Mother Jones on Stephen Schwarzman’s “Extreme mansion makeover” a few doors down from Rough Point on Bellevue Ave: the new “Billionaire’s Row”

 

By Peter Lance Oct. 17th, 2024 In an extraordinary new investigative piece for MOTHER JONES posted online, Hanna Levintova reports on the tumultuous impact that billionaire financier and erstwhile Trump supporter Stephen Schwarzman has had on Bellevue Avenue, in his epic renovation of Miramar, the former estate of Dr. Alexander Hamilton Rice, the famed world explorer, whom I chronicled in Chapter 8 of HOMICIDE AT ROUGH POINT

In the course of her piece, describing Bellevue Avenue, once known as “Millionaire’s Row” — in between references to King Louis XIV and Larry Ellison — she writes: “There is also the mansion once home to an alleged murderer, a billionaire tobacco heiress who almost definitely killed her interior designer.”

That link is to the first of my two pieces in Vanity Fair on Doris Duke’s 1966 killing of war hero, Renaissance man and art curator/designer Eduardo Tirella, whom I prove in my reporting she murdered with intent.

What follows is Ms. Levintova’s introduction to the piece,, which I encourage you to read online as you subscribe to what remains America’s foremost printed/online mag dedicated to investigative reporting.

Hanna Levintova October 10, 2024 The first thing the neighbors on Newport’s Bellevue Avenue complained about was the helipad.

The 2-mile stretch of Rhode Island coast has long been a playground for America’s billionaires, lined with lavish, historic mansions. But for as long as most could remember, old money had meant an untouchable kind of peace, not the thunderous noise of a chopper. Now the New Yorkers who’d bought 646 Bellevue—a Gilded Age estate known as Miramar—had turned a patch of grass on their 8 acres of oceanfront land into their very own LaGuardia, and folks weren’t happy about it.

“Having Sikorskys land in the neighborhood does seem contextually off, noisy, and potentially unsafe,” one neighbor emailed to another, referring to a brand of helicopter. They didn’t even ask Newport’s zoning board, she’d heard. Her concern, she emphasized, was “the character, livability, and safety of the neighborhood.” This wasn’t about begrudging the mansion’s new owners, Wall Street titan Stephen Schwarzman and his wife, Christine; by all accounts, they were “very nice people.”

Schwarzman, the 77-year-old CEO of private equity giant Blackstone, had purchased Miramar the year before, in the fall of 2021. The mansion, which boasts 44,000 square feet of living space, including 22 bedrooms, 14 bathrooms, and a seven-bed, seven-bath guesthouse, was completed in 1915 for a streetcar magnate who later died on the Titanic. Within months of buying Miramar, Schwarzman also acquired the residence next door, Ocean View, which has 15 bedrooms, 12 bathrooms, and a six-car garage. Together, they cost $43 million—making Schwarzman’s megaproperty among Newport’s most expensive home purchases ever.

This links to a pdf of the full story.