Bank One Corp. Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon has made quite a splash in town since he was hired in late March to turn around the nation’s fifth-largest bank.
Now, Dimon has mirrored his high-profile entrance to town with an equally impressive — but surprisingly low-profile — purchase of a 15-room Gold Coast mansion for $4.68 million.
Dimon and his wife, Judith, discreetly bought the five-bedroom, 111-year-old mansion in a private transaction from well-known personal-injury attorney Thomas Demetrio.
Just a year ago, Demetrio, a former president of the Chicago Bar Association, paid the highest price for a single-family property in Chicago in all of 1999 when he bought the Gold Coast area mansion for $4.2 million.
The purchase by Dimon, who will be paid at least $3.25 million in cash this year, signals a huge commitment to Chicago.
While this may not be at all surprising, given how rapidly the oustpoken Dimon has become one of Chicago’s best-known executives, high-profile CEOs tend not to purchase the most expensive homes on the market, particularly since their job security isn’t always high and such properties can be difficult to sell. Instead, the buyers of the highest-priced houses in Chicago often are traders or individuals with large amounts of family money.
The house that now belongs to Dimon was on the market for 292 days before Demetrio bought it last year, but it remains unclear for just how long Demetrio had been considering selling it. At one time, Dimon was rumored to be shopping for homes in Lincoln Park.
Local brokers said Dimon paid a fair price for the mansion, which sits on a desirable corner lot. The recently renovated, four-story mansion has a roof deck, game room, exercise room, two staff apartments with private street entrances, high ceilings, wood floors, large bedrooms and a 2.5-car garage, according to listing information from last year.
One of the mansion’s former owners in the 1980s was Charles Murphy, the former executive of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in Fine Arts.
It’s not known whether Dimon will sell his co-op on New York’s Upper East Side. That 71-year-old building last year became nationally known when author Anne Roiphe named a popular childhood memoir that she wrote after the building’s address.
Separately, Bank One’s new chief financial officer, Charles Scharf, whom Dimon hired shortly after taking over at Bank One, just paid $1.05 million for a condo on Lincoln Park West.
– Rosedale, the 6.5-acre estate in northwest Washington, D.C., where Cuban refugee Elian Gonzalez spent his final weeks in the U.S., may be going up for sale.
Owned by the non-profit Youth for Understanding organization since 1978, the estate, 3501 Newark St. N.W., recently was appraised at $16 million.
Rosedale, which is just north of Washington National Cathedral, has an 18th Century yellow clapboard farmhouse and three more modern, red brick buildings. Youth for Understanding is considering selling the estate, where Elian spent almost a month, because of financial problems.
Though an urban environment, northwest Washington has many larger estates like Rosedale. About a mile to the east is the 15.88-acre estate at 1940 Shepherd St. N.W. that is owned by U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.).
– The 400-acre Couderay, Wis., estate once owned by gangster Al Capone is headed for sale in a sealed-bid auction by Sheldon Good & Co. Auctions. Now called “The Hideout” and used as a restaurant and museum, , the estate has a 90-acre lake and approximately 1,100 feet of shoreline on the Chippewa Flowage, Wisconsin’s third-largest lake. The estate’s main lodge was built in the late 1920s and has 18-inch-thick walls made of native fieldstone.
The lodge has an open, two-story living room with a massive hand-split fieldstone fireplace, unique spiral staircases, and what is reputed to be the first tile bathroom in the area.
Outside are an eight-car garage, a guard tower on a hill, a second garage, a bunkhouse for guards, and a stable, where Capone at one time housed his ponies.
The family is offering the property either in one piece, or in four separate parcels. Bids are due by Nov. 2.
———-
Have a tip about a home sale or a piece of property being put on the market that involved a well-known Chicagoan or a well-known piece of Chicago real estate? Write to Upper Bracket, c/o Chicago Tribune, Real Estate section, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60611. E-mail: rgoldsbo@enteract.com
