Builder home run? On the train tracks??

61 Summit Road, Riverside CT. Ask: $2,995,000. Sell: $3,200,000+ ?

Gideon Fountain posting for Christopher Fountain….

The current record price in this town for a property on the railroad tracks is $3,187,250, on Riverside’s Miltiades Avenue. That happened in 2016 and a bidding war pushed it up above the ask of $3,075,000. Now, it’s happened again, this time, a few blocks away, on Summit Road. The builder paid $827,825 in June, 2020, for the cute little shack that stood there since 1952. The ask was $895,000 and it took many weeks to find a buyer, so obviously, other builders did not see the potential here (Covid concern was still running pretty hot back then).

11 months later, the new house hits the market at $2,995,000 which I was certain was over-priced. That weekend, July 9th, 80 couples showed up for the public open house and, as with Miltiades, the ensuing bidding war pushed the sale price above ask. My guess is $3,200,000 (we’ll know soon), so the Miltiades record falls to the new king.

Listing broker: Kristy de la Sierra (Houlihan Lawrence)

Buyer broker: Julia Allan (Houlihan Lawrence)

61 Summit: the BEFORE picture.

And I'm off! Three-week hiatus on blogging, though probably some occasional updates.

hah! Take that, you pesky redskins!

Off to visit Pall Nancy and the girls in Boulder, then FWIW’s New Mexico correspondent and then, maybe, Bill Clinton’s birthplace in Arkansas. All via a side trip to S.D.’s Bad Lands and the Montana to revisit Custer’s Last Stand, which I haven’t seen since 1963 — even at the tender age of 10, I’d read enough about the Indians and their treatment, and Custer’s foolhardy recklessness, that I knew he had it coming, but it’ll be fun to go there and pretend otherwise. (As a side note, great grandfather John Caldwell might well have never made it out alive from the Civil War had it not been for Custer. Captured at the Battle of Cold Harbor, Coldwell was being held with several hundred other prisoners at a train depot, waiting to be shipped to Anderson Prison, when the then-23-year-old General Custer rode up, blonde locks flowing, and in the company of his troopers, routed the rebels and freed the prisoners.

So I’lll give him that.)

Will I do some house hunting in Wyoming? Montrose? Who knows? This may be the last time citizens are free to wander about the country without pre-approval from the government.

Good Lord, another Boston Tea Party, this time led by (Mrs.) Crispus Attucks

No COVID passports!

Sadly, between the time I read the article returned to it literally two minutes later, the article had been edited to report that she’s already backpedaling due to heavy criticism, but let’s hope she holds the line.

“What I said was there is a long history of asking people to show their papers,” Janey explained. “What our focus here in Boston is in making sure that everyone has access to the vaccine, making sure that we are doing everything to vaccinate our workforce in the city of Boston, making sure that our residents have access to the vaccine.”

Finally, after 15 years

474 North Street, currently priced at $2.995 million, reports a contract. The owner bought it via what looks like a short sale in December 2020, fixed it up, and relisted it at $3.599 in May 2021. Price cuts followed.

This house has a sad history. Despite it being directly on North Street, it’s got some nice features and a good backyard that buffers the traffic noise. Unfortunately, it came on the market in 2006 at $5.495 million, which was far too high. I’ve mentioned here before that I showed clients the property sometime between 2006 and, I’d guess, 2008, and they liked it, but their offer of, if memory serves, $3.2 was rebuffed. Word at the time was that similar offers from other buyers met the same fate.

So the money ran out — believe a divorce may have contributed to that — the house deteriorated badly, and the foreclosure process began. The owner did a good job of holding off the bank until 2018, but without the money to pay off the debt, foreclosures eventually do get done. In hindsight, accepting one of those $3 million bids back in ‘08ish would have been a good idea.

Time for honesty

And Time for a name change? Robert C. Byrd Federal courthouse

1619 Project ignores unbroken record of the Democrat Party’s historical racism

REALCLEARINVESTIGATIONS:  1619 Project, Touted as Racial Reckoning, Ignores Democratic Party Racism.

