It is good to be the princess, too

Randy Kennedy has an article in The New York Times about doings in Newport, Rhode Island:

When Doris Duke was clearing a patch of derelict buildings in the late 1970s to create a modest patch of open space known as Queen Anne Square in Newport, she was sometimes spotted personally directing the backhoe drivers at dusk, acting as both foreman and steward of the enormous fortune that she lavished on such restoration projects. The same kind of New England pluck and perspicacity is now stoking an unusual battle, eighteen years after Duke’s death, over a plan to create a permanent, minimalist art installation in honor of her legacy on this swath of green that she left behind in a former commercial area near the harbor. The tenor of the dispute is distinctly Newportian. Many of the combatants have known one another for decades, as did many of their mothers, fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers.
Supporters of the project— which is being designed by Maya Lin and is completely underwritten with private money by some of the city’s wealthiest families— converge at an oceanside cottage on Edith Wharton’s former estate, now home to Marion Oates Charles, known as Oatsie, the president of the Newport Restoration Foundation and a close friend of Duke’s, who has spearheaded the memorial plan.
The opposition marshals its forces several blocks up gilded Bellevue Avenue, in a rambling Carrère & Hastings mansion that is now home to Laurence S. Cutler, a Harvard-trained architect and former professor, and his wife, Judy Goffman Cutler, an art dealer, who both vehemently oppose the plan, though Cutler takes pains to point out that “it is all well intentioned, and these are all very good people”.
Despite the air of politesse, the fight has taken on the intensity of a debate over the soul of Newport itself, a city that, largely because of the efforts and example of Duke, has painstakingly preserved its colonial and Gilded Age heritage over the last four decades and has kept most incursions of contemporary commercial culture and design at bay.
But when Mrs. Charles, who is 92 and a longtime Newporter, began to think about a public tribute to Duke, who founded and bankrolled the restoration foundation, she said she felt strongly that it should be “something that looked to the future, not to the past”. And so, when a foundation staff member suggested Lin, well known for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington and other public projects that use a mostly spare, abstract visual language, Charles enthusiastically sought her out.
The plan that has evolved since Lin signed on last year would place three low-walled structures around the roughly one-acre space of the square, each to be made from salvaged local stone and intended to evoke the foundations of vanished centuries-old buildings that can still be found in the woods throughout New England. Lin chose the three foundation outlines (a square and two rectangles) from historical Newport maps from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and said in an interview that they appealed to her as a way to give form to the idea of the “layers upon layers of history” that have shaped Newport.
But in the five months since the $3.5 million project, called the Meeting Room, was first presented to the public, a growing group of opponents— including a preservationist who ran the Newport Restoration Foundation during the years when Duke was building the square— has denounced it as ersatz history and as the result of a kind of celebrity-artist-shopping that they say the relentlessly pragmatic Duke would have hated.
The opponents further complain that the foundation structures will impede recreation, that the stone— which is to serve double duty as the first seating in a park that has never had benches— will be too chilly to sit on through much of the spring and fall, not to mention the winter, and that the low, wall-like forms, instead of serving as gathering places for people, will mostly just gather lots of wind-blown trash.
“It will be like some kind of fake Disneyland in the middle of town, and as a professional, I think it’s not only a bad design but a bad idea,” said Cutler, who, with his wife runs the National Museum of American Illustration, which houses the couple’s extensive collection of work by Norman Rockwell and Maxfield Parrish. (Mrs. Charles sits on the Cutlers’ museum board, now somewhat uncomfortably. “She calls me the rogue of Newport,” Cutler said.)
In an online poll completed recently by The Newport Daily News, 329 respondents said they wanted the park to remain as it is now, with grass and trees and a few boulders, while 43 said they supported the current plan. (The population of Newport is just under 25,000.) Among the more prominent opponents is Janet Alexander Pell, the daughter-in-law of Claiborne Pell, the longtime Rhode Island senator who died in 2009; in a letter to a local weekly, she repeated a shorthand putdown of the project that seems to have gained traction lately that likens the stone foundations to cat litter boxes.
Hugh D. Auchincloss III, another venerable Newporter who knew Duke, has also joined the opposition, saying in an interview in Cutler’s study that he believed that not only Duke but also another prominent preservation advocate to whom he was close— his stepsister Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis— would have disliked the proposal. “I think she would have thought it was misplaced in this public park— not necessarily in bad taste but not really in good taste,” said Auchincloss, who is known as Yusha.
Pieter N. Roos, the restoration foundation’s executive director, said that, while he thought that the opposition remained limited, he had been surprised and baffled by its fervor. “We literally were trying to think of the nicest, most innocuous thing we could do to enhance the city and give it an aesthetic gift,” he said.
Mrs. Charles, with characteristic bluntness, added: “Most of the people who are protesting are not habitués of the park, they just don’t want to see change in Newport. This may be a somewhat far-fetched reference to Doris,” she said, “but I think it will be rather a good one.” She said that she and the plan’s supporters believed that they had more than enough support on the Newport City Council, which must approve the installation because the square occupies city-owned land. (A vote on the issue is scheduled for 14 December.) But Cutler and other opponents said that they would consider pursuing legal action to try to stop the project if it were approved.
Lin, who weathered storms of criticism in the 1980s as her design for the Vietnam memorial was shaped, said it had been a long time since she had confronted the kind of opposition she is encountering in Newport. “What can you do?” she said. “You do what you think is best.” But she added that her idea for a group of symbolic and practical meeting places in the square had also been inspired by the role of Rhode Island’s founder, Roger Williams, as a father of the doctrines of church-state separation and of freedom of assembly that came to underpin the First Amendment. “In that sense it’s all about free speech,” she said, “so I guess we should welcome this, right?”
Mrs. Charles does. Dismissing the detractors with a wave of her hand, she said, “I just let them all talk.”

Rico says there's a nice illustration with the article, but you'll have to go there to see it...