House, history are up for sale
Former Kennedy mansion placed on block
Before there was Hyannis Port, there was the Honey Fitz mansion in Hull.
If they look hard enough, house hunters can imagine the beginnings of an American political dynasty in the Hull mansion: perhaps a young Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy coming to summer at the house in 1917 with her newborn baby in her arms.
Born in Brookline, John F. Kennedy spent the first summer of his life in Hull, much of it at the sprawling multigabled house that his maternal grandfather bought.
The family returned for the next several summers, until its most famous owner, Mayor John F. ''Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald of Boston, sold the property in 1921 and moved to Wareham.
A Colorado mortgage company is hoping that history will be an ally when an auctioneer puts the historic Honey Fitz mansion in Hull out to bid Tuesday. The company is also hoping that one of those buyers will have a check for at least $2.3 million in his pocket, but that is by no means certain, given the soft market for luxury houses, said real estate analysts familiar with the property.
The 15-room mansion, which boasts a commanding view of the Boston skyline from its perch atop Allerton Hill, is coming on the market because the most recent owner, Jamie Edelkind, was sentenced to five years in prison last July in connection with a $4 million morgage scam centered on the property.
Federal prosecutors charged that Edelkind, a 42-year-old native of Georgia, used bogus and forged documents to obtain a series of mortgages that he used to buy the house and renovate it. He was convicted of wiring $580,000 in cash from the final refinancing to his wife in Norway before he defaulted, leaving Auroro Loan Services of Colorado in the lurch for $2.3 million.
US District Judge Morris Lasker, who presided over the trial, ordered the house put up for auction.
Boston historian Thomas H. O'Connor said yesterday that the house has a legitimate place in the historic legacy of the Kennedys, who are so often associated with images of the seashore, like President Kennedy sailing or his brother, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, running on Oregon Beach with his dog Freckles.
Not only was the Nantasket Avenue house a place where Rose Fitzgerald developed a love for the seashore, it was also large enough to host large gatherings of extended family and friends, O'Connor said.
After they married, Joseph and Rose Kennedy moved to nearby Cohasset and then finally down to Hyannis, where the family still controls a very large and very famous oceanfront property.
''You see a kind of a foreshadowing of the Kennedy compound," in the Hull house, O'Connor said.
But the dollar value of history will be very much tested at next week's auction, said Justine Augenstern, a sales agent at the Coldwell Banker Residential Real Estate office in Hull.
Interest in the house has been tepid, she said. A prior auction in January was called off, she said, when the auctioneer determined there were not enough interested bidders.
While the house itself is magnificent, with its amazing vistas and features like a huge formal dining room with beamed ceilings and oak wainscoting and two fireplaces, Augenstern said that it also has some issues that might deflect luxury buyers.
One is a lack of beach access. While close to the water, a new buyer walking toward the water would find large stones underfoot, not sand.
''I'm not sure they are going to get a lot, just based on the Fitzgerald name," she said. 