I fought the law and the law won

T'other day I went over to join the other ghouls watching the demolition of an $800,000-plus house. And why was this done? Because the owner had knowingly and willfully ignored, ripped down and stomped on a significant percentage of local zoning laws. He kept up his resistance for 15 years, enriching an entire generation of property lawyers in the process. That this spectacle was fueled largely by hubris isn't just my opinion. The case has been up and down the entire Massachusetts judicial system--twice--in those 15 years, with a recent attempted detour into Town Meeting. The verdict was unanimous: the house was wrong, wrong, wrong, and its owner an arrogant prick. By the time I got there, the chimney was the highest item still standing.




I live in a very old New England town, and we don't agree on much. One of the first large property owners went back to England and became one of the Regicides--the panel that voted to execute King Charles I. That feistiness is in the local DNA. Zoning ordinances require a two-thirds vote to pass Meeting. When two-thirds of us agree on anything, it ought to be respected.

Mr Prick decided that sort of consensus did not apply to him. He ignored numerous warnings from abuttors and from lawyers that he was at the least pushing the envelope. He has whined for 15 years that the town didn't warn him. I'm not privy to what the town did or didn't tell him. I do remember my father sitting on our city's zoning board. I learned then that the burden of compliance rests not with the community, but with the property owner. One can push that envelope, but not break it. That's one reason to have an architect, and one does wonder what the architect here was thinking.

Mr Prick didn't just break the envelope, he shredded it in umpteen different ways. The abuttors did exactly what they said they would do and took him to court.

I had wondered now and then if the abuttors were being hypersensitive, but it occurred to me to get a look from the conservation land behind the demolition. Close to the lot? You betcha, close to at least one. It was close to the other as well, but the trees in the shot above mask how close. It's pretty much the same setback you can see here. No wonder they were pissed.



The whining goes on. Mr Prick's current theme is that the demolition was a "miscarriage of justice," quite as if someone had forced him to ignore his neighbours and the town bylaws at gunpoint. He says he may build a smaller house (read, the one he should have built in the first place) on the lot. How he could do that without being driven by spite all around would be comic. Seems like his smart move would be to sell out, perhaps to the abuttors, but smart hasn't been an obvious feature of this drama from the beginning.

Miss me?

Yeah right.

I have a number of items in the inbox, but sometimes a story comes along that necessarily cuts into line. In this case, it's the Mount Washington Hotel's threatened lawsuits against anyone else in the vicinity who uses the words "Mount Washington" for anything but the hotel.

What lawyer whispered this idea into the ears of the hotel's management? One with dreams of endless litigation, I have no doubt. That might fly, except for one difficult detail. The hotel was named after the mountain, not the other way round. Granted that the mountain got its present name a scant century before the hotel set up in business (succeeding other hotels on the property with fewer rooms and fewer pretensions). The mountain (formerly known as Agiocochook) has nonetheless been doing business for ten or twelve thousand years, and has intellectual property rights to any name it's called that are superior to those of a hotel with a white paint job and a white bread attitude.

People in the Mount W********* Valley are understandably proud of their massive, vile-tempered mountain, where snow can fall any month of the year, where a summer breeze may top 100 mph, and where over 120 people have died because they didn't take seriously the threat posed by a mountain of only 6288 feet. Apparently some residents express their pride by putting "Mount W*********" on their businesses, or their pickups, or whatever. A good number of these people probably can't afford coffee at the Mount Washington Hotel, let alone a weekend's accommodations there. Perhaps that's what bothers the management: that such rednecks can use the mountain's name just like the Elect.

There's the old saying that no publicity is bad publicity, but I think there's an exception for business decisions bordering on psychosis.

Down in Maine there is a modest cottage industry in topless coffee shops. If I were living up in the Mount W********* Valley, I'd start up a Mount Washington Topless Coffee Shop, just to see the blood pressure rise. Along with the (ahem) view, I'd be sure to serve a cup of good joe that ordinary mortals could afford.