ISLAND PARADISE FOR EGGHEADS
MANHATTAN money manager Boykin Curry and a posse of high-profile pals - including musician and eco-activist Moby, PBS talker Charlie Rose and foreign-policy "it boy" Fareed Zakaria - have bought a huge chunk of land in the Dominican Republic they hope to transform into a "Creative Person's Utopia."
The New Yorker's Ben McGrath reports that Curry and Co. have plunked down $50 million for Playa Grande, a 2,200-acre plot that's meant to be an Eden-like island retreat where an elite group of jet-set artists and intellectuals can congregate.
"He imagined a classical Athenian village - updated," McGrath writes of Curry's vision, "in which four-star restaurants and art galleries could share street space with locally run fish shacks and pool halls; with great public plazas, where op-ed columnists like David Brooks and Thomas Friedman might gather to discuss anti-terrorism strategy with Zakaria and Rose, and then join Moby and his friend Michael Stipe for a concert on the beach."
Boykin, who is married to fourth-generation Palm Beach socialite Celerie Kemble, bought Playa Grande (he put up roughly half of the money while the bulk of the 20 co-founders kicked in $1 million each) on a tip from a friend of Kemble.
The Richard Meier-designed project-in-progress is to have a golf course, luxury boutique hotel, farms, equestrian center, science research facility and a nature preserve. There will also be an "artists colony" for 100 lucky recipients to live on the cheap. By "artist," Curry means "anyone who does something that's intellectually interesting that doesn't pay very well."
Playa Grande is far from being finished. Curry's first three capital investments were the 1,082-volume collection of Penguin Classics for the eventual Playa Grande library; an entire art installation from the P.S. 1 Gallery in Queens; and new irrigation equipment for the golf course.
But it's clear the project has utterly consumed Curry, who was known as a man-about-town who threw cocktail parties and fund-raisers for progressive causes at his apartment in the Trump building on Central Park South.
Kemble likens Playa Grande to her husband's second wife. "I'll give her three years," she told McGrath. "And then I'll slit her throat."