Page 575 - WhyAsInY

sWeet sixteen
Luke, a mother of two girls, one of whom was friendly with David, had come over months before we had started to build when she saw me in the front yard. I was planting red-handled knives (originally purchased for my Coca-Cola-accented apartment) at intervals in the grass to mark the outline of the intended project. I had explained what I was doing, and she made what I took to be polite, neighborly, and complimentary noises. Don Luke, Ann’s husband, was a young litigation partner in a large New York City firm. He had not come over.
Without so much as a phone call to us (but with notice now to the ARB, whose hearing they had failed to attend months before), and after construction was well under way, Mr. and Mrs. Luke had gone around to our neighbors and gotten a large number of them to sign a petition opposing our construction project and making some fatuous “legal” arguments in an attempt to reverse the ARB decision. They delivered that petition to the ARB (not to us) and then did even better than that. They also wrote a very angry letter to the local paper, the Scarsdale Inquirer, in which, among other things, they complained that if the proj- ect were to be completed as planned, they would be “condemned” to have to look at the gravel in the courtyard for “the next one hundred years.” (Apparently, not only were the Lukes aesthetes, they were also, for all practical purposes, nigh immortal.) And, more important, in addi- tion to complaining about our project, they referred to it (at a time when the wooden structure of the garage itself was in place and covered with the blue paper that contractors place on structures to shield them from the elements) as a “monstrosity.”
The upshot? Not only did our non–Pulitzer Prize–winning newspa- per, which was read by virtually everyone in the community, publish the Lukes’ screed, but they had a long front-page article about the situation, and they wrote an editorial that essentially agreed with the Lukes’ letter. There was also a photo that zeroed in on the blue-paper-wrapped con- struction (which still did not have the beginnings of the graceful front wall) and hardly showed our house at its best. And, then, the pièce de résistance: a screaming headline above the article, which adopted the Lukes’ use of the word monstrosity when referring to our home.
• 557 •