For 10 years now, the Greystone Mansion has sat empty, a Beverly Hills colossus of 55 rooms and 46,054 square feet, perched on 18 acres of hillside near Trousdale Estates. And no one seems to know what to do with it.
The majestic Tudor-style mansion--considered the crown jewel in a landscape of fabled homes--is owned by the city, which so far has found no public use for it. Time after time, grand schemes have fizzled. Some activists have hoped to turn Greystone into a museum, an idea that drew enthusiastic interest from renowned modern art collectors Joseph Hirschhorn and Frederick R. Weisman.
Yet deals with the two collectors went the way of all other proposals--nowhere. All have collapsed amid community squabbles over traffic, lease contracts and even matters of taste: whether, for example, modern art is desirable in a city better suited, some say, to the Old Masters.
With phase one of a new, $40,000 study expected this month, efforts are under way to resolve the issue of Greystone Mansion and its lavish gardens once and for all. Skeptics abound. Such studies, committee meetings and proposals go back so far that most participants have lost count. No matter what the recommendation--dance theater, think tank, museum of art, sorcery or ornithology--Greystone has remained no more than a hulking civic enigma.
"It's totally a white elephant . . . it's a disgrace," said Frederick Nicholas, former president of the Greystone Foundation, a citizens committee established six years ago to find a use for the mansion. "They've had at least 25 proposed uses and nothing has come of it. It's a valuable asset being permitted to rot."
Nicholas, now chairman of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, is a Beverly Hills resident who has lived next door to Greystone Mansion for 18 years. In bitterness and frustration, he resigned from the foundation a few years ago, giving way to a new president, Donald DeWitt, who is less cynical about the mansion.
Still, DeWitt is not expecting a quick solution either.
"I don't think it'll settle anything," DeWitt said of the pending study by the planning and consulting firm of Pannell Kerr Forster. "It may give a little insight into some other options . . . maybe eliminate some things. We've all been frustrated to some degree or another."
