- AGAPONACK, N.Y. -- Ira Rennert's dream house in the Hamptons will have
29 bedrooms, 39 bathrooms, a 164-seat theater and a restaurant-sized kitchen
with five refrigerators, six sinks and a 1,500-gallon grease trap.
-
- Its outbuildings will include a sports
pavilion with two tennis courts, two bowling alleys and a basketball court;
a garage sufficient for 200 cars, and a power plant with four huge water
tanks, a 2.5-million-BTU furnace and a maze of underground tunnels.
-
- The 63-acre, five-building spread, at
the rim of the Atlantic Ocean, will dwarf the White House, San Simeon and
Bill Gates' megamansion. All told, the structures will occupy 110,000 square
feet, making the residence at Fair Field, as the site is known, the largest
home in America.
-
- Can a complex of such staggering dimensions
be considered a single-family home?
-
- This is the question being asked by the
Sagaponack Homeowners' Association, an ad hoc group of wealthy residents
who are challenging Rennert's building permits, granted in the dead of
winter when his prospective neighbors were 100 miles away in New York City.
-
- Rennert's grandiose plans have produced
protest and speculation among the Masters of the Universe who summer here,
where private tennis courts are commonplace, squadrons of gardeners tend
manicured lawns and the neighborhood market sells lobster salad for $40
a pound.
-
- The homeowners have raised $70,000 to
plead their case on two fronts, before the town's Zoning Board of Appeals,
which held a hearing Thursday night, and in state Supreme Court, where
a trial date will be set after the board rules. In both venues they argue
that Rennert, a reclusive industrialist with a passion for Zionist causes,
has misrepresented his plans, claiming to build a residence in order to
avoid municipal scrutiny when he actually intends the complex for a religious
school or conference center.
-
- "I don't care what it is,"
said Joe Zicherman, a money manager who can see the clouds of construction
dust and hear the growl of trucks from his own four-acre hideaway, where
he trades stock in bare feet and Bermuda shorts, a Cuban cigar clenched
in his teeth. "I just know what it is not: It is not a one-family
house."
-
- As the land clearing goes ahead, much
of the talk at the post office and the Sagg Main General Store is wild
and scurrilous rumor. But some of the neighbors' concerns are grounded
in the plans for the complex. Zicherman, who donated $10,000 to the homeowners'
association, worried that 8,800 square feet of the main house had no specified
use. "He could be building, for all I know, a nuclear reactor,"
Zicherman said.
-
- He also wondered, given local concerns
about the water supply, whether "I'm going to have water to shower
after Mrs. Rennert waters her 17 acres of English gardens."
-
- Nancy Berman, who is building a 4,000-square-foot
house adjacent to the Rennert property, nearly wept at the prospect of
overlooking his power plant, garage and garbage area. And author Linda
Bird Franke, whose 2,500-square-foot home also overlooks the Rennert spread,
feared that the high beams of security lights in her eyes would keep her
from enjoying the glow of the silvery moon.
-
- Rennert, a 63-year-old Brooklyn native,
has refused all invitations to meet his neighbors or speak to reporters.
His only comment has been a two-paragraph letter to the Southampton Press,
promising to use the property "as a private residence for the use
and enjoyment of my family."
-
- Rennert paid $11 million for the land.
His filings estimate construction costs at $3 million, but independent
experts say the project will cost anywhere from $30 million to $100 million,
depending on the detail.
-
- His lawyers conceded that the residence,
made of limestone in the classic style of the Frick Museum, is the largest
they have ever seen. But that does not make it illegal, they said, nor
does its system of service structures more common to commercial buildings.
-
- The battle began in earnest when 300
people mobbed the Town Hall in Southampton for Thursday's hearing, an event
unprecedented in both size and passion. Instead of the usual requests for
variances for swimming pools or garden sheds, the five-member appeals board
faced a battery of lawyers, engineers, land-use experts and citizens armed
with architectural renderings, thick reports, aerial photos and no end
of outrage.
