Greenwich is more ephemeral than it appears, and an influx of hedge-fund wealth spurred a speculative-construction boom.
Dear Greenwich Roundup,
thought you might be interested:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/08/25/080825fa_fact_paumgarten
Lauren
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/08/25/080825fa_fact_paumgarten
Lauren
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The complete Nick Paumgarten article is now available online.
A Greenwich of the Mind
What happens when the downturn goes upmarket?
In the town of Greenwich, Connecticut, it is illegal for a real-estate agent to post a “For Sale” sign in front of a house or a tract of land. For many years, such an ordinance was unnecessary; those who needed to know knew, and those who did not did not. But in the nineteen-eighties, with the arrival in town of national real-estate firms, “For Sale” signs started sprouting up, cluttering the roadways with middleman names and numbers. Many residents found the signs unsightly and crass; some home-town agents, keen to preserve the relationship between their local knowledge and their market share, agreed. The signs’ most persistent opponent was a satellite-television mogul named Rene Anselmo, who lived in a mansion modelled on the Petit Trianon, at Versailles. Patrolling his street in a Bentley convertible, Anselmo uprooted any “For Sale” signs he could find and piled them in the Bentley’s back seat. One day, the police arrested him for spray-painting over a Realtor’s sign near his house. After admitting that he had done this to eight or nine other signs, and remarking that he wished he’d used a chain saw, he became a kind of folk hero, the John Brown of real-estate signage. In time, the town came around and passed a law. It has never been tested in court.....
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