Rennert's Fair Field in Sagaponack revisited

Perhaps if reclusive billionaire Ira Rennert had lived a century earlier, Fair Field, his 100,000-square-foot beachside compound, might have inspired something closer to awed admiration than the shock and outrage that erupted when it began to take shape in 1998 on nearly 65 acres in Sagaponack.

One could argue, after all, that Fair Field is in the grand tradition of the fantasy fiefdoms created back in the first Gilded Age by men who were then monopolizing the nation’s wealth.

History doesn’t record any citizen uprising over William Randolph Hearst’s 97,000-square-foot architectural extravaganza San Simeon, with its grandiose architectural flourishes and furnishings that emptied more than a few European castles. Nor was there an audible outcry over Otto H. Kahn’s humongous estate in Woodbury that required a made-to-order hill before construction could even begin, and then kept hundreds of laborers employed for two years building a Norman mansion that held the title back then as the largest private house in America.

And then there was Charles M. Schwab, who began construction on his New York City dream house at 73rd Street and Riverside Drive in 1901. The mansion—modeled on Chenonceaux in France’s Loire Valley, with 90 bedrooms, six elevators, a 116-foot tower, a 60-foot pool, bowling alley, gymnasium, and its own power plant—took up an entire city block. But it seems to have encountered no protests from unhappy neighbors.

Alas, Mr. Rennert arrived with his dream a hundred years too late. His plans for a mega-mansion in once-quaint Sagaponack—a dwelling with 29 bedrooms, 39 bathrooms, a 164-seat theater, and a restaurant-size kitchen, according to the Southampton Town assessor’s office and previously published reports, that, together with outbuildings, effectively obliterated the last of the hamlet’s seaside fields—was met with a groundswell of resistance. Residents, outraged by the project’s scale and grandiosity, came together in an organization called the Sagaponack Homeowners Association. Their sole mission was to challenge the town’s green light for the project, which had been granted in the dead of winter when Mr. Rennert’s prospective neighbors were miles away in Manhattan.

A decade has passed since their intense opposition to the plan inspired a series of full-page ads in the local press denouncing “the rape of Sagaponack” and calling on local authorities “to stop the Rennert so-called ‘one-family residence’ from going forward.” The passage of time has clearly calmed their most bitter feelings and perhaps even allayed their suspicion that Mr. Rennert’s plans for this “commercial-scale complex” were, if not commercial then perhaps institutional. (Some, who knew Mr. Rennert to be a passionate supporter of Orthodox Jewish causes, wondered whether he might be planning some sort of religious complex.)

Yet, it is equally clear that Fair Field continues to be looked upon by most residents of Sagaponack as an unwelcome intrusion in their community.

A Modest Proposal?

Oddly enough, members of the Architectural Review Board, the first to review Mr. Rennert’s plans, seemed to have had little inkling of how offensive the plan would prove to be to the people of Sagaponack.

Because of reports that the waterfront acreage had been purchased from Daniel Shedrick for $11 million, and rumors that the somewhat reclusive Ira Rennert, head of a privately owned, Manhattan-based holding company, the Renco Group, was planning something big for the property, attendance at the ARB session was perhaps better attended than it might otherwise have been on a wintry night in January, but there were no overflow crowds.

When Mr. Rennert’s representatives entered the meeting room carrying portfolios as big as barn doors and unveiled the plans for Fair Field, the sober limestone façade of the main house prompted one observer to compare it to the Frick Museum in Manhattan.

It was acknowledged that the size of the house was extraordinary, but pointed out that so, too, was the property.

“Because this is on 63 acres, I don’t see how it could be out of character,” one ARB member remarked as the board weighed the question of mass, and whether such a huge structure might be out of harmony with its surroundings. Another said she would be more disturbed if the land were to be subdivided. One board member did hint at what was to come, confessing reservations about the project’s scale and suggesting that members ought to visit the site.

By the following summer, the town’s Building Department and the ARB were both under attack for giving the project a pass. The missing Manhattanites had been brought up to speed on the off-season developments, and the Sagaponack Homeowners Association had raised $70,000 to challenge the project legally and in the court of public opinion. Ads attacking Fair Field’s grandiosity and questioning its purpose were appearing weekly in the local press, and an action alert issued by the Group for the South Fork lamented the loss of prime farmland along with a significant chunk of unique scenic beauty. Sagaponack’s most cherished celebrity, Kurt Vonnegut, famously vowed that he would sell his house and leave the hamlet unless Rennert were stopped.

He was not stopped, nor did Vonnegut, who died in 2007, sell his house. There was nothing illegal about a big house and a bunch of outbuildings as long as they were in compliance with all the codes and regulations, which they were. Community opposition was not grounds for declaring the plans unacceptable.

Paying the Price

While Mr. Rennert triumphed, he paid a price in losing the anonymity he has clearly always preferred. He was profiled in several glossy magazines after the media picked up on the irresistible saga of a billionaire’s battle against Hamptons millionaires and their local neighbors out in sleepy Sagaponack.

People learned that their reclusive future neighbor had made his fortune by buying a variety of distressed industrial companies, often with high-yield junk bonds that allowed him to avoid putting up much of his own money. They found that he had an abysmal record as a polluter, most notably at his MagCorp, a magnesium chloride plant in Utah that had been cited by the EPA on several occasions as the nation’s worst air polluter. Pollution at his metals smelter in Peru, where an alarming number of children had been found to be suffering from lead poisoning, was also making him a prime target for environmental activists. (Those charges were answered with announcements from the company, Doe Run Peru, of a series of successes in a campaign to improve its environmental performance.)

