Sad, but not unexpected: 1871 house off to the dumpster

123 Park Avenue (the Greenwich Park Avenue) is scheduled for demolition. Its former owners paid $4,111 million for it in 2007 and poured a huge amount into renovating it before they ran out of money. leaving much to be done (check the patched roof), and the lender came in and forced a sale at $2.650 million this past June.

Which is a shame, but understandable: I showed the house to clients a few years ago and, even knowing that the place was in foreclosure and a bargain could be had, they passed, because of the million-plus in renovations still needed. At some point, a house reaches obsoleteness, and there are few, if any, buyers willing to pay to restore it. So call in the dozers.

The new owners strike me as decent, good people with excellent taste, so I'm sure they'll be putting up a beautiful new house. There's bound to be grumbling, just as, I'm sure, there were complaints when this house went up on a pasture back in 1871, but the cycle continues.

New construction sale on Cos Cob

117 Bible Street has sold for $2.775 million. Original asking price $3.4. Not an exterior I could love, but if was probably deformed by our FAR requirements, so you can't blame the architect for that. Nice quality, and the price is well within other recent sales on this stretch of Bible. 

This keeps up, I wonder whether the opening stretch of Bible Street, originally an Italian enclave of small single and multi-family residences, will survive. Worse, will we lose Scarpelli's Sausage? Shudder.

Bargain of the year?

121 Lockwood Road, Riverside, hit the market today at $895,000. My guess is that a builder will snap this up by the close of day (town's 2018 appraised value for land alone is $1,054,000), but anyone wanting to get into Riverside at what's considered here to be an "affordable" price should take a look. Owner and listing agent Mark Pruner put a good price on this one.

Dundee school district, not Riverside, but ask almost any Dundee parent and they'll   be happy to assure you on that school's merits.

Riverside sale

10 Club Road closed at $4,357,500. It started in 2017, asking $5.375, so I suppose the seller suffered a bit of disappointment here, but the selling price seems reasonable. Vey nice house, great location, and 0.8 of an acre which, in Riverside these days, is large. 

A brutal scalping on Mohawk Lane

20 Mohawk Lane originally asked $2.9 million; today that price was dropped to $1.895. Mohawk (off Stag Lane and just off Stanwich) can be a tough sell, and $2.9 for a 1964 home was a stretch, even with the property's four acres and 2004 re-do, but $1.8? Better.

Nice kitchen

Beautiful pool

With a bit of shrewd negotiation, both the Zebra and the Orange can probably be yours.

Danger: public "servant" at work

New Haven restaurant owner slapped with $250 fine for asking people not to let their dogs pee in his sidewalk flowerpot.

Fed up with pooches peeing in the flowerpot outside his restaurant, banh mi maestro Duc Nguyen decided to take action — then ended up being declared a public nuisance.

He received a visit Tuesday at his Orange Street Vietnamese restaurant, Duc’s Place, from a city public health inspector, who fined him $250 for a poster he put in his restaurant window aimed at owners of the urinating pets.

Nguyen promises to fight the fine. And he’s fighting mad.

“I’m trying to keep the city clean,” he said Tuesday afternoon. “And I’m a ‘nuisance’?”

Meanwhile, he said, “these dog owners think they own the city. They can roam their dogs and pee and shit everywhere.

Nguyen took action after watching too many dogs relieving themselves in this flowerpot outside the restaurant, which is known for its crunchy, flavorful banh mi and other specialties from his native Vietnam.

“It’s disgusting. It’s right out the doorstep,” he said. “it attracts flies. Every time the door opens, flies come in. This is a food establishment! It’s unsanitary.

“Every night I have to clean the sidewalk. It’s like a river. I’m just fed up with this.”

So two weeks ago he took action. He put a surveillance camera in the window to catch the critters in the act. And he posted this tongue-in-cheek sign. It invited dog-owners to come inside either to “pay” for the privilege of soiling the dirt in the flowerpot, or else have Nguyen “return the favor.”

So naturally, city code enforcer Honda Smith showed up and, refusing to acknowledge the obvious satire of Nguyen's sign, gave him a $250 ticket for creating a public nuisance. She did point out, however, that he was free to spend a few hours away from his business and appeal.

