"That's the biggest secret in town," said Michael Wylie, the zoning officer. "I don't know anyone who knows."
Interviews with developers, neighbors, preservationists, and other township officials turned up the same response. Government records of the transaction lead to dead-ends.
And although the buyer's attorney points out that there is no legal obligation for the person to come forward, there is considerable dissatisfaction that he or she has not.
"The frustration for a lot of people who love this building is that they can't talk directly to the owner," Mike Weilbacher, president of the Lower Merion Conservancy, said yesterday. "They don't have direct access to the person who has made this decision, and that's atypical."
Preservationists fear losing an irreplaceable slice of local history. La Ronda, 1030 Mount Pleasant Rd., was designed by the famed architect Addison Mizner and built in 1929 for a leather-tanning magnate, Percival Foerderer.
"It would just be absolutely terrible and disgraceful to tear it down," said neighbor John McKelvey, whose house was an outbuilding on La Ronda's original 250-acre estate.
The buyer's attorney, Joseph Kuhls, has said the owner thought the dwelling was an impractical place to raise a family because it is in disrepair and lacks air-conditioning.
The plan is to raze the 17,500-square-foot Spanish Gothic house and build a single-family house of about 10,000 square feet on the 3.2-acre site.
The new dwelling would lack the historic stature of La Ronda as the only remaining house in Pennsylvania built by Mizner, whose flamboyant architecture is so prevalent in South Florida that an 11-foot-tall statue of him stands in Boca Raton. The preservationists hope the new owner can be talked out of demolition or persuaded to sell La Ronda to a possible deep-pocketed benefactor.
But first, they want to find the owner.
