Turns Out We Weren't Stealing From Prince's Mom After All
Back in 1986, there were apparently quite a few people sneaking around the build site at 5622 Riverside Drive. Separated from Riverside Green by a deep thicket of uncultivated trees and shrubs, the massive new home was going up slowly but surely. Truckloads of stone, wood, and other materials arrived daily. Some of that wood was plywood. You could use it for ramps and whatnot. Your humble author, it must be admitted, participated in a small amount of Bernie-Sanders-style liberation from the capitalists, securing a half-sheet of plywood for a sloppily-constructed ramp that launched me and brother Bark into the air about fifteen times before collapsing into instant garbage.
I should point out that we weren't normally the stealing types, but the house under construction was so far out of our experience that it seemed like it didn't belong in reality. Who builds a massive cathedral of a home right next to a bunch of duplexes and multi-family dwellings, anyway? On the upward curve of a road where people regularly did 70+ mph, making it sheer murder to try getting in or out of the place?
Never in our various visits to the site, both thieving and merely touring, did we see a young dental student nosing around the place. But there was such a fellow...
The rumor in our neighborhood was that Prince was building the house for his mother. For some reason, I continued to accept that story well into my thirties, despite its patent idiocy. Why would Prince build a house for his mother in Ohio? He had no connection whatsoever to Ohio. Somebody must have just made the story up, perhaps after listening to "Purple Rain" one or ten too many times. We all believed it. The fact is that the house did, in fact, look like something a rock star would build for his mom.
The truth is that is was built by a Columbus businessman named Michael Anderson. The Franklin County Auditor says that it sold for $2.7 million in 1991, then for $1.4M in 1996 to football player Dan "Big Daddy" Wilkinson, then for $2.15M in 2001 to a fellow who let it go back to the bank. In 2008, David Baddour paid $1.8M for it. As a dental student in 1986, he'd been obsessed with the home as it was being built. He bought it right after he turned forty. Which right there reminds me what a fucking loser I am, not buying any $1.8M houses at that age. Dr. Baddour, who owns four dental practices in Columbus, then put the proverbial shit-ton of money into it, covering one ceiling with 24-karat gold paint and restoring all of the parts of the home that had fallen into disrepair over the years.
Two years ago, he listed it for over five million bucks.
It didn't sell.
So he still has it, but not to worry; he's not hurting. He just wanted to buy an even bigger "fixer-upper" down the street, apparently. I'm sure that home wasn't in Riverside Green.
You can see the interior of the house, which features secret passages and stained glass and imported marble toilets, in the WSJ and the Columbus Dispatch. Virtually all of the house was rebuilt by the good doctor from scratch, so there's no reason to think that's what it looked like when Bark and I were kids. Nor is any of it to my taste; I'm a devotee of mid-century modern, as readers of my Tomorrowland piece will recall.
Still. If I won the lottery tomorrow (which would require me to buy a ticket) I'd make the good dentist an offer. Surely the man who lives in that castle is the king of Riverside Green.