Hamptons Real Estate Stories: A Legendary Fight & Teardown

One time, about 20 years ago, I watched two men angrily get into a shoving match at the annual Hampton Classic Horse Show. It was in the aisle where the summer people and the locals stroll to see the pretty bonnets and other fancy clothes of those also attending.   

The shoving match was short lived. But it was intense. Apparently the summer person, thinking to make a new friendly connection, had discovered he knew the house where the local lived. It was one of the teardowns.

A teardown in real estate is an older normal size home that gets torn down to make way for a giant mansion that one of the wealthy folk would build after buying the teardown property.

“You’re calling my home, the house my dad had built 40 years ago, a teardown?” the local man shouted before commencing shoving.

People intervened.

You don’t hear much about teardowns today. They are mostly all torn down now. So be it.

One of the most famous stories about a teardown took place beginning around 2004 and ending about 2012 involving two wealthy men from Wall Street.

In 2004, the richer of them, the head of one of the great investment banking houses, bought a farmhouse on 15 acres in Sagaponack, tore down the farmhouse and in its place began to build the mansion of his dreams. The work went on for years. And beginning in 2008, at 22,000 square feet, it was finally completed and now with the silverware and linens in and just days away from getting final permits, the stock market crashed and the very rich man’s firm went bankrupt.

The just finished mansion stood empty for four years and during that time, a vice president at that banking firm who had hated his boss and quit the year before to join another banking firm that, in the crash, got bailed out, took interest in this situation. He was even wealthier than his old boss when the crash came. And what he did was use some of that money to buy the vacant, never occupied giant mansion of his former boss.   

The next day after buying it, he arrived at the site with several men sitting in bulldozers,  smashed it all down — walls, paintings, silverware, furniture and curtains — to rubble. Then he built an even bigger mansion, moving into it in 2012. Thus he completed what then was the first and only “double teardown” in the Hamptons. This massive structure is still standing and being lived in today.    

I’ve never been able to confirm exactly if this story is true. Is anybody able to confirm this?