7/24/10 — On this day in history, July 31,1889, the local summer newspaper, Mid-Ocean, put it in black and white: “The Pequot House is one of the largest of the second class houses …”

The Pequot House, built in 1879, still exists as a hotel and bar on Water Street, since 1980 called the Harborside Inn. Other names were the Waukesha, in 1913, and most famously the Royal, beginning about 1920.

Being “second class” in the 1800s, or even now, was not really a bad position for a hotel, since the pyramidal economic scheme of affluence dictated that relatively few tourists would request the island’s first-class accommodations, while a far greater number would be knocking on the doors of cheaper places.

During that summer 121 years ago, when the island’s great initial tourist boom was in full swing, first-class rooms could be found at the gargantuan Ocean View Hotel at Old Harbor for $3.50 to $4.50 per night.

Next in the hierarchy was New Harbor’s Hygeia Hotel for $3 to $4 per night, and Old Harbor’s Manisses at $3 to $3.50. The Spring House’s method was for prospective guests to seek “rates on application.” The Hygeia burned in 1916, as did the Ocean View in 1966 — but the Manisses and Spring House are still first class.

At the Pequot in 1889, rooms cost only $2 per night, slightly more than the island’s minimum available rate of $1.50, charged by the Bellevue on High Street.

After being renamed “The Royal,” the hotel’s reign over Water Street lasted for six well-lubricated decades, notably as a splendid place to drink for salt-of-the-earth patrons who, as the 1889 newspaper article put it, were “second class” people. Of course, for that purpose, the Royal was a first-class success.

Architecturally, although given a very nice cupola when built, the Pequot lost that accouterment by 1900. Unlike the nearby National Hotel, which lost its cupola in the 1938 hurricane and replaced in 1985, the Harborside is still cupola-less.

And the Harborside never had the towers and imaginative architecture of the Surf Hotel, the Manisses, or the Hygeia. Plus, being on a small lot on Water Street, there were no expansive grounds to embellish the structure, as around the Narragansett Inn, the Spring House and the Ocean View Hotel.

What little land the Harborside resided on was used for an expansion of the front facade in 1888, from six windows across, to 10 across. And the building’s depth was doubled about 1915, by constructing an addition the full length of the rear, along Weldon’s Way.

Although the porch and eaves were given that era’s customary fanciful gingerbread treatment when built in 1879, the ornate porch was boxed-in 100 years later, during the 1970s, with plywood — the “Texture 111” variety, whose manufacturers went to the effort of scoring the 4’ x 8’ sheets with vertical lines to simulate up-and-down boards. And never mind that the rest of building’s sheathing was still horizontal.

Then there is the sidewalk. Ever try to walk in front of the Harborside Inn in the past? For decades the hotel’s hedge grew over the concrete public walkway, the top hanging over a third of what is already a narrow corridor, making the sidewalk a barrier to pedestrians, with some people having to walk in the equally congested road in order to move down Water Street.

The Pequot-Waukesha-Royal-Harborside does has one great distinction. It is a fighter; it exists. In other seaside resorts, such as Narragansett Pier on the mainland, the big mansard-roofed summer hotels where burned or torn down. Even on Block Island, when hotels such as the National, the Manisses, and the Atlantic were boarded up and unused during the 1960s and 70s, the Harborside remained open, succeeding in life.

And what a life. That plain two-story rear of the building housed one of Block Island’s most famous enclosures: the Orchid Lounge. Anyone who remembers the hotel from the 1950s to the 1970s — when the building was the called the Royal and sometimes the more glamorous “Hotel-Royal” — will defend this hotel’s glory.

The scrappy bar that flourished then, behind the peeling remains of the Victorian gingerbread carvings, attracted an uninhibited mixture of fishermen laying over in port, Navy men from ships anchored off shore, vacationing schoolteachers and other assorted tourists, and even the Block Islander.

The Orchid Lounge, painted gaudily with multi-foot diameter flowers, was one of the inner sanctums, beyond the front bar. And that was only the first floor.

The life of the Royal ended in 1980 when a Newport entrepreneur bought the property, renamed it the Harborside Inn, decorated the bar area with fake nets and corks — like you’d find in a nautically-motifed Howard Johnson’s restaurant in Ohio hundreds of miles from the sea — and generally cleaned the place up, making it more of a family restaurant. Everyone missed the Royal.

The Harborside is painted neatly now. In the summer, real flowers grow in boxes under windows. And the concrete deck was excavated to make room for shops below the ground floor.

Patrons can sit, enmeshed in the Harborside’s front-row view of the bustling harbor, peering over the hedge at other tourists bumping into each other on the sidewalk.