People lust to live in Irving Park for its beauty, for the big houses with views of the Greensboro Country Club golf course and for the prestige of an old neighborhood where exclusivity has increased with age.
The Guilford County Tax Department loves Irving Park, too, even though some department employees can afford only a Sunday afternoon ride through the neighborhood.Once again, as it has for decades, Irving Parkers constitute the department's top-dollar residential customers.
Tax officials say residents of Irving Park paid more property taxes per house in 2004 than in any other neighborhood. But another, more recent trend continues, too: More houses with Irving Park-like tax values are appearing in newer areas, such as Brassfield, Grandover, Lake Brandt, Lake Jeannette and New Irving Park .
Of the 204 houses in Greensboro valued at $1 million or more, 105 are in Irving Park, according to tax department records. Six of the top eight are in Irving Park, which is two miles north of downtown, with Sunset and Country Club drives as the main thoroughfares.
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The annual tax bills some Irving Park residents pay would amount to more than a decent annual salary for many people.
The highest 2004 tax bill, $69,066.82, was paid by John Ellison, owner of a large estate with a Georgia n- style house at Country Club Drive and Carlisle Road. The county appraised the house at
$5.8 million. The second highest, $50,138.67, was the former estate of Kenneth and Ronda Kornfeld, a French Normandy- style castle at Country Club and Cleburne Drive. The house has a $4.1 million tax value.
The Kornfelds lost the house in 2004 as part of a $400 million settlement with several Japanese insurance companies, which alleged reinsurance companies owned by Kornfeld and a partner defrauded the companies out of more than
$1 billion.
The check for the Kornfeld's 2004 taxes, paid by a company called Carofort North Carolina, didn't arrive until Jan. 19 of this year - 14 days late. Carofort, whose incorporation papers listed a New York address, is believed to have been organized by the Japanese companies to sell off Kornfeld's holdings.
The former Kornfeld house is on the market for $6.5 million, the highest amount ever sought for a Greensboro residence. The Kornfelds bought the house for nearly $2.2 million in 1992, at the time the highest amount ever paid for an existing house in the city.
The third and fourth homes in Greensboro with the highest values are owned by Bonnie McElveen-Hunter and her next-door neighbor, Katherine Preyer Dematteo.
McElveen-Hunter 's house is a Georgian- style built by Burlington Industries founder J. Spencer Love in the 1930s.
McElveen-Hunter paid $48,908.80 in taxes on a house with a tax value of $4.1 million.
Dematteo, whose house is between McElveen-Hunter's and Ellison's, paid $37,727.58 in taxes on a house valued at $3 million.
The two-story stucco house with a green roof and sweeping lawn was built in the early 1900s for one of Irving Park's founders, A.W. McAlister. It was designed by Philadelphia architect Charles Barton Keen, who earlier designed Reynolda House in Winston-Salem for tobacco baron R.J. Reynolds and his wife, Katherine.
While Irving Park continues to dominate the tax list of most expensive homes, a street that may rank as Greensboro's richest is across town - Club View Court, a short cul-de-sac that juts into the Starmount Forest Country Club golf course off Holden Road.
The street has 12 houses, all of which have tax values of more than $1 million . The highest belongs to Dr. Donald Linder, owner of Pyramids Wellness Centers and other businesses. He paid taxes of $26,211.95 on a house valued at nearly $2.5 million.
In times past, Irving Park, Starmount, Sunset Hills, Sedgefield and Hamilton Lakes led the county tax department's list of most expensive homes.
No more. Club View Court has kept Starmount on the list. Sedgefield showed up with only four $1 million-plus homes. Hamilton Lakes has two, although one, a lake side French-style castle owned by Randall Kaplan and his wife, Kathy Manning, ranks among the city's most expensive. Kaplan and Manning paid $24,371.43 on their property valued for taxes at nearly $2.1 million.
Newer neighborhoods are catching the fancy of people with money for monster mortgages and sizable tax bills. Brassfield, off Battleground Avenue and New Garden Road, has 14 million-dollar plus homes.
Two Brassfielders are Carolina Panther player Ricky Proehl and Joe Bostic, retired from the St. Louis and Arizona Cardinals. They live close to each other on Bromley Woods Lane. Proehl's house is valued at $1.14 million, which translated into a $13,931.25 tax bill in 2004. Bostic's house is valued at nearly $1.4 million, on which he paid $13,489.61 in taxes in 2004.
New Irving Park, which borders Buffalo Lake off Cone Boulevard, has 12 homes with tax values of more than $1 million. Grandover, off Interstate 85 near Sedgefield, a resort community with two golf courses, has 16 million-dollar plus houses.
Lake Jeannette in northern Greensboro has 21, and the area around Lake Brandt has six.
Jenks Crayton, the county tax director, says property tax values are easy to determine for many neighborhoods, especially subdivisions where houses are built pretty much alike. But, he says, judging the 451 homes in Irving Park - a neighborhood listed on the National Register of Historic Places - is a challenge.
No two houses are alike.
The neighborhood was designed in 1911 by nationally known landscape architect John Nolen of Cambridge, Mass., with the centerpiece being the Greensboro Country Club golf course.
A few years later, Nolen's original design was expanded by another nationally acclaimed landscaper, Robert Cridland of Philadelphia.
More expansion came after World War II, but those houses tended to be modest compared with pre-war houses.
Since the last county wide property tax re-evaluation in 1996 and the most recent one in 2003, changes took place in Irving Park that enhanced tax values.
New and younger owners bought some of the largest and oldest houses - and in some cases run-down - and made major improvements.
An example is the old L. Richardson Preyer home at Sunset Drive and Briarcliff Road. After Preyer's death in 2001, Len White bought the house, which had become run-down, and renovated it inside and out without tampering with its historic character.
The house, built in 1924, was designed by Keen, the architect who did the Dema-tteo house.
White's improvements increased the total tax value to just over $2.2 million and the tax bill to $26,676.82 in 2004.
The county's tax coffers also were improved when smaller houses were demolished and replaced with larger ones.
An example is the new Sigmund Tannenbaum house at 1805 Granville Road. Until 1999, John Dunning owned a smaller house at the site and paid $5,089 in property taxes. Tannenbaum bought the house, tore it down, built a larger one and paid $33,716.90 in property taxes in 2004. The new value is nearly $2.8 million.
There are dozens of other example of smaller houses falling for bigger ones, with the beneficiaries being the county tax department.
The emergence of newer neighborhoods with large, expensive homes indicates Greensboro seems to be prospering, with many desirable neighborhoods.
But Calvin White, who appraises Irving Park property for the tax department, doesn't expect the neighborhood to lose its dominance in the years ahead. Take the situations of Pearce Landry and Lee Porter. Landry is a former UNC-Chapel Hill basketball player who grew up in middle -class circumstances in Greensboro.
After college, he went to Charlotte, made a fortune in investments and returned to Greensboro - and bought a house in Irving Park that has a tax value of nearly $1.6 million. His 2004 tax bill was $13,706.
Porter, who played on the PGA Tour off and on for years, grew up in Irving Park. When he built a new home recently, he selected Birch Lane in Irving Park. The house has a tax value of $1 million. He paid $12,255.10 in taxes in 2004.
"When it comes to new and old money,' appraiser White said , "many want to live in Irving Park.'
\ Contact Jim Schlosser at 373-7081 or jschlosser@news-record.com
\ Contact Margaret Moffett Banks at 373-7031 or mbanks@news-record.com
