Greenwich, Connecticut real estate, politics, and more.
Greenwich, Connecticut real estate, politics, and more
Wounded Knee East
For some reason, Disqus doesn’t like reader Jeffrey Bingham Mead’s link to his fascinating article on the history of Burying Hill. This link should work.I was particularly intrigued by the story of a battle there between Tarleton’s soldiers (I had no idea that that savage beast had traveled so far north) and local patriots. Mead speculates, for sound reasons, that a number of British soldiers were buried right here.
Rosie Triumphant, April, 1980
Rosie Ruiz, subway cheat and marathon winner, dead at 66
“She just felt it was so unfair”, Ruiz’s trainer, George Lindemann, Jr. told FWIW. “Rosie had to find subway fare, shower herself with water, and then spend a lifetime insisting that she’d really run those races, while these boys can just grab a Snickers bar and a jockstrap and tootle around the course shrieking, ‘I’m a girl, I’m a girl!’ — It just all finally got to her.”
Unfair competition
110 Londonderry Drive has sold for $2.175 million. The owner paid $2.4 for it in 2007, and placed it on the market in late April this year at $2.5 million. One quick price-drop to $2.350, a buyer was in hand by early July and the owner is now free to roam about the country.
Usually I’d expect an owner to dawdle through the fall market in the hope of receiving a better offer, but perhaps other offers were coming in low, and he accepted the new reality, or maybe he just had better things to do than hang onto a house he no longer wanted. Either way, he’s off to bigger and better things, I hope, and congratulations to him for his sale.
And that’s just the difference between what 52 Burying Hill sold for in 2004: $2.4 million, and the $1.650 it’s asking for today. The current listing urges buyers to “renovate or build new”, so I take that as meaning that this will be a land, rather than residential sale.
The stock market can drop this much in a single day, admittedly, but so far, the market has come back; I’m not sure when our back country land will.
I suddenly remembered this video from years ago, and it occurred to me that some readers may never have seen it, others might enjoy seeing it again, and still others may just ignore it. What the heck, it’s just 34 sends long, so what’s to lose?
(Photo credit: CBS)
FWIW’s New Mexico correspondent also covers California as part of his beat, and he sends along this sunny story from the land of “Can’t we all get along?”, Rodney King:
Neighbors protest homeowner’s painting her house pink and slapping some emojis on it.
The homeowners claim the house on 39th Street near Highland Avenue was painted hot pink and decorated with the two eye-popping emojis — one with a zipped lip, the other with googly eyes and its sticking tongue out — after the owner, Kathryn Kidd, was fined $4,000. Her neighbors had complained to the city she was illegally running a short-term rental.
“She was upset the city shut her down and fined her thousands of dollars,” says neighbor Dina Doll.
Both emojis, painted several feet tall, have eyelash extensions.
Doll doesn’t think it’s a coincidence.
“I think it’s not even ambiguous actually. Zip the lip … we all know what that means,” she said, adding: “I think it violates every sense of common decency.”
Kidd, who says she’s simply an art lover, disagrees.
“It’s a message to me to be positive and happy and love life,” she insisted, adding: “I have eyelash extensions. The eyes are like a Mona Lisa eye. They kind of follow you.”
There’s an Englishman renting the house currently, and takes a phlegmatic approach to the issue:
Edward Averday, who’s leasing the house for a year, isn’t bothered by the house’s larger than life decorations: “The only thing I really have to say is this is a really nice place to live. It’s a happy house. From the inside, my view is of the ocean. What’s not to like about that?”
This being California, I wouldn’t even begin to guess how it will all work out.
As Mr. Averday says, “what’s not to like?”
200 Byram Shore Road is new to the market today, asking $7.6 million. Nice house, fifteen years old, but it’s on the Byram River side of this peninsula, not Long Island Sound; they aren’t the same. The Port Chester sewer plant, for instance, is a tad upriver from here and around a bend, so you can’t see it, but it’s not nice to know it’s there.
Our own waste disposal facility, Grass Island, hasn’t seemed to have greatly hurt the values of nearby homes, but that’s Greenwich proper, and Belle Haven, not Byram, and so I’d take points off.
So, land value, maybe $1.8, depreciating house (all houses depreciate) in an inferior location; give it $3.5, for a total of $5.3? Personally, I’d pass, but there are always out-of-towners who might bite.
Meet the neighbors
The river doesn’t always look like this; only when it rains and overtaxes the sewage plant’s capacity:
41 Binney Lane, on the market since June, 2018, when it was priced at $14.950, dropped today to $11.750. It’s a slow day, so I spent some of it thinking about what this property is worth. Lots of factors to consider. On the plus side, it’s an acre of direct waterfront (R-12 zone) on Binney Lane. Comes with a dock — hard to get one approved these days — and a pool, far closer to the water than would probably be allowed today.
So is the house, for that matter, but I’m not sure anyone will want to preserve this 1895 building, and there’s the rub. There’s a useful life to everything, and it wouldn’t surprise me if a potential buyer concluded that this house has exceeded its expiration date.
The town values the land at $7,585,300, and that seems about right, but the house itself is set (after a court settlement) at $3.435 million, for a total value of $11,020,300, which is close enough to the new asking price to merit some discussion. But what if the house is worth nothing? In that case, I’d take the land value, deduct the cost of removing the house (and moving a new building up close to the road, as has been done with the house just to the east — coastal regs) and come in around, say, $7.250.
I’ll be curious to see whether my guess is even in the ballpark. Tune in next year.
Psst! Hear it, Fritz? Their master calls!
NBC “security consultants” explains that Trump keeping flags at half-mast until August 8 is a “silent dog whistle” for white racists. Eighth letter of alphabet is “H”, and that means Heil Hitler. 8/8 — get it? Get it?
This moron is actually paid and put on the air by NBC.
"The numbers 88 are very significant in neo-Nazi and white supremacy movement. Why? Because the letter ‘H’ is the eighth letter of the alphabet, and to them the numbers 8-8 together stand for ‘Heil Hitler.’ So we’re going to be raising the flag back up at dusk on 8/8."
"No one is thinking about this," he added. [No one else, anyway —ED]
[Brian] Williams was wowed by this analysis.
"I know you’re keeping your options open there, Frank, but as chilling as that is to hear, you’re saying it’s possible that someone who knows better is authoring or editing the words that show up and are read verbatim, or are supposed to be read verbatim, by the president," he said.
"I'm concerned about who is writing his script and his speeches and what would fascinate me is what he's rejecting," Figliuzzi said. "So it's possible that several iterations of this speech were given to him. Someone with expertise—and believe me, the expertise exists in our intelligence community and our law enforcement community and our civilian population in how to counter radicalization. Those folks could have advised him on writing an excellent speech that would have created an obstacle on this path to violence that we're on. But he either chose to not take that advice, or he's not even willing to solicit the advice."
Figliuzzi is a frequent guest on Deadline: White House, whose host, Nicolle Wallace, had to apologize this week after saying Trump was talking about "exterminating Latinos."
110 Meadow Road in Riverside has sold for $2.750 million. Good house, great street, on a half-acre, what’s not to like? It was priced at $2.995 in late May and had a buyer in just 34 days.
So far, so good, but checking the tax card, it appears that these sellers paid $3.550 for it in 2007, ex-MLS. I suppose that seemed like a good buy at the time, but then, lots of things looked better in 2007 than they do today.
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