After Crash, Newport Real Estate Office Turns Hole in Building into a Positive

There’s nothing to laugh about a senior citizen crashing her Honda into the Libby Kirwin real estate office on Spring Street.

That’s what happened in early May and thankfully, the woman wasn’t hurt. Aside from some damage her car, a wall and a window, the building was structurally safe and the busy real estate agents who work there weren’t put out.

In the end, though the crash was no joke, there’s something to be said about how the folks at Libby Kirwin handled the situation. They say when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. When the crash brought a hole in their wall, the people who work at Libby Kirwin made the plywood covering the damage into a personal billboard with a positive message.

“Love where you live,” the message in white block letters state.

In a post on their blog, the office asked people to tag them on social media with #libbykirwinrealestate and they promise to “repost your beautiful images.”

The driver was leaving church when she had trouble with the pedals.

She told firefighters that it felt like her gas pedal got stuck when she was on Dearborn Street.

Kelly Kirwin of Libby Kirwin Real Estate said that the car caused damage to the exterior wall of a conference room. Nobody was in the room when the crash happened, though the whole building shook.

“There were about four of us upstairs and a couple downstairs when the car crashed into the conference room,” Kirwin said. “It was very scary. Nobody saw it — we just heard it really, and you could feel it.”

A little dog in the car was not hurt, either. And the airbags did not deploy.

The one casualty in the crash was one of the four new planters the office recently had installed along the sidewalk.

“It stood no chance,” Kirwin said at the time of the crash. “We had just gotten all new ones a couple weeks ago.”

Planter problems are nothing new for Libby Kirwin. They’ve suffered repeated bouts of vandalism over the years.

The May 5 crash came on the heels of a crash into a bridal shop downtown on just a few days earlier.