-
- John Shea, the lawyer for the homeowners'
association, framed the debate by asking if Rennert would be allowed to
build a car wash or an office building on his property, as long as he said
he would live in it with his wife and three grown children.
-
- His question drew grins from the board
members, who have the legal authority to revoke the building permits if
they feel they were granted in error. Association members begged the board
to rule boldly, despite concern by the town elders that Rennert will sue
if his plans are thwarted.
-
-
-
- Then a parade of expert witnesses took
the project apart.
-
- One discussed the construction methods,
sanitary and plumbing facilities, kitchen, laundry and mechanical systems
and concluded that they were comparable to a hotel or conference center.
-
- Another said he looked in vain for a
similar home or even apartment building in the region and found none, so
instead was forced to measure Fair Field against Gurney's Inn, a resort
in Montauk. In most ways, Gurney's fell short.
-
- A third spoke of the regional planning
policies here, which for decades have sought to preserve residential character,
agricultural land and scenic vistas. Even a subdivision would be better
than the Rennert complex, some here said, because the town code would allow
a developer to build 21 houses but require that two-thirds of the land
be set aside for farming.
-
- Technical testimony soon gave way to
public theater. Shea asked the board members to imagine making an apple
pie. Then he pulled from his briefcase a sack of lemons and tried to persuade
them, with broad irony, that there was no difference between one fruit
and the other.
-
- Joe Dilworth, a homeowner, cited the
maxim that a creature that walked like a duck and quacked like a duck was
probably a duck. Sheila Bialek, another homeowner, recalled the fairy tale
about the emperor's new clothes and begged the panel not to be bamboozled.
-
- Rennert's lawyers were scornful of the
show. "Law is not chance, frivolity or silliness," said Anthony
Tohill. "We do not argue based on ducks, fairy tales or lemons."
-
- After decades of anonymous success, Rennert
has been profiled in several glossy magazines since his project was approved
last winter by the town's Architectural Review Board, which rejected only
a 16-foot hedge and a pair of gatehouses. No members of that board were
available to explain their ruling that the project was "harmonious"
with its surroundings.
-
- Rennert's holding company, Renco Group,
is commonly said to gross $2.5 billion a year, although its records are
not public, while Rennert's personal net worth is said to be in excess
of $500 million. His business strategy is a 1980s classic: buying troubled
companies cheap and leveraging them for the next purchase.
-
- With the exception of AM General, which
manufactures the Humvee vehicle popularized during the Persian Gulf War,
most of Rennert's companies are Rust Belt concerns. Environmental practices
at Renco's mining companies in Ohio, Utah and Missouri have resulted in
federal lawsuits, state reports, and pages and pages of violations.
-
- Rennert, with homes on Park Avenue and
in Atlantic Beach, is a generous donor to Orthodox Jewish and Zionist causes.
He is said to be a financial supporter of the career of Benjamin Netanyahu,
the hard-line prime minister of Israel, and contributed to the construction
of a controversial archeological tunnel under Muslim and Jewish religious
shrines in Jerusalem that was the focus of riots in 1996 in which 70 people
died.
-
- An ugly sidelight of the dispute, some
residents say, is the discussion of Rennert's religion. John White, whose
family has farmed here for 300 years, opposes the project, but noted that
some "nasty and anti-Semitic" remarks have been made by relative
newcomers who "come out from the city in limousines" and themselves
built houses too grand for the area.
-
- "There are valid reasons for opposition,"
he said, "without going after the character of Mr. Rennert."
-
- Members of the homeowners' association,
most of them Jewish, have been advised by their lawyer to play down their
concerns about a religious school on the site. Mrs. Bialek tried to raise
the subject several times during an interview and was hushed by her husband,
Joe, a real-estate developer and an officer of the association.
-
- Rennert did not attend Thursday's hearing,
which will resume next week. Shea, the lawyer for the homeowners, asked
if a bigger hall could be found for the next session to accommodate the
overflow crowd.
-
- "Could we go to the high school,
or a church?" he asked. "How about Rennert's house?"
|
