It's in the MARCH, 20 (Monday, this week) print edition; won't be available online for a awhile....
pay subscriber get to enjoy it first,
.....It's pretty lengthy, but...
...a conical (I tell ya!) fun read nonetheless.
Ben McGrath on Playa Grande, "Big Beach":
(of sort, verbatim)
[...]
[...] a young American couple approached from the direction of a nondescript hotel called the Occidental, situated beyond the cliff. Noticing the helicopter, the woman said, "Now that's the way to travel like millionaires. Is it very expensive?" She likely assumed that Curry, sunburned in a faded red bathing suit and a pink T-shirt, and with windblown dark curly hair, was staying at the Occidental as well-a fellow-gringo living it up on the cheap in the country with a per-capita G.D.P. of only sixty-five hundred dollars
But Curry, who is forty, was a highly successful money manager from Manhattan. He owned the course, the cliffs, the mountains behind the cliffs, the rolling jungles in between, the bluffs out to the east-everything in the area, as far as the eye could see, except for the Occidental. And even that was just a matter of time; he and Kemble, a thirty-two-year-old interiour designer, already controlled the hotel's water supply, beach access, and electricity, and were in negotiations to buy and demolish it.
[...]
[...] we began touring the property, which extends about five miles along the coast, flanked by a nudist colony and a Rochester doctor's retirement mansion. As curry elaborated on his vision, it emerged that the utopia he had in mind was a twenty-first-century, jet-setting variety, in which golf, a game he does not play, could be used to subsidize and artists' colony and other noble pursuits. Curry's enthusiasms include organic subsistence farming, environmental conservation, and entomology. ("Boykin will do anything to have an insect name after him," [Celery] Kemble told me.) [...]
On the western edge of the golf course, Curry showed me a paved cul-de-sac that was overgrown with weeds-evidence of the Dominican government's aborted attempt to develop the property some years back. "See, sloth is our friend," he said. "They had the foresight, the vision, to keep it all together as one giant property, without breaking it up piecemeal-and the incompetence not to do anything with it. If they hadn't been so incompetent, there would be ten Club Meds here by now."
Sloth had not prevented the government from building the so-called North Coast highway. a potholed two-lane road used occasionally by wild pigs, through the middle of the property[...a flat tire ensues...]
[...]
Fareed Zakaria, who is a regular guest at the Aspen Institute, Davos, and other northern retreats, told me that he was atracted to the Dominican Republic as a potential tropical alternative. "I've never liked Florida, to begin with. It's basically not that attractive and not that warm," he said. "So if you go an hour further ..."
Shortly after my arrival, the weather grew unreliable and rainy. Curry, Kemble, and I spent a fair amount of time waiting, eating, and looking out toward the ocean from the scallop-shaped golf clubhouse.
Even so, there were signs that the D.R. may finally be approaching Next Hot Destination status. Curry's friend George Mueller, an L.E.D.-lighting entrepreneur and one of the twenty "founding residents" of Playa Grande, had spotted a familiar face in first class on his flight down; it turned out to be Donatella Versace, who was staying at a new resort just west of the Puerto Plata airport. On the other hand, Mueller's luggage was confiscated after customs agents discovered camouflage pants in his bag-designr bell-bottoms-and tagged him as either a paramilitary threat or an easy shakedown victim. It took him two days to get his gear back.
[...]
"At Playa Grande, in the regime of Boykin Curry, all the pools will be eighty-eight degrees! I decree, as phase one of my utopian experiment!" [Curry said]
[...]
[...](For one gathering, he and Kemble brought together the Dominican President, Leonel Fernandez, the architect Richard Meier, Zakaria, the Bronx politician Fernando Ferrer, the ex-congressman Herman Badillo, and a former Miss Venezuela.) "They're kind of arbiters of a life style, in many ways," said Alice Ryan
[...]
Conveniently,, a billion-dollar embezzlement scandal, prolonged power failures, and rampant inflation had collapsed the Dominican peso, and brought the country to near-bankruptcy, prompting the I.M.F. to renew calls for the privatization of inessential state assets, chief among them a two-thousand-plus-acre proposed resort that had languished for years.
[...]
Curry is in for roughly fifty per cent of the over-all Playa Grande investment, with the bulk of the twenty co-founders pitching in about a million dollars each. (Moby, who says he is "not much of a beach person," told me that he was drown to " the possibility of being involved in a development project that wasn't guided strictly by avarice.") But Curry retains one-hundred-per-cent controll over all decision-making. Dominican utopia is a benevolent dictatorship. It is also, within the confines of its limited avarice, supposed to make a profit, or at least break even.
[...]
Earlier that week, Curry had closed on the purchase of the Occidental hotel, and with any luck the bulldozers would be arriving to level the place by the end of the peak season-say, April. He had also signed an agreement with the government's Environmental Ministry to co-manage the science center. ("we'll pay for building the center, and they'll pay for the scientists," he said. "Actually, we'll probably end up paying for that, too.") President Fernandez had lent his moral support, at least, to the rerouting of the highway.
[...]
Tittled:
The Utopians: Yaddo meets Club Med
Interesting fact: Curry's "Big Beach" plot, at twenty-two-hundred acres, is nearly three times the size of Central Park, in New York.
It (the article) is so helleriously humoristic, facetiously funny; kept me laughing for ~half-an-hour. ....I'd like to quote the whole damn thing, ...then I'd go to jail,
...
"Big Beach" has a brand new website
...forgot the Byline, ...the witty Ben Mcgrath, of Ichiro suzuki fame, the great....
