Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Whoopi Goldberg Is A Jersey Girl

BUYER: Whoopi Goldberg
LOCATION: West Orange, NJ
PRICE: $2,800,000
SIZE: 9,486 square feet, 8 bedrooms, 6 full and 2 half bathrooms
DESCRIPTION: Stately and elegant, this perfect Colonial Mansion sits in the heart of world famous Llewellyn Park. Home of the Edisons, Chubbs, Colgates, etc. This stately home sits in lush gardens with carriage house, servant's house, and greenhouse.

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: A few weeks ago Your Mama discussed the art filled New York City loft that Oscar winning comedienne/actress Whoopi Goldberg listed for sale with an asking price of $3,990,000. Today, thanks to a leg up from Lulu Letsusknow, we're going to discuss the West Orange, NJ mansion–listed with a price tag of $2,999,999–that property records reveal the gabfest grandee scooped up in August of 2009 for $2,800,000.

Once upon a time, way back in the early 1990s, Miz Goldberg was a capital "c" celebrity with all the suits in Tinseltown bowing down to her big box office receipts and star turns on television programs like Star Trek: The Next Generation. More recently the vexatiously eyebrowless Miz Goldberg has done more voice over work (Toy Story 3, Descendants, Snow Buddies, Everyone's Hero, Doogal) than in front of the camera acting and, of course, she spends five mornings a week pontificating, opining and rolling her eyes at wide-eyed Republican Elizabeth Hasselback on The View.

Property records show Miz Goldberg's new mansion, which listing information called Colonial but which is really more Georgian, was built in 1927 and sits on a 2.34 parcel in the leafy, gated community of Llewellyn Park. Llewellyn Park, located just 14 miles west of lower Manhattan, was established by a Mister Llewellyn in the 1850s and bills itself as the first planned community in the United States. The 425-acre community offers residents a 24 hour guarded gate, bucolic streets lined with period gas lamps, and a 50 acre landscaped park called The Ramble that meanders through the community. Somehow we imagine that the activities in Llewellyn Park's family friendly Ramble is a far cry from the lusty activities that go on behind trees and in the bushes of The Ramble in New York City's Central Park.

Miz Goldberg, hardly the first prominent person to call Llewellyn Park, joins a long lists of former notable residents including members of the Colgate family (soap and toothpaste), the Merck family (pharmaceuticals), and the Chubb family (safes) as well as Thomas Edison (electricity) whose estate Glenmont is a National Historic Site, and former minister turned abolitionist James Miller McKim whose Llewellyn Park house contained secret rooms used to hide escaped slaves traveling on the Underground Railroad.

Listing information and property records reveal Miz Goldberg's new house, called Ravenscroft, measures in at 9,486 square feet and includes 8 bedrooms and six full and 2 half poopers. That's a lot of damn terlits for a ladee who, as far as Your Mama knows, lives all by her lonesome.

Listing information indicates that beyond the curving circular driveway and the columned portico, the historic home counts 23 rooms including a grand entrance hall, a paneled living room with a black, veined marble fireplace surround, a banquet hall sized dining room, a family room lined with a series of tall, arched windows and an newly renovated eat in kitchen with a large work island, cream colored faux-antiqued cabinetry, granite counter tops and all the over-sized stainless steel appliances one can and should expect in a house of this weight and cost. The vast master bedroom includes a vintage, tiled bathroom plenty large enough to comfortably navigate in a damn hoop skirt, not that the somewhat masculine Miz Goldberg will be donning a hoop skirt any time soon.

Other amenities include a sitting room and sun room on the second floor, a tee-vee watching room off the kitchen, and in the basement a wine cellar, paneled billiard room, fitness room, and a media room. The wonky rear facade of the house shows a wide screened porch stretching along a good portion of the main floor. Your Mama loves us a screened porch because dealing with all them flying bugs and mosquitoes that come around on the East Coast during the hot and humid summer times can be an itchy load of misery. Listing information Your Mama managed to dig up shows the genteel property includes lush gardens, expansive lawns, a swimming pool as well as a carriage house, greenhouse and a servant's house.

Having once lived in a spectacular house in blue-blooded Tuxedo Park, NY Miz Goldberg is certainly no stranger to upscale gated communities in suburban New York City. Property records also show that the dreadlocked jokester whose real name is the much less funny Caryn Johnson also owns a house in Pacific Palisades, CA and she may or may not still own and 8,000 acre spread in Vermont, a small house (or duplex) in Berkeley, CA and some kind of property in Cornwall, CT.

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