![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldBloomberg's James Tarmy describes some lucrative island real estate in the New York City area. This is nearly the inverse of the inexpensive Prince Edward Island real estate I have seen advertised around.
Island dwellers the world over have noted rising sea levels with increasing alarm, but for Barrie Zesiger and her husband, Al, the lone inhabitants of Connecticut’s three acre Tavern Island, climate change has resulted in an unexpected if temporary benefit: “Going across the sound at 2 a.m. in the winter isn’t a big deal,” Zesiger said. “It’s easy, because things don’t freeze over anymore.”
It also helps that the trip from island to shore takes about five minutes. Travel is easy enough that the Zesigers, who recently retired from the money management firm they founded, spent more than 35 years commuting to Manhattan. (The island is just off the town of Rowayton, which is a little more than an hour’s drive from the city with traffic. The couple also keeps an apartment in New York.) But after her husband fell in a horse riding accident—“we were going to get rid of the horse, but the horse got rid of us first,” she said—they decided to sell the island.
It first hit the market in 2012, a month before Hurricane Sandy; and though the island emerged almost completely unscathed from the storm, “coastal real estate in Connecticut totally disappeared for a year,” Zesiger explained. Four years later the Tudor Revival-style house, caretaker’s cottage, boathouse, teahouse, and a plot of land on the mainland with a three-car garage and a second boathouse are still waiting for a buyer willing to spend $10.995 million.
