A Very, Very, Very Fine House?
We feel bad for Gary Rabin. We really do. He's the big swinging dick on the cover of yesterday's Times real-estate section, the guy who just didn't have enough space in his 19.6-foot-wide Greenwich Village brownstone.
In the fall of 2004, he found what he was looking for: a 38-foot-wide town house a few blocks away, a massive piece of real estate for New York. Sure, it was a lot more expensive, but he's a lot happier, too. He now owns one of New York's widest houses, in a category defined more than anything else by that single statistic.
"I have to admit, it makes a huge difference," Mr. Rabin says, rhapsodizing about his extra-wide new home. "There's an element of pride when you walk out the door in the morning."
And here we were, sitting in our 425 square feet, all ready to hate Rabin for being disgustingly rich and unbearably smug about it. Then we flipped to the jump page, saw the photo of his new house, and realized: We know that place. It's down the block from where we used to live. And — how do we put this gently? — it's without a doubt the single ugliest townhouse in the Village. So, actually, while Rabin is running around bragging to all his friends — and to all the Times's 1.7 million Sunday readers — about how he's got the widest house in New York, they're all laughing behind his back at how fugly the thing is. Poor guy.
