Farewell To The Big House

I’m sure no historian marked the date, and I’m still not sure it was a date worth marking. But I’d like to declare that the night of July 10-11, A.D. 2002, just possibly signaled the beginning of the end of an era. On that sweltering night, under the glimmering stars of the vast American plains, an unfinished mansion burned in Dallas. 

What could be so portentous, you ask, about a blaze that barbecued some choice Texas real estate? Houses go up in smoke all the time, like Arizona forests and human hopes. You have to understand that the property in question was no pedestrian McMansion of the sort we cynics like to deride with hoots and harrumphs. It was more like a pedestrian parliament building. This house, you see, was valued at $44.9 million. Let me try to put that sum into perspective for you: the defunct Dallas domicile was worth roughly as much as FORTY-FIVE mansions at a million dollars a pop. 

The big house, appropriately and obnoxiously named the Chateau du Triomphe, had been under construction for seven years and reportedly was just weeks away from completion at the time of its demise. At 43,000 square feet, it occupied as much space as an average warehouse, if not a Wal-Mart. It probably would have taken a small village of domestic servants just to operate and maintain the place. You  wouldn’t want to misplace your remote control there. 

Situated on Dallas’s ‘Billionaire Row,’ not far from maverick mogul Ross Perot’s own spread, the uninhabited three-story palace boasted a 16-car garage among its numerous amenities. (No family of substance should have to settle for a 15-car garage, I can hear the real estate agent telling prospective buyers.) On the night of the blaze, three hundred firefighters labored for eight hours to save the mansion as it incinerated before their eyes. By morning it was a ruin, like the Roman Forum and most of the Bronx.

The Dallas conflagration struck me as an ominous omen, a fiery telegraph message from the gods. As the stock market continued to crumble that week, after many of us thought it could crumble no more, the burning of the $44.9 million monstrosity seemed to represent more than the untimely end of a mere masonry-and-mortar folly. For me it loomed as a sobering symbol, a cultural milestone, the moment that finally marked a shift in the tide. When the Chateau du Triomphe blazed and crumbled in the Dallas night, I have reason to believe that we were witnessing the high-water mark of America’s Second Gilded Age. From now on, and probably for a long while to come, the tide would be going out.

You all remember the original Gilded Age, of course; it was the time of Rockefellers and other robber barons building their empires and strutting their spoils -- generally in the form of absurdly grandiose mansions. The new-money aristocrats were establishing a visible pedigree for themselves: their marbled halls called to mind, sometimes with alarming literal-mindedness, the stately palaces of old-regime Europe. I say ‘alarming’ because the Gilded Age potentates seemed to forget that America was a nation of equals, at least in principle. Not for them the gentlemanly comforts of a handsome brick country house; the robber barons aspired to live with pomp and twenty-foot ceilings. So did their presumptive heirs, the technomoguls of the 1990s. When these latter-day robber barons, newly flush from infusions of venture capital and overinflated stock options, decided to settle down, they did it in the manner of the Astors and Vanderbilts: they built BIG. In fact, they often tore down perfectly good and gracious mansions so they could erect more ostentatious ones on the same property. You could almost see the hubris billowing from the windows.

Even the petty rich of the nineties -- the lawyers, dentists and fast-track corporate jocks -- settled in those hulking new suburban tract homes that we fondly dubbed McMansions. Why would any family want to rattle around inside those vast and uncongenial barracks? Why would they prefer such architecturally undistinguished precincts on such barren plots of land when, for the same price, they could have nabbed a charming 1920s Tudor in a leafy old neighborhood lined with oaks and maples? Here's my guess: because the new elite saw themselves as the vanguard of the future rather than the guardians of a musty past. The civilization of business and technology would bury the civilization of Aristotle and Voltaire. It almost did.

Then the stock market crumbled like a sand-castle, and the small investors in that new civilization watched their life savings wash away. Inexplicably but not surprisingly, the top players managed to escaped largely unscathed. So what if their portfolios eroded from $9.2 billion to a paltry $3.8 billion? They’d still be set up for a hundred lifetimes. But the small investors (like me, good reader, and probably like you) would have to scrap their retirement plans and start peddling handicrafts on eBay. We watched the favored ones escape destruction with their insider advantages and golden parachutes. The resentment has been growing from within the ranks of the excluded, and eventually I fear it could explode.

The burning of that $44.9 million megamansion in Dallas might have been an accident. Or it might have been the desperate work of speculative builders who couldn’t find a buyer. We still don’t know. But I like to think a band of small investors, fed up with an economic system that promises the moon and then callously snatches it away, set the blaze themselves. I like to think they set it because nobody in this country deserves to live THAT much more spectacularly than anybody else. I like to think they set it because of the 16-car garage. 

The robber barons of the nineties, despite their aversion to the past, unwittingly became the new Bourbons, an aristocracy founded on lavish stock options and extremely creative accounting. (Who’d have suspected all those innocuous, buttoned-down corporate functionaries of hatching such diabolical plots?) And just in time for Bastille Day, a symbol of their excesses went up in smoke. Maybe the petit-bourgeois investors who got burned decided do some burning of their own. Maybe they didn’t. But it’s safe to say that many of us outsiders who heard about the blaze felt a warm inner glow of satisfaction.

Cynic's Pick of the Week

Another awful week for baseball: While the hotly contested remains of Red Sox immortal Ted Williams were readied for the deep freeze, baseball’s annual All-Star Game ended in an unheard-of tie. It seemed that both teams had run out of substitute players and didn’t want to overwork the boys who were already on the field. I didn’t think ballplayers were that fragile. In the days before multi-million dollar contracts, old warhorse pitchers like Cy Young would sometimes hurl both ends of a doubleheader. Now they’re coddled like the precious investments they’ve become. Too sad.