Preserving Newport society is<br> a continuing challenge

As the leader of the organization that owns and operates the Newport Mansions, one of the top tourist attractions in New England, with about 750,000 visitors per year, Trudy Coxe has grown fundraising, memberships, annual attendance and retail sales at the society’s eight museum stores.
During her tenure, 10 of the properties have been designated as official projects of Save America’s Treasures, a public-private partnership between the White House Millennium Council and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

PBN: Can you talk a little bit about the work of preserving these very old buildings?
COXE: That, at the end of the day, is what this is all about. Every visitor to our houses, every person who buys something from our stores, every person who rents one of our rooms for a wedding or for a party, and everything that we do goes right back into keeping these houses up to snuff. The preservation challenge of these 11 unbelievable mansions is so daunting, it really is. We have about $95 million worth of preservation work to do at our houses – work that is allocated out over the next 30 years … and we’ve got a plan of which comes first, what can we do this year and what can we do next year, and can we delay a little bit if the money doesn’t come in. It’s a big job. If we don’t take care of the houses, well then we will lose part of our American heritage, and that would be a crime. One leak in any roof in any of our houses could be the end of any unique room that we own.

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PBN: There’s been a steady decline in visitors since 9-11. Why is that, and how has the attendance been so far this year?
COXE: That’s the question of the day, it really is. There isn’t a museum in America that isn’t affected, and we are all going through major introspection and transformation, if you will. It is a very different society than it was 20 years ago. … Now that being said, we have seen a decline, but it seems like we have stabilized. … The number of people who walked through the door last year was 719,665 … and of those, 672,275 paid for tickets – the difference was people who are members of the organization who get to visit us as part of their membership fee. The year before, total paid [attendance] was 694,729, so that’s 3.2 percent down in terms of tickets sold. … Rentals – that is, a corporate group comes to Rosecliff for a corporate party or a wedding is held at Marble House terrace – that was up substantially, from $1.3 million to $1.7 million – a 25-percent increase in one year, which is unbelievable. I’m very proud of that, because we really worked that whole line of our business very hard. … Our special events … [and] our retail sales are holding their own, and then fundraising we’re sort of holding our own – we raised just under $1 million last year. … What’s significant about fundraising is it’s up by about two-thirds compared to five years ago. So we have really stepped up our pace on the fundraising side and on the rental side.

PBN: You are always conducting research on the mansions’ history. Why is that important from a marketing perspective?
COXE: Some of the research that gets done is really done by people who have stories to tell, things they remember that a grandfather might have told them or a great aunt, or they’ve stumbled across a box of paperwork in their attic. Particularly as time goes by and you get further away from the families that originally lived here, we really rely upon the community story about our houses. … One of the things we’ve been doing in the last few years, in an effort to bring the houses more to life, is to tell the story of what it took back in those days to manage our houses. … We hear from our visitor surveys that people are very interested in the servant life. … They’re very interested in gardens, now that gardening probably is the most popular hobby in America. We’ve found people are very interested in the lifestyles of the owners of the houses. We also find that they are very interested in knowing about the architecture of the house. … We also know from our surveys that they may be slightly less interested in the collections, which is very interesting to us. You know, 20 years ago antique collecting was much more popular than it is today.

PBN: Do you have to be selective about what history you choose to highlight? I’m thinking about the recent statewide focus on Rhode Island’s slave-trading history, for example.
COXE: Do you mean the sort of seamier sides of life at the Newport Mansions? Actually, I don’t know of any stories. I know for example that Mr. Berwind, who owned The Elms, had sort of an uprising of his staff on a labor issue, but that is not a story that we try to hide from the public. … We’re selective not so much by history but by time. You know, we have about 45 to 50 minutes to get groups of people that vary in size through the house, and we have a variety of stories … that we want to tell that includes the culture of the time-frame that you are looking at, the architecture that you are looking at, a little bit of a story about the owners and the people who lived in the house over the years, and then there’s some of the story about the collections within the house. Every audience wants a little bit of everything … and there are thousands of stories we’d like to tell, but we are very limited by people’s time-frames.