Asked about the anger directed at her by the owner, Miss Smith refused to back down: " Smith said she encounters upset people all the time. 'It doesn’t affect me,” she said. “I’m a public servant. I have to handle it. I’ve got to do a job'. "

In a perfect world, Honda Smith would be reprimanded, suspended w/o pay for two weeks and forced to apologize to Nguyen. None of that will happen.

(photo credit: Paul Bass)

Fun video of the idiot at work.

Mexican Jew, but works for Trump? She's obviously a white supremist flashing secret Nazi code signs!

Yeah, well, but maybe her OTHER grandfather was Robert Byrd!

Or so say some of the more deranged (if such a distinction can be made) anti-Kavanaugh hysterics.

“Kavanaugh’s former law clerk Zina Bash is flashing a white power sign behind him during his Senate confirmation hearing. They literally want to bring white supremacy to the Supreme Court. What a national outrage and a disgrace to the rule of law.
”

Her husband points out:

Over at Powerline, some perspective:

You have to squint carefully, but tHere it is: the "okay" dog whistle

And here ARE STILL MORE RACISTS. WE'RE DOOMED, I TELL YOU DOOMED!

Let the circus begin

Tomorrow is opening day on Judge Kavanaugh's confirmation hearing. The first day is entirely devoted to various senators speechifying. with no questions directed to or answered by the judge, so it will be entirely worthless, but from Wednesday on, the hearings may provide some rich entertainment.

Minnesota's junior senator, Amy Klobuchar claims to have read 156,000 document relating to or written by Kavanagugh, and they prove that he is a sexist, racist person entirely unfit to serve on the Supreme Court. Powerline's Scott Johnson points out that, even if the senator had spent just 2 minutes reviewing each document, she'd have had to spend 24-hours a day for 205 days to get through them: Kavanaugh was nominated 55 days ago. Klobuchae also  claims that she can't reveal single document to back up her claim because they're all "secret": they aren't.

So Klobuchar is (once again) proved a liar. That certainly won't stop her from repeating her lies during her speech tomorrow, but she'll have to be specific if she dares to question Kavanaugh directly during the following days. I'm betting she won't.

Another Senate clown, Hawaii's Mazie Hirano, does intend to question Kavanaugh, on the issue of Judge Alex Kozinski's alleged sexual harassment of women. Kavanaugh clerked for Kozinski twenty-five years, ago, for one year, and none of the claims against Kozinski involve incidents occurring a quarter-century ago; Hirano served on the Senate Judiciary Committee for four years with her colleague, Al Frankin during his sexual predation period and said nothing 

Hirano will have another problem with this line of questioning: the testimony of Kavanaugh's female clerks — all of them.  Paul Mirengoff reports:

“Kavanaugh is poised to win big on the issue of how he treats female law clerks. Severino reminds us that a majority (25 of 48) of Judge Kavanaugh’s law clerks have been women, and every one of them not precluded from doing so by her current employer has endorsed Kavanaugh. The female former clerks cite the mentoring and support he provides not just during the clerkship, but as they advance in the legal profession. Indeed, according to Severino, 20 of Kavanaugh’s female law clerks have gone on to clerk at the Supreme Court.

No wonder all of his former female clerks (again, excluding the ones who can’t because of their employment status) signed a letter to Chairman Grassley and Ranking Member Feinstein describing Kavanaugh as “one of the strongest advocates in the federal judiciary for women lawyers.””

(North) mid country bargain?

31 Baldwin Farms North has sold for $1.7 million. It started at $2.8 million in August, 2017, and the town has appraised it at $2,734,100, so $1.7 would appear to have been a deal, but I'm not so sure that was. It's an obsolete 1965 home (with failed pool) on 2.5 acres which, to me, suggests land value only,* and $1.7 strikes me as a high price for a building lot in this neighborhood. Propane heat, Parkway and Western school districts; none of those are popular right now.

* I note that the new owners have immediately listed it for rent at $6,500, which indicates, to me, that they'd like to cover their carrying costs while obtaining the necessary permits to raze and rebuild. As a rental, this wouldn't be a bad deal at somewhere around that price.

Who you gonna believe, Slate, or your own lying eyes?

Slate: 2 years on, Trump still doesn't use a computer. 

That computer to his left is presumably used by an assistant, who transcribes the president's constant crayon drawings into Tweets. 

To TDS victims, anything is believable, and is.