Opposition Grows Against Plan
To Build Golfing Community
PINE PLAINS, N.Y. -- Manhattan skyscraper developer Douglas Durst hopes he has better luck than ice-cream pioneer Tom Carvel on this same bucolic site in the shadow of the Catskill Mountains.
Forty years ago, the founder of Carvel Ice Cream was the first to try to convert the land into a second-home golfing community. He built a Golf Hall of Fame, invited friends George Steinbrenner and Perry Como to play on weekends and designed one hole to resemble his Fudgie the Whale ice-cream cake.
But Mr. Carvel couldn't win over the local farmers who still mockingly recall his New York adviser who paraded around in a blazer monogrammed with his family's "royal crest" and called himself "the count." Mr. Carvel abandoned the project after selling 17 homes. His vision of a tribute to golfers is a small concrete building, condemned because of a large crack in one wall.
"I thought people with money would flock from the city," says Charles O'Donnell, then the attorney for Mr. Carvel, who died in 1990. "It just never got off the ground."
Today Mr. Durst is trying again. The man who has developed office towers around Times Square and Grand Central Station wants to build 951 homes on the former Carvel property and surrounding farms. That's less than half of the houses planned 40 years ago. Hoping his project will avoid the fate of Mr. Carvel's, Mr. Durst pledges an environmentally friendly development that includes corridors for passing wildlife and recycled water for the 27-hole golf course.
"I don't have to develop at all," he says over a lunch featuring tomatoes grown at his nearby organic farm. "I want to do it because I want to show how it should be done."
But Mr. Durst is encountering some of the same skepticism and resistance that dogged Mr. Carvel. A 600-person community group called Pine Plains United is handing out "small not sprawl" bumper stickers and pushed the town council to hold off approving projects until January, when the council has its own zoning plans in place.
And he's encountering an additional hurdle that's slowing other developers who venture into largely rural areas: Just as developers have grown more sophisticated in how they approach planning, so have the opposition movements that protest them. In New York state, Poughkeepsie-based Scenic Hudson -- a 50-person nonprofit group whose board is headed by a partner at law firm Sullivan & Cromwell -- has locked horns with developers throughout the Hudson Valley on land-preservation issues.
In places like Pine Plains, where developers seek to build second-home communities for well-heeled weekend commuters from nearby big cities, the opponents often include big-city transplants who arrived earlier -- with the means and talents to fight plans they fear will overcrowd their new-found getaways.
From their office in a former Ford dealership, Pine Plains United members enlisted a former Manhattan copywriter to design their materials and a former hedge-fund manager, James Sheldon, to prepare data on the financial impact of the project. Mr. Sheldon, who bought a farm in nearby Gallatin and writes a column for a local newspaper, suggests that Pine Plains buy back the parcel Mr. Durst has accumulated to preserve "the character of this area that has brought me and others who spend time here."
When Mr. Carvel arrived in the 1960s, this town's rolling hills were covered in dairy and livestock farms. Mr. Carvel, a Greek immigrant, started his national ice cream business in 1934 with $15. With the help of iconic 1970s TV ads in which the deep-voiced Mr. Carvel hawked ice cream "made fresh in the store," he built a chain of 900 outlets that he sold in 1989 to Investcorp for more than $80 million.
Mr. Carvel and his wife, Agnes, came to Pine Plains to build a weekend home where he could golf without facing the crowds on courses near his home in Yonkers. He bought 1,010 acres in Pine Plains from two award-winning livestock owners, and quickly proposed plans for his own golf course and second-home community with a man-made lake.
Jerry Stuetzle, who was Pine Plains' town supervisor for 30 years, recalls the Thursday night monthly town board meeting when Mr. Carvel showed up with an engineer, a lawyer and the self-described count. Mr. Stuetzle, now a member of the group fighting Mr. Durst's proposal, spreads his hands out widely to show the size of the diorama of the planned community that Mr. Carvel brought to the meeting.
Despite reservations -- some town officials feared wealthy second-home buyers would take over the town government -- the council ultimately approved Mr. Carvel's plan. Mr. Carvel began by building a two-story house for himself and an 18-hole golf course. In early June 1975, Mr. Carvel held the Ladies Professional Golf Association's Girl Talk Classic at his course, which he dubbed the All American Sports City Country Club. He started selling lots for $3,500 -- up to $20,000 for corner locations -- in a community where lots typically went for $1,000.
Opposition grew as his project became more ambitious. From his initial proposal in 1966 for 64 homes, by 1973 he expanded to 2,500 units, prompting fears the project would overwhelm local schools and force the town to hire more police and firemen. At the same time, rising interest rates and gas prices made the prospect of buying a house that was a two-hour drive from New York City less enticing. Within two years, economics and public opposition forced Mr. Carvel to give up his dream. "This guy knew franchises and ice cream and that's where it stopped," Mr. Stuetzle says.
Mr. Durst, 61 years old, brings both greater credentials as a developer and hard-won experience in Pine Plains disputes. He spent nine years fighting with a neighbor and fellow real-estate developer over an organic composting farm Mr. Durst was starting. The fight divided the town and led to a court case over whether Mr. Durst's farm was illegally located in a "rural historic district." Though he lost in a federal appeals court, state law allowed Mr. Durst to continue composting manure and leftover food. Mr. Durst says his MacEnroe Organic Farm now produces 20,000 cubic yards of compost a year and that he and his onetime adversary, Robert Quinlan, are "the best of friends." Mr. Quinlan agrees.
Ray MacEnroe, who runs Mr. Durst's organic farm, tipped him that Mr. Carvel's relatives were selling the remains of the estate. In 2003, after spending three years trying to close on property mired in lawsuits surrounding Mr. Carvel's estate, Mr. Durst paid $12 million for the Carvel land and some surrounding farms.
Even critics say Mr. Durst is approaching this venture with greater sensitivity to the environment than Mr. Carvel. Still, opposition is building. Mr. Sheldon, the former hedge-fund manager, warns that Mr. Durst won't be able to sell enough second homes and most lots will become full-time residences that overburden local schools. Adds Paul Spencer, a former ad writer who came up with the "Hey, You Never Know" slogan for the New York State Lottery and who co-founded Pines Plains United: "Even 1,000 very tasteful environmentally sensitive homes still doubles the size of the town. When you think of how much light will be cast into the sky at night -- just imagine."
Mr. Durst counters that the New York metro area is a prime market for second-home buyers and there's increasing demand for close-by retreats.
The dispute is now in the hands of the town's zoning commission, which has until January to draft Pine Plains's first zoning regulations that could limit the number of homes Mr. Durst is allowed to build. "If I were to speculate, the Durst property would not come anywhere near the 1,000 units," says Scott Chase, a planner for the county water authority who bemoans the decline of agriculture in the area. "I would suspect that it would be less than half."
While he waits, Mr. Durst is facing some of the same external factors that doomed Mr. Carvel -- rising interest rates and gas prices. But Mr. Durst says he's confident "we'll be hitting the market at the right time" in 2008 when the first lots are to be ready for home building. He adds that he's better equipped to succeed. "Tom was a gravelly voiced ice-cream salesman and I'm a soft-spoken real-estate developer."
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