This is an archived page. Images and links on this page may not work. Please visit the main page for the latest updates.

 
 
 
Read my book, TEACHING BEAUTY IN DeLILLO, WOOLF, AND MERRILL (Palgrave Macmillan; forthcoming), co-authored with Jennifer Green-Lewis. VISIT MY BRANCH CAMPUS AT INSIDE HIGHER ED





UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Sunday, July 02, 2006

Jacobean Tragedy

This is from Vanity Fair. It’s an update of a story UD’s been following. She even wrote a poem about it. Anyway, it’s sad. The best-laid plans of mice and men, etc., etc. …



“Look," Joseph Jacobs is assuring me, "no one starts out wanting a 30,000-square-foot home. You say, 'I want this and that' and then you get up to 30,000 square feet."

To be precise, the new house Jacobs hopes to build in Greenwich is 32,114 square feet, plus a 1,165-square-foot pool house. Jacobs, a founding partner of a hedge fund called Wexford Capital, is unapologetic. "America's a great country," he says. "I've worked hard. I've made a few bucks. So I want to build a house for myself. Is that so wrong?"

It's February 2006. I'm in Greenwich… [Jacobs] is entranced by the idea of building what he call his "dream house." "What can I say?" he tells me, washing down a pill for acid reflux with a glass of Lactaid skim milk. "I always wanted to build a house that would have everything I want—a house that I could build for my kids and grandkids. Is that a crime?"

You have grandchildren? I ask, surprised.

"I don't," concedes Jacobs, who is 53, "but I hope to one day."

…The idea [for the house] came to him one night at the movies. "I thought it up in my head," he says. "It needed to be in a meadow, just like in France." Michelle later confirms, "It was his dream, no question."

In September 2003, Jacobs paid $5,575,000 for 11 bucolic acres in Conyers Farm, a gated community in Greenwich's backcountry. It took more than a year for the first draft of architectural drawings to be completed. As time passed, according to Jacobs's architect, Dinyar Wadia, the house expanded. "When Joe came to me, he said, 'I don't want to be one of those hedge-fund people who builds a monster house,'" Wadia recalls. "But then he talked to his sister-in-law, and his decorator, and he kept adding more to the first floor.

He added a breakfast porch, and, because he's into symmetry, we then needed to add a library porch. He added a wet bar off the library … " Wadia's voice trails off.

With breakfast cleared away, Jacobs pulls out a thick roll of drawings. Looking at a sketch of the façade, I see a neoclassical palace with two perfectly symmetrical wings. Sweeping entrance steps lead to a grand loggia framed by three radiating stone arches. Above, reminiscent of Venice's Ducal Palace, is a second-story viewing balcony with ornamental stone balustrades. A large central pediment with a carved floral relief serves as the focal point of the façade. I study the slate roof: by my count, there are 12 dormer windows, four chimneys, and two cupolas.

Is it a formal French country manor house? A proto-Palladian villa? "I'm not sure what it is—I'm not an architect," replies Jacobs. Adds Michelle later, "We wanted an old house that's new." Jacobs again: "We wanted a symmetrical, sort-of-European-influenced house … I wanted it to look like it was there a long time—it'll have ivy."

Jacobs walks me through the proposed highlights: "There's a dining room that seats 16. It's 27 feet by 20 feet. It's a big room, but it's not a ballroom, O.K. … Over here there's a room for playing billiards—which is a fun thing to do."

As Jacobs flips from one drawing to another, I notice three staircases, one rising from the center hall, another in "the East Wing," and yet another in "the West Wing." There's also an elevator. On the second floor, occupying the entire West Wing, the master suite encompasses a bedroom, a living room, a wet bar, his-and-her bathrooms, and two dressing rooms, each about the size of a Manhattan studio apartment. (Says Michelle, "For me, as long as I had my closets, it was fine.") In the East Wing are four more bedrooms, plus two apartments for staff. And on the top floor, yet another four bedrooms. Every bedroom has its own bathroom. "The third floor no one will use until I have grandchildren," Jacobs explains.

What particularly delights him are the plans for the lower level. You may think of the "lower level" as a basement. Often damp, with low ceilings and concrete floors, basements used to be places to store old bicycles, do laundry, and, in better homes, install "rec rooms" with brown wall-to-wall carpet. In Greenwich, however, the basement as it once was has been transformed into something grand. Home theaters are commonplace. So are exercise rooms and wine cellars. Now, following Steven Cohen's lead, the newest basements of Greenwich's hedge-fund elite have arts-and-crafts ateliers with built-in sinks, massage rooms with waterfalls ("so you get that Zen feeling," one builder explained), panic rooms, and hockey rinks.

