Built between 1883 and 1886 as the monumental entrance to the Narragansett Casino, The Towers recalls Narragansett Pier’s heyday as one of nineteenth-century America’s foremost seaside resorts. Designed by Charles F. McKim of McKim, Mead & White for the Narragansett Casino Corporation, the Casino served as a gathering place for recreation and social life, with stores, dining rooms, cafes, parlors, a billiard room, a reading room, an assembly hall, a bowling alley, a shooting gallery, and lawn tennis courts set in grounds designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. Inspired by late medieval French architecture, especially rural Normandy and Brittany, the complex was built in stages along Ocean Road, Exchange Street, and Mathewson Street, with stonework directed by Kneekand Parelow and rock taken from the old breakwater near North Pier. After completion, the Casino became the center of summer social life at Narragansett Pier, though some people viewed it as extravagant and frivolous. On 12 September 1900, a great fire that began at the Rockingham Hotel swept the Exchange Street area and destroyed the Casino, leaving only the stone Towers. The ruins were repaired in 1908-9 under Providence architect J. Howard Adams, and after years of vacancy the Towers opened as a ballroom in 1924, stood vacant again during the 1930’s, housed a snack bar in 1963, burned again in 1965, and then passed into public ownership when the State of Rhode Island purchased the structure and deeded it to the Town of Narragansett.
