Greenwich, Connecticut real estate, politics, and more.
Greenwich, Connecticut real estate, politics, and more
Back on today, price unchanged. "No one's gonna steal MY house! Or buy it, either".)
When the price doesn't budge for six years, like 85 Round Hill Road, $6.495 million.
A "make me move" price only works if someone wants your house. Otherwise, don't pack your bags.
Tomorrow, though, we'll be hunting peasants: a tougher challenge
Fly away, little bird!
I'm off to help release 2,300 pheasants this morning and into the afternoon, to prepare the way for people like me to slaughter them during the next three months. Mind you, most of the birds will go towards feeding hawks, foxes and coyotes, but it's a worthy attempt.
The hardest part of this project these days is finding release areas outside the grip of the Land Trust people, who are grabbing increasingly large acreage and shutting it down to hunting (and even fishing), and city types, who are buying farms and posting them against "trespassers". The two groups are changing southern Maine into NYC/Boston North, and are expanding their virus into the middle and even northern parts of the state. Rural America and its traditions are under siege.
Sad.
Gott im himmel, what'd I do?
Greta Gerwig is now "real sorry" she demanded Lincoln Center cancel production of "The End of the Land" last summer.
Greta Gerwig, a potential Oscar frontrunner for her upcoming directorial debut “Lady Bird” — has exclusively told Page Six that it was a mistake to lend her name to a letter asking Lincoln Center to ban an Israeli-backed play.
Page Six previously reported that Gerwig’s name appeared on a letter with over 60 artists calling on Lincoln Center to cancel performances of “To the End of the Land,” which is being presented “with support of Israel’s Office of Cultural Affairs in North America.” A source said, “There is an Oscar campaign afoot for Gerwig, and her team doesn’t want her controversial anti-Israel opinions hurting her chances.”
On Friday, Gerwig told us in an exclusive statement that she regrets signing the letter.
“This past summer, a close friend asked me to lend my name to a letter,” Gerwig wrote in a statement. “I am generally careful about the causes I support, but in this case I was not. I was unfamiliar with the complexities of the letter and I did not take the time to study them.”
... I am sorry for any confusion or hurt I may have caused.”
Although as recently as five days ago Gerwig's handlers were refusing to let reporters even mention her call for censoring the play, the realization that she'd jeopardized her Oscar quest has caused the German-American ("hey, it was grandfather who gassed those people, not me") actress to reconsider. This morning she reached out to FWIW to say that she was furious with her management and her "so-called friends" for letting her sign onto the anti-israel campaign.
"Of course I didn't read the fucking play, let alone see it," she told FWIW, "so I have no fucking idea what it's about, but all the cool kids were signing on, and, you know, Israel's like — you know, some kind of Nazi place, right? So what was wrong with going along? What's wrong with being liked?
My manager never told me that there were Jews in Hollywood, powerful Jews — who let them in? — who'd get pissed off at me for signing that goddamned letter, and my shitty friends didn't, either. Now I'm up for an Oscar, and this goddamn thing is coming back to bite me in the ass. Shit. So okay, I'm really, really sorry, okay? Now can I have my fucking prize?"
But boy, is she pissed!
A tale of two signings
Of course, vendor fraud eventually catches up with the malfactor
Ding Dong
Theresa Hatton fired or, as the GAR puts it, "is looking for a new challenge". At least they didn't claim it was "to spend more time with her family", as these sorts of announcements usually explain.
Other realtors tell me she was a nice person. I just remember her filing a spurious claim with the Greenwich Police Department that I had "threatened her". Total bullshit — never happened, I'd never met the woman, but she wasted at least an hour of my time (and countless hours of "investigation" by two GPD detectives). It turned out to be a very pleasant meeting with those detectives, which ended with their apologizing, but saying that they had to investigate complaints of this sort, which of course they do, but I never really forgave the lady.
Kevin Rennie's Daily Ructions has the scoop.
When Greenwich board of selectman member Drew Marzullo (aka Joseph Andrew Marzullo) was arrested for shoplifting in Clinton, Connecticut on August 26th, he had 25 items in his Blackdog tote bag and no evidence he’d paid for any of them.
Marzullo at first denied taking more than $600 in clothing items. He became emotional and admitted he’d taken the goods and apologized for lying to police, who had been called to the scene by a J. Crew employee.
[Marzullo], the arrest report states, said that he did not know why he had stolen the clothes [pictured below] when he could have purchased them.
Mug shot
Skeetcher shriekers
Who's a party animal, ya big hunk!
118 Glenwood Drive, Belle Haven, cut its price to $15.5 million today. It started at $17.975 in May, was dropped to $16.975 in July, and now another substantial cut today. That strikes me as very smart.
This is a very special house, to my eye, with, of course, the water views contributing much of that attraction. It's on the east side of Overlook, so thee's no direct water access, but no one's going to build anything on the west of the road — there's no land to do so, so you're high and dry, looking down the Sound. And you wouldn't want to moor a boat here on the exposed side of the peninsula anyway, and swimming and small boat sailing is available just around the corner at the club.
Is this, finally, the right price? Beats me, but Belle Haven commands a premium price, and there aren't many lots in the neighborhood that offer this kind of view. Listing agent Chris Finlay's usually pretty good with his pricing estimates, and if he missed a bit here, he and his clients are adjusting rapidly, rather than let the house linger, overpriced, and growing stale. Like I said, smart.
14 Dawn Harbor Lane, a spec house in Riverside, has closed at $5.250 million.
That's not chump change, but the final price was probably a bit disappointing to its builder, who priced it at $6.9 million back in April, 2015. Especially if you add in the carrying costs for 2 1/2 years.
10 Mianus View Terrace (it'd have been nice if they'd repaved the failing driveway — something to negotiate, perhaps)
House flipping: this developer paid $900,000 for a split-level in July, moved a wall, added central a/c and new appliances, did some painting and has put it back up sale this week at $1.450 million.
It's still a split, and its backyard remains problematic, but it does offer an example of how to modernize and transform, to the extent possible, one of those horrible 1960s houses. Not all of us can afford to build a new, $3.5 million house, and this developer shows how much you an do, at minimal expense, to make at least a rayon purse from a sow's ear.
The July listing, showing the house before renovation, can be seen here.
Additional pictures of the new version below:
Did they really build this without a stall?
Can'd do much about the yard
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