And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards the closing table to be born?

20 Langhorne Lane, currently priced at $5.495 million, is reported as pending. It’s been a long road.

Way back in 2006, that spectacular failure of a would-be developer, acupuncturist/(horrible) artist/dancer Tsoi Jianhua paid $1.9 million for this lot, and in 2007 somehow persuaded Patriot Bank to loan him $6,025,000 so that he could - he promised he would — build a 19,000 sq.ft. house that would sell for $14.9 million. I wouldn’t want to besmirch the name of the individual who was the senior loan officer at Patriot back then, but almost every Patriot loan that went bad in Greenwich when the bust came, including huge loans to a ex-con who was on his way back to prison for bank fraud, had been personally approved by this man. Mark it off to coincidence, I suppose.

Mr. General Tso Sauce did at least come up with a design for his monstrosity, and did list it for the aforementioned $14.900 million in 2008. Neither the house itself nor a buyer appeared in following years as the price slowly dropped to $9.998 in 2009, and was then offered for land again at $2.995 until eventually Patriot had worked through the legal morass that is the Connecticut judicial system and foreclosed on the property in 2010.

The end of a dream, 2009.

Our tale resumes in 2012, when Patriot sold their regained property for $1.1 million to the current owners (that loan officer who approved the $6,025,000 loan in 2006 was long gone, having departed for a better job at another Greenwich financial institution). The buyers went to work, built a 7,227 sq.ft. house in 2013 and listed it for sale that year for $5.995. Over the years, that price hasn’t budged much, but nether has the house; so the would-be sellers have rented it out, off-and-on, and collected nice rents; even, perhaps, enough to keep pace with inflation.

Somewhere along the line, the listing’s given date of construction was changed to 2016, not doubt to keep that fresh look, and the claimed square footage was expanded to 9,000, presumably by the owners remembering that it had basement, too. Whatever the reason: the newer construction date, the larger square footage, or even its new lower price of $5.495, a buyer has appeared, and this chapter of the Saga of Langhorne will end, and a new one begun.

Stay tuned.