Good Fences Make Good Neighbors

I love Prairie Home Companion. It’s usually a lot of fun, and, at its best, it tells a side of upper-midwestern scandihoovian life that doesn’t get well-described elsewhere. Garrison Keillor has an amazing ear for the local argot, and some wonderful insights into the stoic, dysfunctional, warm heart of the region.

But good lord, he can (allegedly) be a real jagoff.

Keillor and his wife, Jenny Lind Nilsson, are suing their next-door neighbor, Lori Anderson, to stop her from building a two-story addition to her home that would include a three-stall garage and studio.

The lawsuit, filed Monday in Ramsey County District Court, claims the addition would “obstruct the access of light and air to the Nilsson-Keillor property” and “impair or destroy protected historical resources.”

The complaint also said the project would obstruct their view “of open space and beyond” and possibly hurt property value. The estimated market value a year ago for Keillor’s home was about $1.2 million, according to property tax records; Anderson’s was about $600,000.

The City of Saint Paul – which administers building permits rather carefully in the tony, historic Ramsey Hill neighborhood via its’ “Heritage Preservation Commission” – is also a defendant; it claims Keillor was notified the same way all Saint Paulites get notified of such things; by mail.
Naturally, there are at least two sides to the story.

Anderson, who has owned her home since 1999 and lives there with fiancé Paul Olson, said Monday that Keillor and his wife have been good neighbors and that she is wary of offending them.”We were heartsick,” Anderson said of learning about the suit.

Olson said when he and Anderson decided to marry, they realized their one-car garage wasn’t big enough. Even before they hired an architect, the couple said they talked to neighbors. They planned to build three stalls, a storage area and a mudroom on the first floor and a studio for Anderson’s business on the second. The addition would be a few feet lower than the existing home and would be attached to the rear.

The project would add about 1,900 finished and unfinished square feet to the home, which now has 2,124 finished square feet. The Keillor-Nilsson home has 5,168 finished square feet, according to tax records.

According to Anderson, they jumped through all the usual hoops one must go through to build an addition to a home, especially a historic one.

City Attorney John Choi said Monday that “we have reviewed the plaintiffs’ allegations in the complaint and find them to be without merit. It is our position that the city, Board of Zoning Appeals and the Heritage Preservation Commission acted in compliance with the law and within our legal discretion.”

Olson said Monday that Keillor and his wife “couldn’t have cared less” when Anderson told them they were building a bigger garage.

“He’s a busy guy,” Olson said. “We didn’t feel obligated to include him in the planning.”

Let’s take a step back.  Keillor’s public persona is that of a lovable, if unctuous, academic – that fuzzy-headed professor that’d make you laugh when he wasn’t boring you stiff.

As I wrote five years ago, there’s another side:

I used to be a radio producer. I knew people who’d dealt with Keillor – fellow low-level producers, production assistants, the grunts that do the dirty work that has to be done for show like Keillor’s to come off. To a person, they all – every one – describe him as “extremely abusive when angry”, “selfish”, “never has a good word to say about anybody”, “no social skills”, “treats his colleagues like dirt”, ” keeps people hanging on without officially hiring them”, “destroys people behind their backs”, “acts like his shit doesn’t stink”, “dumps [employees] without warning”. Most concisely, “a complete son of a bitch”. Every one of those is from people who’ve worked with Keillor in some professional capacity, many of whom don’t dare say a thing because they want to work in these towns again. Keillor, it seems, also as a reputation for squashing careers.

It was a local joke among radio people in the eighties – Keillor went through “personal assistants” like kleenex. He was as petulant as any caricature of a golden-age movie queen. He demanded his subordinates worship him. He cast them off like old underwear when they displeased him. He was a spoiled, petulant egomaniac.

The article above was a follow-up to this one which, in addition to garnering my first Instalanche and putting this blog on the map, drew a number of emails from former and current Public Radio and Keillor employees.  They excoriated the man – and, to a person, begged to be kept anonymous.

Keillor’s not a pleasant employer.

And if the Strib’s story is true, I can’t say as I’d want to be his neighbor, either:

Olson said he and Anderson were on vacation in New Zealand when they received “an angry e-mail” from Keillor on Nov. 29. The e-mail accused Anderson and Olson of building “a carriage house” and said, “If we had known, we would have been horrified. … Neighbors do not deal with neighbors the way you dealt with us.”

Anderson and Olson cut short their vacation and returned home, hoping to talk to Keillor and Nilsson.

“We wrote them a very conciliatory e-mail to say we’ll do anything we can to work it out,” Anderson said. “They refused to talk to us.”

To paraphrase P.J.O’Rourke, you can reason with Keillor.  You can also reason with livestock, for all the good that’ll do you, if his former colleagues are to be believed.

I wonder – if he loses the court action, maybe he’s thinking of packing up and moving to New York in a snit again?

4 thoughts on “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors

  1. They showed the two houses on the news last night. Old Scouts was dozens of feet taller than the Anderson’s house. This man is a shriveled prune in every possible way.
    My last ounce of patience with him dissolved when he uttered the words “I’m not saying the Bush administration had Paul Wellstone’s plane shot down, but…”

  2. To be fair to Keillor, if his neighbor had mentioned over the backyard-fence “Say, we’re thinking of re-doing our garage” but the eventual permit was for a structure larger than my house, I can see where Keillor would be miffed.

    And the City’s claim that it followed all required procedures and sent all required notices is boilerplate lawyer denial stuff. Saint Paul routinely ignores those rules and everybody knows it.

    Most recent example: The District 10 Newsletter was delivered in the mail yesterday, January 14th. Inside is a notice that the District Council is having a special election to fill vacant seats in January so if you want to nominate somebody for a vacancy, you must write or e-mail the Board IN ADVANCE OF THE JANUARY 15 MEETING. Which is TODAY.

    The Council is short three members and it’s giving residents about 12 hours notice to apply? You just know that when they’re asked, they’ll claim to have mailed notice to all residents well in advance of the election, so the fact that their hand-picked cronies were the only nominees is mere coincidence.

    I don’t doubt that Keillor can be an ass. But I wouldn’t trust a word the City said, either.

    .

  3. What a puky man good ol’ Garrison is. Can’t stand him and this is the icing on the cake. Again, tho, it’s so damn typical of a leftist. I’ve got mine, so you there in the smaller house can get bent. Who’d want to live next door to him anyway? His picture in the Strib sure was heartwarming-really showed he’s as ugly on the outside as he is on the inside.

  4. Pingback: Three Or Four Races Are Plenty | Shot in the Dark

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