Music star sells mansion for R$280 million that he saw for the first time when he was a fisherman

A teenager then known as William Martin Joel lived in the working-class suburb of Hicksville—his family was so poor they didn’t own a TV. He took on a grueling minimum-wage job dredging oysters.

The dredge crossed the waters of Long Island Sound, including a bay that curves like a comma and faces some of the most expensive real estate in the United States. From the boat, he could see an imposing brick mansion.

“Rich bastards,” he thought to himself. “I will never live in a house like that.”

Several decades and dozens of Top 40 hits later, Billy Joel—the oyster fisherman turned music star—bought this same Center Island mansion in 2002.

Joel, 75, has told this story many times, including the expletive, perhaps because it is so unbelievable: “The word that applies is ‘absurd.’ I grew up in a tiny house in Hicksville. And I would ride my bike here and look at all the rich people and call them names,” he says.

On Wednesday, a team of real estate agents and advertisers working on your behalf held an open house to sell the property. The listing price is US$49.9 million (about R$281.2 million).

The event, which lasted several hours, was by invitation only, and high-end real estate agents arrived by speedboat. Potential buyers are in the 0.1% — at least one billionaire and the representative of a Brussels-based hedge fund were expected to visit the house. Joel’s former neighbors include Rupert Murdoch, Sean Hannity and one of the heirs to the Exxon Mobil fortune, according to his team.

It’s a group a world away from the one Joel used to inhabit, their identity and music closely tied to working-class Long Island.

Hicksville, where he grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, is less than 15 miles from his mansion. When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, his mother sent him to a nearby store to rent a TV. He returned with the TV on a cart, his biographer Fred Schruers explained.

Although Joel’s family didn’t have a television set, they had a beat-up Lester upright piano, and his mother insisted he take lessons, Schruers said. Eager to go out and play with his friends, Joel resented practicing, so he learned to imitate Beethoven’s style well enough to make his mother think he was following the score, he said.

He tried to incorporate these modest musical roots into the property when he first purchased it, naming it “MiddleSea” — a reference to its mid-sea location, on a spit of land jutting out with Oyster Bay on one side and Cold Spring on one side. Harbor on the other. But it’s also a pun referring to the note middle C, the first key beginning pianists learn.

“If it wasn’t for me being able to take piano lessons, I probably would never have been able to purchase a high-end property like this. So I named it after the first note I learned on the piano, which was C,” he explained.

The 105,000 m² high-end property has a main house, a beach house and two guest houses, totaling 18 bedrooms, 16 bathrooms, three swimming pools, a bowling alley and a helipad.

The vastness of the grounds is difficult to describe in words, so I walked from one end of the property line to the other. At a brisk pace, it took me 9 minutes and 3 seconds, about the same time it takes me to walk seven city blocks in Manhattan.

Guests and Joel get around in golf carts—electric, his property manager quickly notes.

A sandy beach, more than 600 meters long, beautifies the edge of the property.

On Long Island’s “Gold Coast,” as the area is known, “it’s rare to find a property with 200 feet of beach,” said Emmett Laffey, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices, which is representing Joel in the property’s sale.

The singer still owns other properties on Long Island, including a home in Sag Harbor, but his home base is now in Florida, where his two youngest daughters, ages 7 and 9, are enrolled in school. “Once they start going to school, you’re kind of stuck,” Joel said.

That’s one of the reasons he’s selling. There’s also a more mundane concern: taxes.

At $567,686, the annual property taxes are more than the average sale price of a single-family home in the United States. “It’s not cheap, let’s put it that way,” he said. “As successful as I’ve been financially, yeah, that’s, you know, a lot.”

The house was put up for sale for the first time last year. A renovation that involved replacing all bathroom fixtures, installing new marble floors, renovating the kitchens and renovating the brick paths and patios was still underway — tarps covered certain rooms and didn’t show well, Laffey said. It was taken off the market and relisted last month after renovations were completed, with a price increase to $49.9 million from $49 million.

To sell a property at this price level, a “high open house” was appropriate. Uniformed waiters served shrimp and goat cheese appetizers while classical music played on a sound system throughout the property.

The group of high-end real estate agents who arrived by speedboat to tour the property were seeing it for the first time the same way Joel first saw it — from shore, except he was on an oyster boat and guests had arrived. holding luxury bags.

One woman in the group took off her heels and ran back barefoot after realizing she had forgotten her Dior bag on the dock — the group had stopped to take photos against the sparkling water.

“This is so beautiful,” said one. “Wonderful,” said another, as the mansion on the hill came into focus. “What a view,” said a third.

What they visited was actually a restoration. Joel’s property manager, Chad Nuzzi, discovered blueprints and plans, dated 1913 and signed by George Bullock, a railroad magnate, in a hidden closet. The property had been named “Yeadon,” intended by Joel and his team as a reference to the ancestral village of Bullock in England, and had been subdivided into four lots.

In the years that followed, Joel said he worked to reconstitute the original property — recreating a tract of land of “Gatsbyian” proportions (The trust that purchased the original parcel in 2002 is listed as “F. Scott LLC,” a possible reference to F. Scott Fitzgerald.)

Joel lived a life of luxury there. While fans of the working-class nostalgia depicted in his songs filled Madison Square Garden again and again, Joel flew to the concert venue by helicopter—a 13-minute flight from takeoff to landing—from his helipad.

Not bad for a former oyster fisherman.

“I love this property. I don’t think there’s a property as beautiful as this,” he said. “It has that Gatsby feel that I dreamed about when I was a boy. When I hand over the keys, there will be some regret.”