WENTWORTH BY THE SEA

Visitors new to the Seacoast region are amazed when they learn that, just a few years ago, this New Castle hotel was a wreck. Stephen Gianotti and Tom McCarron thought they were capturing the last days of the Wentworth when they shot these photos in 1989. According to the architects who redesigned the hotel, it was roughly two years from total collapse when it suddenly received a $26 million reconstruction.

SEE Wentworth by the Sea section

EXTREME MAKEOVER "BEFORE" PHOTOS

In retrospect, it all seems like a dream. For 20 years the massive hotel stood vacant on the New Castle, NH bluff looking blankly out to sea. Now with Wentworth by the Sea re-opened and bustling, we quickly forget how close it came to complete destruction. Very very close.

Yet much was still lost. Fully 85-percent of the 800-foot Victorian hotel was razed by previous owners during its Limbo Years beginning in 1982. In 1998 photographer Stephen Gianotti asked permission of the Green Company to capture images of the hotel. Closed in 1981, the Wentworth was in desperate shape when Gianotti and his friend Tom McCarron began shooting pictures inside and out.

Following is a gallery of details from the Colonial Revival era, plaster cherubs, wooden rosettes and adorned columns. Most were destroyed when the 1880s and 1890s additions were bulldozed recently, but not all. Only the earliest portion of the hotel has survived and been renovated and modernized by the new owners Ocean Properties. Today Gianotti's photographic record offers a rare last look at the architectural detailing from Frank Jones era. --- JDR

VISIT the photographer's web site
BUY THE BOOK that includes these photo

Wentworth-by-the-Sea Photos
Victorian Details

CONTINUE photos of Wentworth by the Sea

Wentworth by the Sea Before Reconstruction (consinued)

All photos (c) Stephen Gianotti and Tom McCarron.
These images appear in the book "Wentworth by the Sea:
The LIfe and Times of a Grand Hotel" by J. Dennis Robinson.