TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/121189/12118900.049

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 7.3 KB | 144 lines

                                                                                AMERICAN SCENE, Page 21

Key West, Florida

Pritam Singh's Strange Career


An eccentric developer brings good taste to a tacky island

By Richard Conniff


    At 9 o'clock on a weekday evening, having just flown in
from his Vermont retreat, following the previous week's human
rights mission into the hills of El Salvador, Pritam Singh is
touring the best piece of real estate on Key West: the Truman
Annex, a former Navy property where Harry Truman had his Little
White House.

    Singh owns the place now, and one is unsure which jarring
and inapposite piece of his biography best begins to explain
him: That he is a former SDS organizer who is building a
Ritz-Carlton hotel? Or that he is a developer whose fondest wish
is to run away with Sea Shepherd, a Greenpeace splinter group,
and ram whale ships? Perhaps that he is a 36-year-old
Massachusetts-born Sikh of French-Canadian extraction, in a
turban and a Ralph Lauren polo shirt? Or that he read about this
102-acre property one Sunday in 1986 and bought it on a hunch
three days later for $17.25 million, outbidding a group of
Alaskan Indians bearing federal pollution-compensation credits?
Around Singh, one sometimes needs to stop, press rewind and take
it all in once more, slowly.

    "This is exciting," he tells his architect, surveying the
half-finished plaza he has conceived as the social center of
the new community he is building. "Have you done the guardhouse?
Let's go see the guardhouse." Singh is minutely attentive to
aesthetics, even with interest costs and overhead running
$30,000 a day. The guardhouse, it turns out, is coming along
nicely, except for some ugly screens, which Singh promptly
removes from the muntined French doors. He peers at a Government
facility up the road: "Now we gotta get the Navy to straighten
out the Stalag 13 look there. Those guys are so subtle."

    When he is done with the $250 million project in 1992,
Singh intends the Truman Annex to be an environmentally sound,
architecturally pure, socially engineered complex of 700 homes,
condominiums, shops and hotel rooms. His design guidelines,
reflecting the conch-house architecture of historical Key West,
run to 27 dogmatic pages: "White is the preferred and approved
basic color for all structures." "Each single-family unit shall
have a bougainvillea within the front-yard area . . ." What he
is building is an enclave away from the trashed-out, mixed-up
modern world, and he gleefully plans to earn a pile of money
doing it.

    Singh has sea-blue eyes, magnified by thick, round glasses;
his beard, unshaved since he was 17, is sparse and wiry. Born
Paul LaBombard, he was, in adult eyes, a bad influence on
anybody who knew him as a teenager. He ran away from his
working-class family, smoked dope and organized a high school
SDS chapter. Lacking money for college, he spent two winters
camping out and gathering shells for a living in Key West. He
was arrested at the Mayday antiwar demonstrations in Washington
in 1971, and spent three days locked up in the basement of the
Department of Justice. Afterward he sought spiritual growth in
a Sikh ashram in Massachusetts, where he remained for five years
before revolting against the power-hungry leader.

    Singh says his past and present connect perfectly. He was
always good at organizing things. He has always tried to live
a moral life. "I don't see any divergence in my program," he
says. In 1979 he borrowed $7,500, started rehabbing buildings
in New England and prospered; luck or savvy got him into Key
West before the Northeast real estate market went flat.

    The odd thing is that he never stopped being a Sikh, and he
remains full of admiration for the social reformers who founded
the religion: "These guys were, like, wacko. They just appeared
out of nowhere and were talking about justice and equality.
Treat women equally, serve the poor, defend your rights. It fits
the social and revolutionary agenda of the American republic to
a tee." He shrugs. "Except that we wear beards and turbans."

    Singh can be disarmingly frank about his failings: he has
dealt with the problem of homelessness in Key West by putting
up gates to close off his streets at night. His complex includes
more affordable housing than required, but up to half may go to
friends and vacationers, rather than to year-round residents.

    He is most ardent about environmental issues, having become
a rehabber at least partly because he believes it is wrong to
build on open land. An aide informs him that Greenpeace will be
tying up at his dock on Thursday morning. "That oughta impress
the Japanese guys," he jokes, referring to a group of financiers
arriving the same day with the prospect of a $100 million loan.
He dreads the idea of having lived in a period of ecological
collapse and done nothing but good deals.

    He also dreads power, which he admits is what he enjoys
most about being a developer. "I read the papers and I think,
`I could do that deal. Grrrrr.'" He makes a low self-mocking
growl. "I could make $50 million on that deal." The fingers of
both hands wriggle in acquisitive frenzy. Sheer insatiability
has convinced him that he must give up the business after Key
West. "I'm successful only if I can walk away from it and deal
with who I really am." He aims to retreat to his sprawling farm
in Vermont, where he has built a private Stonehenge, a
Jeffersonian library in the middle of the woods, a Japanese
teahouse. Cross-cultural follies.

    Singh's efforts have generally gone down well among the
blithe spirits of Key West. Without Singh, the Truman Annex
might have become "Meldorado," a pirate theme park. But if
islanders appreciate having a developer as sensitive as Pritam
Singh, they are also worried that he is exerting a more profound
influence on the island, as an apostle of good taste in a place
long known for exuberant tackiness.

    Key West has begun cracking down on noise, street vendors,
store windows filled with obscene T-shirts. Singh acknowledges
his power to influence this trend: he will in time be paying 25%
of the island's tax revenues. Before the recent election, two
of the five city commissioners were, by amazing coincidence,
slated to have shops in his coveted retail space. But he argues
that the city would be adjusting its image, growing up, even
without him.

    It's possible to grow up, he suggests, without becoming
dull. Among other anarchic touches, he plans to rent office
space in his complex to environmental groups that "will drive
other developers crazy." He is restoring the Little White House
to its tacky Truman-era splendor, spending $15,000 just to
repair the Sears, Roebuck fluorescent lights on the porch.
Presidential bad taste doesn't trouble him, in part because he
has income projections for his planned Truman museum. "The
Little White House is a little gold mine," he says. But he also
claims he does not mean to make Key West precious and yuppified.

    "Yeah, you've got the nice guardhouse," he says. "You've
also got Harry Truman in the middle, and across the street
you've got the Peekaboo Lounge." For the foreseeable future, Key
West also has Singh, who is weird enough all by himself to keep
the place interesting.

    "Eh," he shrugs. "It works."