Jacobs does not play hockey, so instead he decided to install a regulation-size squash court in his house. "I'm not really a big squash player, and you should know I'm a lousy squash player," he says. "But squash is fun, especially in bad weather. I figure if I build the house why not have the things I really want? I'm paying for it."

What did Jacobs want in his basement? "I created a yoga room," he tells me. "There's a golf simulator in the basement, next to the home theater—again, if it's raining outside, it's fun." There's also the spa: it includes an indoor pool, a steam room, a sauna, and something called a Swiss shower, with a dozen adjustable showerheads.

Jacobs pauses. "So, what do you think so far?" he asks. Without waiting for an answer, he continues: "We wanted the house, although it's grand, to be comfortable."

"Not fussy," agrees Michelle.

"We want it to be country comfortable," adds Jacobs. "We want furniture you can sit in. We're not having black-tie dinners, not that there's anything wrong with that."

"Nothing fussy, just nice," repeats Michelle. "We were hoping it would be tasteful."

"I wanted something that didn't look like some McMansion," says Jacobs.



Despite Jacobs's best intentions, some people in Greenwich view his new house as just that: an unsightly McMansion. Last December, at a public hearing before Greenwich's Planning and Zoning Commission, a lawyer representing Conyers Farm had this to say about the house: "It is too large, it is too in-your-face, it is too visible."

Next to offer her view of the matter was Regina "Gigi" Mahon-Theobald, a former journalist who heads the Planning and Architectural-Review Committee at Conyers Farm. "I've been on the PARC for I believe it's six years," she said, "and there's never in my experience been a project that aroused anywhere near the depth of passion, really, that this one has. It's really kind of an uproar."

One month later, when I meet Mahon-Theobald, she gets right to the point: "Jacobs is building a monster manse," she declares. "In the past few years, there has been teardown after teardown. All these old, interesting houses are torn down every day, and they put up these massive things that are overwhelming the properties, overwhelming the roads. With the Jacobs house you finally get to the point where you say, 'Enough is enough.'" Apparently there are limits, even in Greenwich.

…On March 13, Joseph Jacobs was awakened from his dream. That morning, a little before seven, he heard the telephone ring. His wife rolled over in bed, reached for the receiver, and handed it to him; Jacobs heard an unfamiliar voice on the other end. It was a reporter from the financial network CNBC: "Mr. Jacobs? Do you have any response to the article in today's Times?"

There it was, for all to see, on the front page of The New York Times's Metro section: an article about Jacobs's house. The headline: "Land of the Big Puts 'Too Big' to the Test."

By the time Jacobs got to his office, a camera crew was waiting for him in the lobby. That day, hanging in the sky above Jacobs's bucolic 11 acres were television news helicopters, droning, greedy for substance. Covering the big story about the big house were reporters from CNN, CBS, ABC's Good Morning America, NBC's Today show, News 12 Connecticut, and Hartford's WTIC NewsTalk 1080 talk-radio station. Even Jon Stewart called and invited Jacobs to go on The Daily Show.

The next morning, Matt Lauer introduced Jacobs's home on the Today show. "Katie," he began, turning to his co-host, "Americans are getting bigger and bigger these days. I'm not talking about our waistlines." You'd have thought that Jacobs was the first man in Greenwich to have built a big house.

Having just hired a spokesperson, Jacobs released a statement. "In light of the publicity," it read, "I no longer have any plans to build this house."


+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Told you it was sad. RIP. And… not that I like to blow my own horn, but… I did , as mentioned, write a poem about Jacobs when I first read that ill-fated Times article… and, well, I’d sure as hell like to run it by you again… So… here it is!!


To Greenwich, From J.M. Jacobs

Let us not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments! Wealth is not wealth
Which falters when it escalation finds,
Or fails its tennis courts to enbubble:
No! 'tis an ever-fixed indicator,
And e’en four kitchens is not too much trouble;
It is the star to every golf simulator,
Whose worth exceeds what measures might be taken.
Twice the size of Neverland, it beguiles the assessors
Who with their mystic numerals come;
Its long façade makes enviers of lessers
Whose real estate dominance it dooms.

If this be error and the town finds guilt
My legal counsel assures me it’ll still get built.