Friday, March 20, 2009

Derek Jeter Is Recession Proof

You thought A-Rod's 8,300 sq. ft. mansion in Coral Gables, Florida was sick? Derek Jeter is not impressed. (via Neil Best)

New York Yankees slugger Derek Jeter is building a behemoth of a mansion just a stone's throw from downtown Tampa.

Once completed, the seven-bedroom, nine-bathroom house on Davis Islands will be 30,875 square feet, according to Hillsborough County public records. To give you an idea of how big that is, the average Best Buy store is 39,700 square feet. That's also twice as big as the Bayshore Boulevard mansion of Lazydays RV SuperCenter founder Don Wallace.
To give you more of an idea of how fucking ridiculous and excessive that is, I grew up just down the street from this place. It's only 20,000 square feet, and supposedly cost $32.5M to build... in 1992. It has a glass elevator and a "mermaid bar", which has windows looking up into their indoor pool. The cobblestone driveway is heated and it leads to a split underground 12 car rotating garage. The house for their two Dalmatians was (and maybe still is) a scaled-down replica of the main building.

It gets more ridiculous:

Crafted from over 1,200 tons of Ithaca’s Llenroc Stone (the same material used to construct the Llenroc dormitory at Cornell University), this elegant home has a first floor master suite with his and her bathrooms, 15 fireplaces, $3.5 million worth of imported Scandanavian marble flooring, hundreds of unique hand-painted Portuguese tiles, a formal dining room featuring 24 karat gold guilded ceilings and moldings, walnut design inlaid hardwood floors, miles of mahogany moldings, a five-floor glass elevator, four galleries, and a servant’s kitchen with its own elevator.
Because 18 karat gold guilded ceilings just wouldn't do.

Click through here and look at the pictures. It's astonishing. I could go on longer, but you'd be better served Googling "Llenroc" (Cornell spelled backwards) because it will blow your mind. The story behind it is pretty interesting also. Al Lawrence, the man who built that monstrosity spent two months at the very end of his life in jail for fraud, embezzlement, and tax evasion. It was only two months because his cancer was diagnosed as terminal and we was released to die at home (which he did in 2002). That seems fair.

Llenroc is excessive, garish, gaudy, decadent, ostentatious, ... yes?

Now make it 50% larger.

Because that's Derek Jeter's place. Imagine if A-Rod was building that home right now? People would want to burn him at the stake. What's the difference?

9 comments:

  1. if you lived down the block from that monstrosity, why are you writing here? Don't you have a trust fund to piss away? ;)

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  2. They wouldn't even let me mow the lawn there.

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  3. im sorry, that is just too excessive!! you couldnt PAY me to live in a house like that! but on the other hand, all of jeter's ladies will love it, especially the bathrooms (however over-the-top they may look).

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  4. Poor choice. I can see it now, Jeets to show the "nice room" that he never uses on Cribs Remix 2.0. I'm gonna go lay down in my 1/30,000 Jeter's-mansion-sized room and cry myself back to sleep.

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  5. It may be larger, but it doesn't have as much character as my 3 bedroom/1.5 bath 1300 square foot home in historic, fair Albany...

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  6. If he stole my idea of having an indoor Segway race track I am going to be pissed.

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  7. Does anyone remember when LoHud posted the pics of Posada's crib in Tampa? It is my lifelong goal to fuck Laura Posada in that house.

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  8. That is fucking insane. If the local kids can't get parks and fields around 161st St., at least Jeter can have 9 bathrooms. If it helps his numbers in '09 I'm all for it.

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  9. Someone has to stimulate the economy. Think of all the underpaid immigrants Jeter is probably employing to make his dream a reality.
    Meanwhile, one thing they don't show in the pics of Llenroc, a "waterfront" property, is the "river view" of the Mohawk and the stunning vista of the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory and a GE research facility. I suppose you can just stare at the 24 carat gold ceilings instead.

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