GREENWICH, Conn. -- Col. Raynal Bolling, an architect of American air power in World War I, died of a German bullet in 1918. The aviator's Greenwich mansion, featuring 13 fireplaces and a shooting gallery, survived until 2007.
Hedge-fund manager Spencer Lampert spent $7.6 million to buy the home, designed by the same firm that created the New York Public Library. Then, last year, Mr. Lampert razed it to the ground. Asked to describe what he has in mind for the now-vacant six-acre lot, he said in an e-mail: "Planning on building a house."
While much of the nation is mired in a housing slump, this Connecticut enclave is keeping alive one tradition of the late, great U.S. home boom -- the teardown. In the first three months of this year, 19 homes in this wealthy coastal town of 64,000 were demolished to make way for new ones. That keeps pace with the rate over the past three years, when more than 70 homes in the town were demolished annually, according to the city government's Historic District Commission...
...Preservationists say that since 2004, at least 13 homes with recognized historical significance have gone under the wrecking ball. "We are seeing destruction of the fabric of the community year after year," says Susan Richardson, former chairman of the historic district commission. "I'm not sure where it will end."
Many of the teardowns are done by developers who use the lots for new homes. Developer Steve Hatch says he bought an old farmhouse in 2004 for $1.5 million. Local preservation activists told him it had historical value. "I'm just personally not into that stuff," he says.
Still, he says, he offered to sell it back to them at cost. "They laughed at me and said they don't have that kind of money," he recalls. Mr. Hatch razed the house, built a bigger one and sold it to a family last year for $3.2 million....
....At a town meeting last month, the commission proposed doubling the length of demolition stays to 180 days. Opponents argued the measure would interfere with property rights. The extension was voted down 96 to 81.
Preservation battles have turned some prospective residents away from Greenwich. Kenneth Buckfire, a founder of the New York restructuring firm Miller Buckfire & Co., purchased a late-18th-century property, known as the Solomon Mead Homestead, several years ago. He planned to tear it down.
Preservationists objected. Mr. Buckfire says he offered to move the farmhouse, which he calls "dilapidated and not habitable," if the Greenwich Historical Society provided a place to put it. The offer wasn't taken up.
So he tore down the farmhouse in 2004 and spent $1 million on plans for a new home for the site, he says. He kept a smaller historical structure on the property. But criticism and an angry letter from local preservation activists led him to abandon his plans to live in Greenwich. "I said, 'To hell with it,' and sold the property," he says....
....In Greenwich, his sprawling estate with five stone chimneys was sometimes open to the public for teas and concerts hosted by his widow, Anna. By the 1960s, the colonel's offspring sold Greyledge, as the estate is known. "It was too big for continued use. There was an entire servants' wing," recalls Trish Twining, the colonel's granddaughter. "In the '60s, people didn't live that way."
In 2001, Greyledge was bought by Mr. Lampert, managing director of Tudor Investment Corp. (The hedge fund was founded by Paul Tudor Jones, who himself stunned many Greenwich residents in the 1990s by tearing down a waterfront home and building a 13,000-square-foot, dome-topped mansion it its place.)
Mr. Lampert -- no relation to hedge-fund manager Edward Lampert, another Greenwich resident -- says he initially wanted to preserve Col. Bolling's manor. "I designed a renovated Greyledge with a well-known architect," says Mr. Lampert, who currently lives down the street. "The cost [of renovating] was materially the same as or insignificantly different from building from scratch."
Last year, Greyledge disappeared.
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