Word: key
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
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...
...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...
...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...
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...