Sunday, May 08, 2005

For years, the main entrance to the Blackthorne Estates golf course community in Penn Township, Westmoreland County, sat half-finished, a knee-high wall of masonry abandoned by builders midway through its construction. Instead of signifying privilege, luxury and masterful planning -- the very allure of the upscale residential development -- it was a gateway to nothing.

Blackthorne Estates had been an ambitious, 315-acre project several years in the making. Developers envisioned 500 elegant, high-end homes hugging an 18-hole private golf course, country club, tennis courts and swimming pool. Ground was broken in 1996, but Blackthorne's owners quickly ran into financial trouble. Bankruptcy filings and lawsuits followed, and work was halted.

Inside the half-built entrance, off School Road South, Blackthorne was only three single-family homes, and what looked vaguely like a wheat field. The golf course's painstakingly cultivated bentgrasses and bluegrasses had grown tall, losing their unique structure and mixing irretrievably with weeds.

Today, 10 years after its initial "grand opening," Blackthorne is a place of action again.

Bulldozers chew up the landscape, grading lots for the next phase of homes. A nine-hole golf course designed by Arnold Palmer is scheduled to open this month. In Prudential's on-site sales office, the emerald carpet has become a makeshift putting green, where agents gently knock around Titleists while pushing Blackthorne to curious clients.

"Everything you see with a roof on it is already sold," said Tom Easton, project manager for Blackthorne Estates.

Buyers from Cranberry to the South Hills are snapping up the single-family houses, "Villa" duplexes and "Manor" townhouses promised but not yet built. Blackthorne's Phase II, which has yet to be approved by township engineers, is nearly sold out.

The biggest challenge in restarting Blackthorne Estates after its prolonged interruption was "bringing the clients and the credibility back into focus," Easton said. "Trying to make it a community for the few people who lived here prior to the takeover, and watched it bottom out."

A framed poster on the wall of the Blackthorne sales office quotes Winston Churchill: "Great Success Always Comes at the Risk of Enormous Failure."

In 1997, Wendler Construction Inc. split in two, and developer Robert Cawood was sued by ex-partner Raymond Wendler. Cawood soon filed for bankruptcy, attributing his $6.5 million in debt to various unpredictable factors.

The site stayed semidormant for nearly seven years, said Dallas Leonard, planning coordinator for Penn Township. Minor work went on over the years, Leonard said -- sporadic grading for the golf course, attempts to install a sewer line, obtaining a lone home-building permit here and there.

"The fact that it was delayed, it didn't help things any as far as we were concerned," said Leonard. "It was not an asset."

The turf died off from the stress of drought, said Eric Pockl, golf course superintendent under both Cawood and the current developer, Fairway LLC. "He essentially lost control," Pockl said. "He couldn't build anymore, he couldn't maintain what he had. It basically went away."

The few residents of Blackthorne found themselves stranded in their isolated houses in a barren field. Easton half-jokingly described their mental state during this time as "the hollows of despair." The first family to build a house at Blackthorne filed a lawsuit when they didn't get the sewer hookup they were promised.

Three years ago, Jan Gergely, a former orthodontic assistant, and her husband, Bill, district manager for a pharmaceutical company, moved into a villa near the 16th hole. There were two or three other Blackthorne families back then; the other half of their duplex was vacant. It was a lonely neighborhood then, Gergely said. The Blackthorne Homeowners Association, intended to give residents a snowplow- and lawnmower-free existence, was rendered moot for lack of members.

"It was kind of scary, but we kept being reassured that it's going to happen, it's going to happen," she said. "We just thought, sooner or later it has to take off. So we held out."

Over the past decade, Penn Township has grown 20 percent, Leonard said. In the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, about 200 houses were built in the township each year; the current growth rate is about 100 a year, he said. When Blackthorne broke ground, Penn Township had much more available land than it does now, Leonard said. Another couple of planned residential developments are in the works, including Walton Estates, which involves 236 potential home sites and is on target to be finished within the next couple of years.

Such rapid growth during Blackthorne's long hiatus has positioned it well. The large lots and spacious homes can command a premium: single-family houses cost upward of $350,000; duplexes, more than $220,000; and townhouses, more than $165,000.

Fairway LLC is a group of four investors, two based in Pittsburgh, another in Washington, D.C., and the fourth in Columbus, Ohio. Although each partner was individually experienced in home building and site development, Easton said, Blackthorne was the group's first collective venture.

They had to convince potential clients that Blackthorne Estates was no longer a risky proposition. One of the first orders of business, though perhaps symbolic, Easton said, was to complete the main entrance abandoned years before.

"That made a big difference," real estate agent Barbara Wolff agreed.

Another symbolically important step was to build a permanent sales office on one of Blackthorne's carriage house lots, rather than use a temporary double-wide trailer, "to bring the confidence of the consumer back," Easton said.

Of course, a little unmitigated luxury doesn't hurt, either.

The sales office is crammed with high-end bathroom fixtures, a dozen kinds of distressed patio brick. Buyers can customize their homes with Gothic entryways, Frank Lloyd Wright-designed stained glass, vaulted ceilings and skylights. The houses already built at Blackthorne are all supersize, with the standard three-car garages, acres of gleaming hardwood floors and supersize Jacuzzi baths looking out onto the golf course greens. Six more phases are slated for the next seven years, totaling some 450 houses.

Pockl, the golf course superintendent, estimated Blackthorne's second nine holes would be complete next year. He stressed that the new golf course was orders of magnitude better than the previous course, which he called "mediocre."

"It's two different worlds," Pockl said.

Penn Township is not exactly hurting for golf courses, however. It has four of them, Leonard said, two of which are within a half-mile of Blackthorne.

But Easton said Blackthorne wasn't marketing itself against traditional golf courses. It's part of the larger trend of golf courses being built in association with residential development. The twin elements of "golf" and "community" are relatively rare in Pittsburgh's eastern suburbs, and will be the key to Blackthorne's success, he said.

The downswing in golf courses are most often associated with the stand-alone, equity courses, where members are owners.

"If you go to Columbus, Ohio, you'll find a golf course community on one side of the street, right across from another golf course community," Easton said. "They're building so many of them. It kind of separates you from just the typical housing development. This is a little town in itself. You go to any other driving range, and you may not know the people standing next to you."

Easton even manages to see the positive aspects in Blackthorne's extended period of abandonment. In the past decade, the school district has expanded to accommodate other growth, he said. Look back 10 years and you wouldn't easily find homes of Blackthorne's size and opulence in Penn Township.

"The delay actually maybe made this community a better fit for the overall township," Easton said.

Inside her Blackthorne villa, Jan Gergely sits and watches out her window as the landscape around her changes. Two houses went up on her street in the past month, she said. The place crawls with construction workers, and baby boomers, of which Gergely is one, are moving into nearby townhouses.

"We're finally getting neighbors," she said. "It's a little overwhelming at times, but at least it's progress."