Rents of $100 a square foot are not unheard of. Another third is occupied by companies that work with hedge-fund companies, according to commercial-real-estate brokers.Ĭommercial rents have gone through the ceiling: whereas prime office space in Midtown Manhattan goes for around $55 a square foot, office space in Greenwich now rents for between $60 and $70 a square foot. So many hedge funds have moved to Greenwich in the past five years (mostly from Manhattan) that they now occupy about a third of the town’s relatively scarce office space. To put that figure into perspective you should understand how small Greenwich really is: there are only about 23,000 households, a total population of 63,000. Of the $1.2 trillion currently invested in hedge funds worldwide, approximately one-tenth, or $120 billion, is now managed out of Greenwich alone, according to Hedge Fund Research, Inc. Today, the money that talks loudest in America belongs to a closely knit, inscrutable group of men who run hedge funds Greenwich, where increasingly they both live and work, is swarming with them. Rumor in Greenwich has it he’s either a Russian mobster or, more likely, a hedge-fund manager. A few months ago, one of the main pieces of the original Simmons estate changed hands yet again, this time for $18.5 million. With its undisturbed views of Long Island Sound and a comfortable commute to Manhattan, Greenwich has long attracted men with brand-new money. For better or for worse, it was now George Skakel’s turn to join the American aristocracy. It was one of the biggest social events of the year. When the service was over, 2,000 guests attended a reception on the grounds of what had once been Zalmon Simmons’s estate. Kennedy, then a Democratic congressman from Boston, was the best man. The bride wore a white satin gown with a wide, deep collar of point de Venise lace. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church in Greenwich, Ethel Skakel, the daughter of George and Ann Skakel, married Robert F. Twelve years later, on June 17, 1950, at St. In 1918, Daniel Gray Reid, “the Tin Plate King,” built for his daughter, Rhea Reid Topping, a Tudor Revival house for the then staggering cost of $1 million (equal to about $15 million today). Percy Rockefeller built a 64-room Georgian mansion. Phelps Stokes, an heir to the Phelps Dodge fortune, went a step further: he had a 16th-century Tudor manor house taken apart in England then, wainscot by wainscot, peg by hand-carved peg, it was packed into 688 numbered cases, shipped across the Atlantic to Greenwich, and re-assembled. Longing for permanence and, above all, recognition, the newly rich residents of Greenwich built for themselves near replicas of Old World architectural glories: a copy of Versailles’s Petit Trianon, for example, and an homage to Britain’s Warwick Castle. Havemeyer), and Harriet Lauder Greenway (the daughter of George Lauder, a partner in Carnegie Steel). Rockefeller (their father co-founded Standard Oil), Louisine Havemeyer (the widow of “Sugar King” Henry O. Converse (founding president of Bankers Trust), Jeremiah Milbank (of the Borden Condensed Milk fortune), Herbert and Louisa Satterlee (she was the eldest daughter of J. Once settled in Greenwich (having moved from the backwater of Kenosha, Wisconsin), Simmons found himself surrounded by other leading industrialists and their heirs. Simmons had made his fortune by revolutionizing “the nighttime furniture of the nation,” as his New York Times obituary phrased it put simply, the Simmons Company developed the country’s first mass-produced mattresses. Like other titans of the era, Simmons and his wife, Frances, proceeded to build a manor house in Greenwich that would rival the palazzi and châteaux and stately homes of Europe. In the 1920s, Greenwich, Connecticut, was known as “the richest town per capita in the world,” and Zalmon Gilbert Simmons was one of the richest men in town.
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