BOBBYWOOD

Gardiner (New York), Nov. 4: Even after he bought his 78-acre property here, expanded it and turned it into a veritable Bobbywood, Robert De Niro never made much of an impression on this town of 5,800 farmers, climbers, labourers and second-home owners.

De Niro rarely passes through but for the occasional ice cream cone with his younger children, local residents say, and the only way people even know he is here is when a helicopter comes buzzing up the Wallkill River, landing on his ample fields where apples once grew.

“He’s the ghost of Gardiner,” John Habersberger, a local gadfly, said while standing on the two-block Main Street last week.

De Niro’s message to his neighbours in this Ulster County town 75 miles north of Manhattan could have been delivered by one of his menacing characters: Don’t bother me, I won’t bother you.

Yet De Niro and the town are bothering each other a lot these days. Their quarrel — as familiar to those with blue collars as red carpets — is over the property tax bill.

A simple challenge to a $6 million property assessment has turned into a grinding court battle that has cost the town more in legal fees than it stands to win. And the Riverside Trust, the legal entity that owns the property for the De Niro family, has shown no inclination to back down.

While a number of residents are questioning whether the fight is worth it, they are also not hiding their dismay towards De Niro, especially since a judge ruled against the trust in June and then, rejecting a settlement, it decided to appeal.

Dawn Foti-Correa, who runs the one barber shop in town, Cuts by Dawn, said she estimated that 75 per cent of her customers had been rooting for De Niro.

“But now he won’t let up, and that’s got people ticked off, too,” she said.

When the trust bought the property in 1997, it cost $1.5 million and included an 18th-century wood-frame farmhouse with two additions, from the 1820s and 1980s, for a total of six bedrooms, seven baths and 2,700 feet of frontage on the river.

Since then, the trust has added 20 acres, and, according to court records, enough new construction for a town within the town.

A barn was turned into a 14,000-square-foot recreation centre with a game room, gym, basketball court, swimming pool, steam room, sauna — and boxing ring and small film studio. Another barn was turned into a workshop and one was built as an office. There are two guesthouses, a tennis court and a small ski slope.

More than $1 million in landscaping blocks the view from the road, which used to run to the river until the trust bought that stretch of pavement from the town, too.

In May 2010, Gardiner received notice that the trust was challenging its $6 million assessment. John E. Watkins, a White Plains lawyer who represents the trust in the dispute, said he was not sure why the challenge came when it did, especially since the taxes did not change between 2009 and 2010.

“Perhaps it was just a V8 moment, where someone was going through the books and just smacked their head on this,” Watkins said. During the trial, each side presented drastically different views of the property, as though trying to price Buckingham Palace if it were in the Bronx.

The trust said comparables should be drawn only from Ulster County, where the median home price was $330,000 between 2008 and 2011 and only six properties sold for more than $2 million.

The town countered that the property was a unique, estate-quality home and could be marketed to wealthy buyers.