It's Wednesday, so here's the opportunity you've been waiting all week for: I'll be on Gideon's WGCH radio program @10.35 a.m. (ish)

Cell phone, or connect from your computer or, heck, try it the old fashioned way and turn on the radio. I’m planning on bringing up the Chilston Court low-income housing project, but it’s Gideon’s show, so who knows? Might be Dan Hicks, the price of eggs in China or even, gasp, other real estate news (Gid goes on the air at around 10:08, and you can definitely hear Greenwich real estate matters then).

"The alternative would be to tear it down and build something different" — If this is what it’s going to look like, I'd have chosen that option

From today’s Greenwich Time: October 21, 2026:

Lodgings on Stamford's Atlantic Street

A hotel long in the works for downtown Stamford got a zoning administrative review on Oct. 19. Old Towne Hotel would be located at 160 Atlantic St., where an historic Stamford Savings Bank building has been used more recently as offices. The hotel would be 11 stories with 92 guest rooms and suites.

To my eye, topping off the existing landmark with a lump of a hotel tower that could as easily be a corporate headquarters building achieves nothing good aesthetically, but hey, it’s Stamford, so why not? What really caught my eye, though, besides the ugly building itself, is the length of time it’s taken the developer to get to this stage: seven years, and probably at least another year before ground-breaking. Even the luxury/po’folks towers (see next post) at 275/290 Mason Street, despite being tied up in court battles and P&Z disputes, are underway after just 3 years.

The article below gives the details of this of this Stamford project was published September 17, 2023, and at that time the application was already four-years-old, with, as it turns out, at least two more to go:

Newest plan for Stamford Savings Bank-to-hotel conversion includes better parking, traffic control

STAMFORD — The Zoning Board appears to finally be heading toward a vote on a long-discussed downtown hotel project.

The board on Sept. 11 closed a public hearing on an application to renovate the old Stamford Savings Bank building into an 82-room boutique hotel with a ground-floor restaurant and rooftop patio. Board members could vote on the proposal as soon as their next meeting Monday.

The historic 1940 building was valued at about $3.27 million at its most recent appraisal last year. Formerly the headquarters of now-First County Bank, it was acquired in June 2019 by Old Town Square LLC, a company run by business partners Nagi Osta and Shalinder Nichani. Osta runs the self-titled Nagi Jewelers, a High Ridge Road family jewelry business.

“The last set of plans which we got delivered Friday night were really helpful in this application,” board member William Morris said. “It really cleared up a lot of the questions that I believe several of the board members had that they weren’t sure, but now we know what we’re voting on.”

The Zoning Board first received the application for the Old Towne Hotel more than four years ago. The project received its first public hearing last December, and the development team has been shoring up design concerns at the board’s request since then.

…. Additionally, during public hearings [note the plural, some speakers complained that the proposed hotel was too tall. The proposal would build the red-brick building up to about 160 feet high.

Lydon said the development team has reached an understanding with the mall and agreed to conditions including using part of the building’s westward frontage as a staging area for vehicles. If the project is approved by the Zoning Board, Lydon said, city officials will write up an agreement for the different parties.

….

Zoning Board chair David Stein noted that there are no existing measures in place for property owners to protect the bank.

“Whoever owns it can tear it down and build something different there, so what this application does is maintain that bank. It keeps it there and incorporates it as part of a larger development, but the alternative is that (the) bank gets torn down,” Stein said.

Cos Cob sale

10 Mill Pond Court, listed at $1.850 million, sold for $2.1.Built in 1946, last renovation in 2007, all the pictures have been yanked from the internet as per the new GMLS rules, but here are some from its 2018 listing, when it sold for $1.095. The new owners painted the exterior, removed a lot of the furniture and splashed soe bue paint around but otherwise, no change.

Diversiters are our strength. Or as Stephen Green puts it over at InstaPundit ...

overachiever: booking photograph of Mr. Mahad Ali, who was charged by the Hennepin County Attorney's Office with second-degree murder following a gang-related shooting in Minneapolis, Minnesota

YOU CAN ELIMINATE A THIRD OF MINNESOTA GANG ACTIVITY WITH THIS 1 WEIRD TRICK:

1 in 3 Minnesota Gang Members are Somali Muslims. “Somalis may only be between 1% and 2% of the state, but they’re between 30% to 15% of its gang members. That’s an overrepresentation of between 650% and 2,900%.”

1959 Split-level for under two-and-a-half million? Yes! It's possible!

1 Midbrook Lane, listed at $2.095 million, sold to Manhattanites (ZIP 10019) for $2.3. Window a/cs, but it is under two-and—a-half million, after all.

