether Doris’s non-profit also saw a “profit” in its gentrification of Newport. Today, operating as “The Vanderbilt Grace,” the old YMCA is a 33 room luxury hotel billed by The Five Star Alliance as one of “the world’s best.” 667

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