GoLocalProv — Renehan: The Tangled Spirits of Exclusion, Tradition & History at Bailey’s Beach

Viking Hot Dog Cart at Reject Beach in Newport PHOTO: GoLocal

July 27, 2019

By Guest MINDSETTER™ Edward Renehan — NEWPORT, RI — Last week, a manager from Newport’s elite and exclusive Bailey’s Beach (the Spouting Rock Beach Association, bastion of Newport’s oldest “old money”), walked to the intersection of Bellevue and Coggeshall Avenues, a spot barely within screaming distance of the club, there to gruffly confront three middle-class public high school students selling hot dogs. The students were busily serving up dogs to folks visiting the so-called Rejects' Beach, adjacent to Bailey’s, where the public is welcome.

According to student Will Farley's father, the club’s man, Chris Gleason, demanded that they move and stated that the “people at Rejects are ruining Bailey’s for the members.” Police were called to the scene. The students’ paperwork was found to be in order. In the wake of this incident, the beach club – which generally hates receiving any kind of publicity at all – received a torrent of it, all negative. Thus, rather quickly, the Board of Governors at Bailey’s reversed course, issuing a statement in which they apologized for the “misunderstanding” and gave their endorsement to the energetic industry and ambition of the young people. 

This is more than appropriate, and the members of Bailey’s are to be congratulated for their albeit tardy recognition of the free market from which they have all so greatly benefited through the past 140 years or more, for such is the age of the old money involved here.

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