The former home of Red Sox Owner Harry Frazee Larchomnt, NY
For Sale in July 2016, asking price = $2,650.000
So much for the “house that Ruth built” later in New York. Now we have more of the facts behind Harry Frazee’s need to sell the greatest ballplayer in history to the Yankees prior to the 1920 baseball season – and it wasn’t all due to the AL Boston club owner’s need for $100,000 to float “No No, Nanette under the lights of Broadway alone that caused the biggest loss in Boston sports history and the curse that came with it for the rest of the 20th century and extra four years.
Flat out, it was the Harry Frazee lifestyle in general that did him in for the production money he needed for his theatrical interests. Although it still wasn’t enough for dealing Ruth away, as history has easily proven, $100,000 in late 1919 was a whole lot of money.
Harry Frazee wasn’t living under a bridge on the Charles River and surviving on stolen clams and crab lines at the time he sold Babe Ruth. We are not sure where he lived in Boston, but his place in Larchmont, NY was beyond “pretty nice.” That reality was brought home sharply for many of us by an article that SABR buddy Mark Wernick sent me only last night about the former Harry Frazee home being up for sale again this summer by the present owners. They are “only” asking $ 2,650,000 for the seven bedroom, six bath mansion in the community of Larchmont, but, hey, we only live once, right?
We also mistakenly thought this modest community in Larchmont was near Boston when we wrote this column earlier this morning, but readers Len Levin and Bill Hickman both helped us get our facts straight early in the day. Our apologies too for the fact that we do not either know the period of time that Frazee owned this property, but that matters little to the point here. The house speaks to the lifestyle requirements that contributed to the Red Sox owner’s needs to sell Ruth. Before or after the Ruth deal, the effect of the Ruth sale upon Frazee was pretty much the same. It was either the “House That Helped Cause the Loss of Ruth” or “The House That was Only Possible as the Result of the Sale of Ruth.”
Larchmont is a village located within the Town of Mamaroneck in Westchester County, New York, approximately 18 miles northeast of Midtown Manhattan.
The old Frazee place is a stunner-castle for those who like to dream big, even if those dreams occasionally are accompanied by a few delusions of grandeur. As we mentioned to Mark Wernick, it would make a great summer home for any Houstonian with both the desire and wherewithal needed to escape these cruelest months of our seasonal heat. Alas, we personally come up a tad shy on the wherewithal side of this equation.
Below are ten pictures of the old Frazee place in Larchmont. To see eleven more, just click this link and dream your own way through the slide show.
Again, it wasn’t just the Broadway show that cost young Harry Frazee his greatest baseball asset and earned him the eternal spite of Red Sox fans – and a curse that far exceeded his lifetime. It was the lifestyle of Harry Frazee that cost the Red Sox the lights out talent of the great Babe Ruth!
Former Frazee Home
One of Several Great Rooms
The Dining Room
The Kitchen
The Breakfast Nook
Sun Room to Backyard
One of the Six Bathrooms
One off the Seven Bedrooms
The Back Yard
The Driveway Entrance
Thank you, Mark Wernick! ~ What a great subject!
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Publisher, Editor, Writer
The Pecan Park Eagle
Houston, Texas
The Pecan Park Eagle 
July 22, 2016 at 12:54 pm |
Bill, that house is not in the Boston area. It is in Westchester County, outside New York City.
July 22, 2016 at 1:33 pm |
Thanks, Len.
July 22, 2016 at 3:55 pm |
Having been in New York City in the summer for Yankee and Met games, I don’t know how much improvement Westchester County would be over Houston regarding heat and humidity.
July 22, 2016 at 6:51 pm |
Tom, the only thing I recall from two summer vacations in the New Milford/Bridgewater CN area a few years ago is that it got cooler in the evening, Another time, 1994, the year we went to Cooperstown, it was a little cooler in the daytime – presumably because of the higher elevation – and very pleasant during the evening. Over the Hudson River from NYC, where my in-laws live, it was every ounce and inch as hot and humid as Houston.
July 23, 2016 at 1:25 am |
Prior to buying this house in November 1920, Frazee lived on Park Avenue in Manhattan, NYC. So, he was living large.