Interesting Looking Tour: New Breakers tour plumbs the depths below famous mansion

If we can get to Newport, Rhode Island, there's a tour we'd like to take. A new tour at the Breakers Mansion takes people underground to see how the heat, hot water and more come together.

New Breakers tour plumbs the depths below famous mansion

By MICHELLE R. SMITH  AP,

September 4, 2017

NEWPORT, R.I. (AP) — Visitors to the spectacular Gilded Age mansion The Breakers now have the chance to explore its depths with a new tour that shows off the domestic technology that helped make the 70-room building state of the art when it was completed in 1895.
    The hour long “Beneath The Breakers” tour takes place almost entirely underground, from the boiler room built hundreds of yards from the house, through a tunnel as wide as a carriage, and into the mansion’s basement, where visitors can see original parts of its elevator, electrical system and plumbing — which used three kinds of water.

The Breakers mansion in Newport, Rhode Island. –Steven Senne / AP, File

   It’s a weekend handyman’s dream tour and a completely different way to look at the opulent house built by railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt II. The Preservation Society of Newport County, which owns The Breakers and several other mansions in Newport, developed the tour based on journals kept by a resident house engineer, as well as other documents.

   Tour guide Raymond Roy describes the tour as focusing on “the guts and the glory” of the house, as opposed to the “glitz and glamor” upstairs.
   “The systems we talk about are commonplace today,” Roy said.
    But at the time The Breakers and other famous Newport mansions were built, amenities such as electricity were available to only a few.
    The tour begins in the caretaker’s cottage, which sits at the gate to the 13-acre estate and was built to camouflage a massive chimney that runs from the boiler room, dug below it by hand.

Tour guide Raymond Roy conducts tour in tunnel at The Breakers. Stephan Savoia / AP

The boiler was intentionally placed far from the main house. The first Breakers mansion was made of wood and burned down in 1892 in a boiler explosion.
   The architect, Richard Morris Hunt, designed an innovative indirect hot water system powered by coal to heat the 138,000-square-foot house. Two boilers now on display in the room heated a school until 2016 but are the same as what was originally installed here, Roy said.

 Source: https://www.boston.com/news/new-england-travel/2017/09/04/new-breakers-tour-plumbs-the-depths-below-famous-mansion?s_campaign=Email:BComToday