I am the owner of the home at 595 N. Sheridan Rd. that you made a big issue about being torn down in the Feb 17 paper.
Here are the facts that you missed, and some important clarifications:
– The biggest and most ridiculous misconception is that it was a $12 million house. It absolutely was not a $12 million house. It was the three acres of lakefront land that is worth $12 million, not the house.
– The house itself, as large as it was, was an unremarkable wood-frame that had been appraised for only $1 million. The previous owners had not been living in it and had allowed it to become completely rundown, and it had structural problems and was out-of-code in many areas. It would have cost $2 million to just restore it to a decent and safe livable condition.
– Other than being old and having been lived in by some rich people from a long time ago, the house had no particular historical or architectural significance at all. If it did, it would have been designated a landmark home a long time ago. Plenty of other North Shore homes are.
Although I appreciate that the village was indeed willing to allow a special subdivision variance to keep both the existing and a new house, it was only in the case of splitting the lot into two parcels.
The only way to keep the lot whole and build a new home was to remove and replace the existing one.
I and a lot of other North Shore residents are tired of bureaucrats trying to tell us what kind of homes we should live in, what they should or shouldn’t look like, and that, after working hard all our lives, we can’t build the homes of choice for our families just because these other people want to see the same nice old house sitting on the lot when they occasionally drive by.
Give me a break.
This is America, and we should be free to build the homes we want to live in.
It was a great house for a long time, but also a long time ago.
Time moves on.
People’s needs and tastes change.
And neighborhoods evolve.
In a progressive civilization, the reasonable evolution and replacement of old and deteriorating structures is all part of natural human progress that allows free, hardworking people and their families to choose where, how and in what type of home they want to live.
