This is an archived page.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)

Monday, March 13, 2006

Mr. Jacobs Refiles.
By Way of a Poem.


From this morning’s New York Times:

With plans calling for almost 39,000 square feet in the main building, plus an 1,165-square-foot pool house, the home that Joseph M. Jacobs, a 53-year-old hedge fund manager, wants to build for his family on 11 acres in the Conyers Farm section of town would be twice the size of Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch and would top the Greenwich mansion occupied by Leona Helmsley, the self-appointed queen of a real estate empire.

Whether the Jacobses' homestead turns out to be the town's largest depends on how one measures. (Be glad you're not the tax assessor.) Do finished basements count? What about guest cottages, barns and gazebos? Should ice rinks and twenty-car garages count as much as other structures?

Still, the unbuilt house has come under fire from neighbors whose own homes easily surpass the 10,000-square-foot mark. They say there is insufficient foliage to screen the mansion from the road. Another complaint is that the planned facade stretches about 220 feet from end to end.

"It's just a huge departure," said George James, a next-door neighbor who told the town planning and zoning commission in December that the new palazzo-style home would undercut the "rural character" he has worked hard to preserve in the century-old farmhouse he owns near the Jacobses' property line. Mr. James also owns a much newer 20,000-square-foot mansion behind the farmhouse, when enclosed areas are counted.

Barry Hawkins, the general counsel for the Conyers Farm homeowners' association, which is made up of the development's residents, told town officials at that meeting that other homeowners also had problems with the proposal. "It is too large, it is too in-your-face, it is too visible," he said.

…Roger J. Pearson, a former first selectman of Greenwich, offered some support for the house. In a letter to town officials, he expressed hope that the furor was not built on "manufactured issues to suit the purposes of neighbors who upon completion of their own amply sized residences become instant conservationists."

…[Another resident], whose 31,600 square feet of living space in the north part of Greenwich is one of the largest homes on the tax rolls, has sparred occasionally with neighbors, but backed down last fall when they objected to his plan to encase his tennis court in a bubble for year-round use.

But the Jacobses have inspired fierce opposition.

Town records show the couple downsized four kitchens and two laundries that town officials deemed excessive and redesigned a drainage system. The couple had a harder time showing that the proposed septic system could handle an 11-bedroom main house and secondary structures.

They notified Ms. Fox's office on Feb. 13 that they were temporarily withdrawing their request for a special permit, required when a planned structure exceeds 150,000 cubic feet, as theirs does, to address the concerns of town officials. "I do intend to refile," Mr. Jacobs said on Friday.

One thing the couple has not done so far is shrink the plans for the house, which now includes his-and-her dressing suites; a five-car garage; a home theater; a staff lounge; and most spectacularly, a 3,600-square-foot indoor gym, complete with its own squash court, golf simulator, massage room, beauty parlor and indoor pool, with views of a sunken garden.

The current design may make it hard for them to win the consent they need from the Conyers Farm homeowners association, which represents members of the 1,500-acre development, built on a former dairy farm that straddles the Connecticut-New York border. Conyers Farm has long had extensive guidelines, backed up by restrictions in the landowners' deeds, aimed at maintaining the development's country look. Lots in Conyers Farm must be 10 acres or more. Glimpses of homes and stables are all that should be visible from the road.

Sentries limit access to all but a few of the 70 or so homes that make up the development.

…Gigi Mahon-Theobald, a neighbor who presides over the planning and architectural review committee of the homeowners' association, said her group advised the Jacobses to remove the side wings or wrap them behind the house to minimize what would be visible from the road and polo fields. On Friday, Mr. Jacobs said, "Trust me, it won't work."

He said he wanted a home that would be suitable for entertaining and have room for his children's friends and his future grandchildren to sleep over. "We have one guest room," he said of his current 5-bedroom house. "I go down in the morning and there's people sleeping on sofas."

Mrs. Mahon-Theobald said the association recognized that the Jacobses paid $5.5 million for their lot and it was "not in the business of trying to turn people down." But she did not recall a project in Conyers Farm "that aroused anywhere near the depth of passion really that this one has. It's really kind of an uproar."

Those sentiments were on display at the December meeting of the planning and zoning commission. There, Charles Campbell, Jr., Mr. James's lawyer, ridiculed claims made by Mr. Jacobs's lawyer, Thomas Heagney, that three of the four kitchens were actually kitchenettes and could be further downsized into wet bars.

"I doubt that Mr. and Mrs. Jacobs are going to want their five live-in staff people to have coffee with them in the main breakfast room down on the main floor," Mr. Campbell said.

Frank Farricker, a commissioner of planning and zoning, marveled, "Are there really four kitchens in the house?"

"Depends on how you're defining a kitchen," Mr. Heagney replied.


**********************************************


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.