CBS spots still more scuffling among the “largely peaceful protests" in France (Updated)

CCTV footage from Nice, France shows the moment a mob of looters broke into a phone case store over the weekend, destroying displays and stealing merchandise. The incident comes after largely peaceful anti-government protests in many cities across France descended into riots, with damage to historic properties and thousands of arrests.

— CBS News (@CBSNews) October 20, 2026

UPDATE

I have no idea what a “social journalist” is, but it’s great fun to watch one’s head explode.

Social justice journalist Lisa Durden MELTS DOWN on air after getting absolutely wrecked about the riots in France by conservative commentator Ben Ferguson. Durden claimed the riots were just “student protests,” but Ferguson wasn’t about to let that slide, and he had the receipts to back it up. Then he delivered a brutal reality check that sent Durden into a fit of RAGE. FERGUSON: “You either have to be incredibly incompetent or totally blind to look at the images and think that this is students that are doing this.” Durden immediately snapped. DURDEN: “What you’re not going to do is call me a pathological liar!” “I’m talking now! You’re not going to call me a pathological liar because you don’t know me, so stop that right now!” “EXCUSE YOU!” Katie Pavlich did her best to keep the show from going completely off the rails.

— Overton (@overton_news) October 20, 2026

New Old Greenwich Listing

24 Hendrie Drive Ext., $9.5 million. Purchased by these owners from the parents of friends of mine, the Hastings, for $1.2 million in 1997, there doesn’t seem to have been all that much work done to this 1916 house since, but the town assesses it at $9,803,500 ($8,548,000 of which is the assessed value of the land), so who knows?

I wonder whether that assessment was unduly influenced by the size of the lot: 1.6 acres. That’s a good size for providing privacy, but you can’t do much with eel grass and spartina, which comprise most of that acreage.

Zillow shows lower tax assessment and a number of mysterious sales, but it also gives the distance from this Old Greenwich house to Riverside School so ….

Here’s the current tax card:

From the Department of There Goes the Neighborhood

7 Pintail Lane, new construction, has sold to buyers from Rye for full price, $7.750 million. DOM, 15 days.

It replaced a very nice house, but buyers of the lesser sort are no longer financially qualified to buy in New Greenwich. That’s good news for homeowners who want out, not so much for buyers who’d like in.

Past decade’s Pintail sales:

National wealth tax on assets, 100% inheritance confiscation

$32 million [$33.9, but who’s counting?] CEO lectures America on income inequality

United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby is calling for a national wealth tax and inheritance taxes approaching 100% for certain estates, arguing that growing wealth inequality poses a threat to American society.

Kirby, who took home about $32.3 million in total compensation in fiscal year 2025, made the remarks when asked about declining public trust in corporate executives during an interview with The New York Times.

"Wealth inequality has become a danger to our society, and we need to address that," Kirby told the outlet in an interview published Sunday.

The airline executive argued that a wealth tax would need to be implemented nationwide rather than at the state level to prevent wealthy Americans from relocating to avoid paying it.

"We should have a national wealth tax — it won’t work by state because people will just move," Kirby told the outlet. "And I think we should have inheritance taxes that get close to 100 percent at some level. I would pay them." [“Because I’ll be dead then, and will already have set up trusts for my seven kids, so what do I care? And that wealth tax? Start it at a billion, okay? I let you know if I get near that threshold and need it raised.”

AI Overview

United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby's stock holdings in United Airlines Holdings Inc. (UAL) are valued at approximately $78 million to $89.5 million, depending on the exact share count and current market price. [1, 2]

• Share Ownership: He owns roughly 810,851 shares of United Airlines stock. [1]

• Current Stock Price: UAL trades around $96.10 to $117.70 per share (with recent tracking near $96.10 as of October 18, 2026, and $117.70 following earlier market shifts). [1, 2]

• Total Valuation: GuruFocus estimates his UAL holdings at over $78 million, while WallStreetZen values his current UAL stake at approximately $89.52 million. [1, 2]

Having spent 2 1/2 hours Sunday accomplishing this, and only finally saved from defeat by, ironically, ChatGTP, I appreciate this Babylon Bee headline

A.I. To Take Over World Just As Soon As It Can Learn To Connect To Printers

In defense of my own technological cluelessness, when I whined to friend yesterday about my struggle, he told me that he was the tech coordinator for a corporate office here, and the absolute, most-hated task he had to deal with was connecting employees’ computers to printers. If there isn’t a special circle in Hell reserved for printer designers, there should be.