Historic Walking Tours of Narragansett Pier
U.S. Lifesaving Station/
Coast Guard House
40 Ocean Road
Added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1976.
The original section of the U.S. Lifesaving Station/Coast Guard House was a 11/2-story granite
structure with a semicircular end and a gable roof with semi-conical terminus. Designed by McKim,
Mead and White, it was supposedly modeled after a lifesaving station in England, and was the first
such building in America to be built of stone. The structure served as a U.S. Lifesaving Station from
the time of its completion in 1888 until 1937.
Its form and materials were designed to harmonize with those of the nearby Towers, an earlier
building by the same architectural firm. It now serves as the core of the Coast Guard House
restaurant and, complains the 1991 survey, Historical and Architectural Resources of Narragansett,
"is encased in unsympathetic concrete-block additions."