43 Arcadia Road, Old Greenwich, is priced at $2.395 million and is reported pending after 8 days. The place looks markedly different from when I first saw it in 1988, when it was owned by a sweet old guy, Frank Halleck. If you lived here back then you may remember him, because he was a regular fixture in the Village, always seen with a stevedore hook on his belt, ready for fishing treasure out of dumpsters, and pulling a toy wagon behind him for bringing his finds home.
Frank was a hoarder, and the Collyer brothers would have envied his collecting skills. The backyard was completely buried under everything from barbeque grills, to cardboard boxes, garden tools, and broken bicycles, and inside, newspapers, books, and magazines were stacked to the ceilings, with a maze of passageways through, with enough furniture to fill up any of Greenwich’s finest 10,000 sq. ft. mansions (most of those tables, chairs, bookshelves and lamps were broken, of course, and may not have been welcome in our better houses, but hey).
The summer I met Frank I’d just left a large law firm and had set up shop in the late Bill Lapcevic’s offices on Mason Street. I was looking for clients, and Frank was looking for a lawyer, because his neighbors had somehow managed to persuade a judge to issue an order compelling him to completely clear the backyard jungle of debris. I forget who steered him to me: it might have been Bill, or perhaps then fellow-lawyer, now judge Kevin Tierney, but either way, Frank had enough cash to pay a small retainer, and I was retained.
My legal skills weren’t exercised much that summer, because the order was final, and my efforts were limited to gaining a few extensions of time before the sheriff and a dumpster crew arrived. I did, however, spend hours and days at the property, wearing denims and work boots and attempting to help Frank sort out the trash from the valuable. There was none of the latter, of course, but Frank was unpersuaded: “Oh, you can’t throw that out”, he told me when he caught me tossing a sneaker box into the dumpster I’d rented on his behalf, “they don’t make ‘em like that anymore!” “Frank”, I said, “it’s a Nike box; Nike’s still in business, still making shoes. We’ll throw this one out, and when the judge is satisfied, you can go down to The Sport Shop and get ten more.”
I won that skirmish, but lost most, and finally time ran out. A hired crew descended and cleared the lot, using a front-end loader to pile everything into a succession of dumpster bins: tires; discarded pedestal sinks and toilets, and, damn them, a huge collection of valuable sneaker boxes. A very sad day.
But still, the entire saga had its benefits. We used poor Frank’s example to caution then-7-year-old John, when he refused to pick up his toys, “you don’t want your room to look like Mr. Halleck’s house, do you?”, and the annual St. Paul’s Fair became a family milestone because of that summer of living on a paper thin retainer. At the fair that June, I told the kids we had exactly ten dollars to split between all three of them for rides, period; the next year, I could afford ten dollars for each of them, and every year thereafter the entertainment budget grew as my practice did. So June became a time to look back on and measure how far we’d come, and be grateful.
As for Frank, things worked out, more or less. Although he was devastated by the rude eviction of his treasures, when I passed by a year later I was gratified to see that he’d managed to replenish the piles and perhaps even expand them. I’m sure the neighbors weren’t as gruntled as I was, but Frank was old, and wasn’t going to linger on his mortal coil of garbage forever; patience was the only thing required.
And that patience was rewarded not so very long afterwards. Frank moved on to that great junkyard in the sky, the house changed ownership and was renovated, and now it’s selling for millions. I doubt ride ticket prices at St. Paul’s have matched that rate of appreciation.