Democrats who advanced a bill in June to remove statues of white supremacists from the U.S. Capitol ignored a central fact about those figures: All of them had been icons of their party, from Andrew Jackson’s adamantly pro-slavery vice president, John C. Calhoun, to North Carolina Gov. Charles B. Aycock, an architect of the white-supremacist campaign of 1898 that ushered in the era of Jim Crow.

At a time when governments, sports teams, schools and other bastions of American society are rushing to expunge legacies of slavery or racism, this was another instance of the Democratic Party’s failure to acknowledge that it did more than any other institution in American life to preserve the “peculiar institution” — and later enforce Jim Crow-style apartheid in the Old South.

“I think it’s absolutely fair to criticize the history of the Democrat Party when we’re literally changing the names of birds because they’re named after racists,” said Jarrett Stepman, author of “The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past,” referring to a new racism-cleansing push in, yes, ornithology.

Democrats’ circumspection in the face of this trend is especially noteworthy because it comes at a time when they are criticizing Republican legislation to block the teaching of critical race theory on the ground that the GOP wants to whitewash American history. But one of the most noteworthy efforts to reframe American history in terms of race, the New York Times’ 1619 Project, virtually ignores the Democrat Party’s role in advancing and sustaining racism in the United States.

“Rather I should die a thousand times, and see old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels.”

The Martha's Vineyard soiree has shrunk

“Only a few dozen of our closest friends”, Michelle announces. “Oprah, Harry and Meghan, and of course, George and Amal”, the self-proclaimed oppressed Princeton affirmative action graduate said from the balcony of her Vineyard cottage.

Sad.

“But he’ll still bring party hats and dope”

"John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it"

On the Trail of Tears

And with that, Andrew Jackson told the Supreme Court to piss off, and began the removal of Cherokee Indians to Oklahoma. Not to be outdone by Old Hickory, Biden has announced that he’ll extend the CDC’s rent/mortgage moratorium that was ruled illegal by the Supreme Court last June.

From The Hill: 

“Whether that option will pass constitutional measure with this administration, I can’t tell you. I don’t know,” Biden said. “There are a few scholars who say it will, and others who say it’s not likely to. But, at a minimum, by the time it gets litigated it will probably give some additional time while we’re getting that $45 billion out to people who are in fact behind in the rent and don’t have the money.”

[Red State] “In other words, he knows it’s unconstitutional and it wouldn’t be upheld but he knows that legal action against this extension will take time, so he’s going to try to do it anyway and then blame others and the courts when he’s sued and he loses. Can we talk about how wrong this is? He doesn’t care that it’s illegal. He knows it’s contrary to what the Supreme Court has already indicated yet he’s flying in their face anyway, something that just defies belief.”

As a reminder, even Nixon obeyed the Supreme Court’s ruling that he must turn over the Watergate tapes, at the cost of his job. But beginning with Obama’s executive orders creating DACA residents, continuing through Trump’s four years in office while the country’s security forces worked to overthrow him, to the COVID lockdown, we’ve been set on a dangerous path. I’d remind you to keep your powder dry, but that would probably bring the FBI to my door.

Nice cover

Lockwood Avenue OG sale price reported

35 Lockwood Avenue, asked $3.595 million, got $3.890. This was a Richard Girouard project back in 2004, when it sold new for $2.795 (these owners paid $2.9 in 2010). Girouard was a New Canaan developer who built solid houses on shaky financial foundations, and he and his lawyer went off to prison for a while to reflect on their business practices and how they might be improved. I’m sure he’s out by now, but if he gave any long-term guarantees on his houses, they probably won’t be honored.

And raise your hand if you remember Ruth LeBlanc Jones, the New Canaan agent who represented Girouard, and whose Persian cat-like face was ubiquitous on billboards, bus signs, and cable TV back then? I think she’s still around, but haven’t seen any Greenwich listings from her recently.

Cumo responds, brings in spokesman to address sex charges

who, me? listen to this guy — he speaks for both of us

UPDATE: The Paper of Record’s on the job