Open Letter to a Son of Scarsdale

Written by Tom Bartley

Mr. Barton Craig

Somewhere out there

Hi, Barton:

We wanted you to know that the home you grew up in—but didn’t inherit when your father, Jerry, passed away—is about to become the property of the Village of Scarsdale.

You can’t really blame the village treasury folks. By their accounting, the old homestead is behind in tax payments by something north of $230,000. Moreover—and perhaps more importantly, especially to your onetime neighbors—3 Edgewood Road has become a neighborhood blight.

Even your house number is hard to see, hidden as it is behind the uninhibited growth of front-yard shrubbery. Combined with an untended lawn, peeling paint, rotting roof and other eyesores, it’s enough to make 3 Edgewood an utterly un-Scarsdale-like embarrassment.

Maintenance was clearly not a priority. We don’t know your age, but you were in Scarsdale High School in the mid- to-late ’60s, so you’re likely in your own 60s now. Perhaps that explains the uncut grass.

Neighbors complained, of course, about the house’s increasingly shabby appearance. But there was little the village could do as long as someone kept up the property taxes on the unoccupied house. For a number of years—for whatever reason—you apparently did just that, paying the property taxes owed by your parents’ estate. Then, in 2009—again, for whatever reason—the village says you stopped paying them.

After two years of nonpayment, the village moved to seize the property. “We’re going to be foreclosing on that [property] in a couple of months,” says Village Manager Alfred A. Gatta.

He and other village officials have tried to find you. So have we, but without success. We turned up an address, but not you, in Connecticut. Gatta had followed the same trail. “He did live at one time in Bethany, Conn.,” the manager notes, “[but] he abandoned the house there too. . . . We got that far with [tracing] him.”

Now, your Scarsdale home is going on the block. At a minimum, acquiring it would mean paying off the back taxes and catching up on the maintenance. Still, it could be a steal. The two-story home sits on a lot measuring 65 by about 110. That’s what? A sixth of an acre? Not a lot of yard work, by any measure.

It’s assessed this year at $12,200, but that number’s relatively meaningless. The taxes alone in 2013 come to almost $16,000. Meanwhile, in local real estate circles, the house’s market value is estimated at between about $700,000 and $900,000.

It’s hard to believe you’d want to abandon your claim to that. But, as Village Manager Gatta shrugs, “I can’t tell you what makes people tick.”

All the best,

The Editors at Patch