One of Mr. Rennert’s least controversial business moves was his purchase of the military contractor AM General, maker of the U.S. Army’s all-terrain HumVee vehicles, for $133 million in 1992, and the launch into the luxury SUV market with the 2.5-ton Hummer. In 2004, Mr. Rennert sold a majority stake to Ronald Perelman’s MacAndrews & Forbes Holding Company for $930 million.

In 2006, the Rennert story got new legs in the media when it looked as though Fair Field might be at risk of confiscation by the feds were he to stonewall their attempts to make him deliver on hundreds of millions of dollars in pensions promised to a group of steelworkers at WCI in Ohio. The takeover didn’t happen but the threat did force his hand and convince him to keep the pension plan going.

Throughout, Mr. Rennert, who is now in his mid-70s, has prospered to the point that he was number 91 on Forbes Magazine’s list of the world’s billionaires last September with a reported net worth of $3.5 billion.

Mr. Rennert—who did not respond to several attempts to reach him, including e-mails—and his wife, Ingeborg, have three children and several grandchildren, who have presumably been enjoying summer sojourns at Fair Field since the Rennerts moved in back in 2004. While he has not had a strong local presence, he has proved to be a good Sagaponack citizen—no wild parties, no large gatherings, no delinquency in paying his taxes. He is up to date on his 2007-08 village tax payment of $16,571, according to Sagaponack Village Clerk Rhodi Winchell, and the Southampton Town tax receiver’s office confirmed that he has paid the first half of his whopping $420,528.68 town tax bill, with the remainder expected when due.

Southampton Hospital is one local institution that has benefited from Rennert philanthropy—the Rennerts were “Diamond Circle” donors to the annual summer party in 2007—but most of his charitable giving has been devoted to Jewish and New York City causes. The Rennerts maintain a home in New York and have lavishly remodeled an historic private mansion a short walk from the Old City in Jerusalem. The Nation magazine reported that contributions from the Rennerts have helped to restore the Western Wall Tunnels in Jerusalem, where the visitor’s center bears the name “The Ingeborg and Ira Leon Rennert Hall of Light.” New York University has an endowed professor of entrepreneurial finance in Rennert’s name, and the Rennerts donated between $1 million and $1.9 million to the World Trade Center Memorial.

The June 2007 article in The Nation also noted that Rennert’s supporters have included Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Holocaust survivor, and Rabbi Yaakov Kermaier of the Fifth Avenue Synagogue in New York, who described his synagogue’s chairman as “a person of extraordinary generosity and unimpeachable personal integrity.”

Unseen Presence

Sagaponack residents, informally surveyed over the past several months to find out how their feelings toward Fair Field may have evolved, displayed hardly a trace of the seething resentment of 10 years ago.

Sheila Bialek, who with her husband, Albert, had been on the front lines in the fight, lamented the loss of the geese that used to gather on what is now the Rennert compound, but “I guess most people will just live with it now,” she said.

“We never see him,” said another resident, who spoke on condition of anonymity because she occupies an official position. “As far as I’m concerned, he’s never around.” There was nothing in the town code that said he couldn’t do what he did on his huge piece of property, she added, “and I don’t think of him as evil. He didn’t do anything illegal, even though people were incensed.”

Asked whether Mr. Rennert’s presence has had any noticeable impact on life in Sagaponack, which incorporated as a village in 2005, Mayor Don Louchheim indicated that it had not. “I’ve never seen him,” he said, “and I don’t know anybody who ever has.”

He said that, to his knowledge, there have been no complaints to the village about activities at the Rennert compound, no problems at all.

“It’s just big,” he said.

Lessons Learned

Mr. Louchheim did suggest that just because passions have cooled, it should not be assumed that people are now unperturbed by the presence of such an enormous and elaborate estate on what had been one of the hamlet’s cherished farm fields. “It’s not as though it has been accepted,” he said, “and that we would like to see more like it.” On the contrary, he said, Fair Field is often referred to as an example “of what we don’t want to happen in the village.”

The village now has zoning laws that would not permit a building on that scale, he said. Incorporation has given Sagaponack power over such matters, but he stressed that it was not the Rennert flap that spurred villagers to incorporate.

“Rennert had nothing to do with it,” he said. “There was an abortive attempt to stimulate interest at the time of the Rennert cases, but it was Dunehampton and its effort to incorporate the oceanfront that was the impetus.” The attempt by some oceanfront homeowners to slice off the beachfront as a separate entity was defeated, but not before the gears for incorporation had been set firmly in motion.

Village officials are in a much better position to maintain the historic character of Sagaponack now, but there will be challenges nevertheless. Some in Sagaponack worry about what the future would hold for Fair Field should Mr. Rennert one day find himself in financial difficulties.

The zoning code would not permit its transformation into a school, according to Mr. Louchheim. “But it certainly could be subdivided,” he said, “though even that would be problematic because of the size of the house and the other structures.”

To date, there has been no hint of hard times hitting the Rennert household and no rumors of plans to transfer or transform Fair Field have reached the mayor’s office.

“We will just have to wait,” said Mr. Louchheim.