Theme Thursday - Roof

I went out collecting interesting roofs this week, wandering around looking for the perfect subjects. As you'll see, I have a preference for slate or cedar shingle roofs, and Victorian round towers. There are a lot of interesting roofs in Newport, and these are my favorites.

This first one is The Waves, at the end of Ledge Rd. on the point known as Land's End. It's on the Cliff Walk, so it's easy to look at from a variety of angles.

This house is along the dogleg end of Bellevue Ave. I love the towers and the copper ornamentation.












A Stick-style house on Rhode Island Ave., seen from the back on Everett St. I've always loved the varying stages of the roof-line on this house.











This is "Villino" on Red Cross Ave., built in 1882 and designed by Stanford White. It's always looked like a house from a Nathaniel Hawthorne story to me.







And this last house is a classic - the Katherine Prescott Wormeley House, 1876, at the corner of Red Cross and Old Beach Rd. It was designed by the famous Victorian architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White from New York, who designed many of the houses for the "400" on the East Coast of the US. We locals call this the "Turkish Delight" house, for obvious reasons!

I thought long and hard about this week's Theme Thursday video. I know so many people are thinking of "Up On the Roof", so I went a little further afield. It's not about roofs, but this song is certainly about being above all the mundane daily stuff - "Sittin' On Top of the World", by Cream at their 2005 reunion concert at the Royal Albert Hall. For me, this is a far superior version than the one on the original album, because Clapton plays a meaner, leaner, gutsier blues rendition here, pretty much abandoning the earlier "psychedelic" trappings and going right for the roots. Yeah! Slowhand!!!!

Photos & text © 2009 by A. Roy Hilbinger