Greyledge, it isn't, but the land remains
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129 DoubLing Road
The 8.67 acres at 129 and 137 Doubling Road, with a 1978 house on 129, have sold for a total of $8.675 million to two different buyers; less than the $15 million asked in 2011-2012, but a bit above the $7.6 the owner paid in 2001. (The links have been pulled)
The property was once the site of Colonel Raynal Bolling’s (his statute still stands across from our former post office on Greenwich Avenue) 1912 mansion, “Greyledge”, but no more.
In fairness to that owner, Greyledge was an oversized white elephant, and when an architect was brought in to redesign and renovate it, the estimated costs were at least as high as building a new house, and the building still wouldn’t work. Some houses are just obsolete, and so they go.
I reserve my contempt for another person mentioned in the Journal’s article, one Steven Hatch, who tore down a beautiful 1848 Italianate on Riversville Road and replaced it with a nondescript pseudo farmhouse. I had shown it to a person up from Greenwich Village, who told me he was trying to convince Hatch to at least allow the man’s preservation committee to come in before the structure was demolished and rescue the antique moldings and other unique interior features. “I thought we were still talking”, the Villager said, “but he came in with a backhoe and a dumpster one morning, and it was gone by noon.”
The WSJ asked Hatch about that:
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.
