Newport’s Spring Park celebrates its grand opening

Newport’s new Spring Park celebrated its grand opening on June 1 with a gathering of Newport and Rhode Island officials, as well as committees and project managers that were involved with the site’s conception, design, and protection. The park is situated at the corner of Touro and Spring Street, in front of the Loeb Visitors Center.  

Ron Henderson, a landscape architect at Lirio Landscape Architecture and a professor at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, explained the design concept of the park. Made of stone, there is a large, open gathering space with a raised stage, framed to the south and to the north with groves of ironwood trees – ironwood being a native species that does well in wet spaces. Behind the stage runs a stone wall, and the archway in the wall is directly above the root of the spring. Mirrored against the arch, a shallow semicircle is cut into the stage to collect rainwater. Once filled, the rainwater will spill over into a bronze channel that “traces the route of one of the historic wooden pipes that led water to Newport as part of its first water infrastructure,” Henderson explains. The system acts as a passive water feature, and after the rain runs down the channel, some of the stones around the park are angled to collect rainwater. “This is a park that will be beautiful in the rain,” he said.  

The creation of Spring Park has been an ongoing project for over a decade. Before, the site used to be Coffey’s gas station, owned by Mr. Neil Coffey. “Once Mr. Coffey put his property up for sale [in 2015],” said Lilly Dick, chair of the Newport Spring Leadership committee, “it became evident that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reclaim the site of the heart of colonial Newport, and bring its history and significance to life. The mission of this project is to recognize and celebrate the Spring site as the birthplace of Newport and the important role this place had in sustaining the life and growth of this town, the birthplace in the United States of religious freedom and separation of church and state.”  

Hundreds of years ago, the Spring Park site was a key feature in describing the boundaries of the city. From the records of the Colony of Rhode Island, March 16, 1639: “it is agreed and ordered that the Southwest side of the island shall be called Newport, and that the town shall be built upon both sides of the spring and by the seaside southward.” 

Dr. Alexandra Uhl of Salve Regina University, as well as students from Salve Regina, the University of Kentucky, and Stonehill College literally unearthed history at the site via an archeological dig. “[The dig] let us see the pieces and parts of the lives of those that lived here prior to us,” Uhl said, a time when the spring would have been used as a well. Students from the University of Kentucky came to the opening ceremony of the park to show models of the artifacts they found during the dig, letting the public interact with objects that would have been used by the stewards of this land centuries ago.   

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse spoke more of the historical significance of the site and the surrounding area. Just across the street from the park, George Washington spoke to the people of Newport at the Colony House as he was campaigning for election; the Florence K. Murray courthouse, also across the street, represents the first woman appointed Superior Court judge in Rhode Island, first woman Chief Justice of the Rhode Island Superior Court, and first woman justice on the Rhode Island Supreme Court; and Touro Synagogue, right behind the park, was “where it was first decreed that it would be the policy of this country to give bigotry no sanction, and persecution no assistance,” the senator explains. He joked that this is a “tough neighborhood” for the park – with high standards to live up to – and lamented that despite the park’s history and the surrounding area’s historical significance, “for Rhode Islanders, this will be known as ‘Spring Park, y’know, where Coffey’s used to be.’”

Spring Park is especially important today, not just for its historical significance, but for its environmental importance as well. The underground spring was historically used as a source of easy-to-access fresh water in Newport, allowing colonists to settle on this part of the island. Water is essential to life, “but as we’ve seen in the age of climate change impacts, with the increase of storms that bring massive amounts of water at one time to our island, water has the potential to cause devasting floods that damage homes, businesses, and infrastructure, and pose serious risk to human safety,” Terry Sullivan, the executive director of Aquidneck Land Trust, addressed. “These storm events also cause stormwater to fill our water bodies on the island with pollutants that further impair our drinking water supplies.” 

That is why the Aquidneck Land Trust is looking to take steps to restore the natural function of watersheds on the island through nature-based solutions. “This project is a nature-based solution: underneath the plaza are chambers that will capture a lot of water that rushes down the hill during a storm event, and slow it down, hold it here, and allow it to be absorbed into the Earth before it flows right down the street into Narragansett Bay,” Sullivan explains. The park became officially protected by the land trust when Steve Ostiguy, the asset manager of the Church Community Housing Corporation, presented the conservation easement to Sullivan and the deed transfer of the park to Vice Mayor Lynn Ceglie, who represented the City of Newport. The property represents Aquidneck Land Trust’s one hundredth permanently protected site.  

Vice Mayor Ceglie christened the park by pouring a bucket of water into the passive water feature, displaying how the park will work during stormy weather. “Newport, many of us know, is a bay, an ocean town,” Henderson intoned. “Now let’s never forget that it’s also a spring town.”