The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
04/13/05

Driveway polarizes neighbors

Judge to decide if Buckhead homeowner owes city millions and jail
time

By TY TAGAMI

To Sarkis Agasarkisian, the massive rock pile signifies beauty,
strength and peace of mind.

The free rock from a city sewer excavation buttressed his crumbling
and dangerous driveway, the immigrant from Armenia said. “My driveway
today is like heaven.”

T. Levette Bagwell/AJC
(ENLARGE)
Sarkis Agasarkisian says he built his rock driveway with city
approval; a judge decides today whether that’s true. What’s not in
dispute is that the project divided Agasarkisian and his Buckhead
neighbors, who consider his effort ugly.

LOUIE FAVORITE/AJC STAFF

To his neighbors in the swank Buckhead area, the pile of so-called
“tunnel muck” is straight from hell. They see it as an eyesore that
has silted a downstream lake and damaged their property values. They
see the rocks and the trees he tore down to place them there as an
obvious act of environmental devastation and arrogant disregard for
the law.

A judge will decide today which side is right, but several things
already seem clear: The Agasarkisian family has a history of moving
soil and cutting down trees in Buckhead, and the family from “the
land of stone” and their neighbors in “the city of trees” have
fundamentally different notions of beauty.

Agasarkisian, who came to the United States in 1979 at age 21 and is
now a U.S. citizen, was fined nearly $50,000 for felling the trees
without permission. He could end up paying much more. Observers say
he piled anywhere from 50 to 700 dump-truck loads into the ravine
between his ranch-style home and West Conway Drive. Atlanta Municipal
Court Judge Lisa West said after the bench trial last week that she
would rule today whether he dumped the rock without a permit and did
so too close to a drainage ditch, as the city has claimed.

Agasarkisian faces fines of more than $1 million, and his attorneys
say he theoretically could be sent to jail for more than 100 years.
Shel Schlegman, a neighbor who has led the fight against the
driveway, said he and the other residents in the Mount Paran Road
area believe Agasarkisian has ruined his property. “It looks like a
logging camp,” said Schlegman, an architect. “It’s all just stone.
There’s nothing green there.”

Schlegman said he believes Agasarkisian thought he could act with
impunity after watching his brother do something similar to his own
property, without apparent sanction.

Agasarkisian’s brother lives a mile away, in a ranch-style house
surrounded by similarly unhappy neighbors.

The residents of Swims Valley Drive say Aroutioun Agasarkisian, or
Harry, as they call him, cut down dozens of pines that once hid his
home from the road. They say he hauled in soil and terraced the
sloping yard into what they derisively call the “rice paddies,” then
allowed weeds to grow. A brick ledge that peeled off the front of the
house is still where it fell, and a stone fountain near the street
stopped gurgling soon after it was built and has been dry ever since,
they say.

“It’s an unsightly mess,” said Al Goodgame, whose house at the end of
the street overlooks a forested ravine. “He mows his grass once a
year. It’s almost like it’s his revenge for when we made a stink when
he cut down the trees.”

Goodgame, a retired landscape architect, wrote a letter to the
neighborhood association president in April 2000, complaining that as
many as 45 mature trees had been toppled and that the city had done
nothing about it.

Why ‘ugly homes’?

The letter, signed by nearly all the residents on the street,
described a chaotic scene. It said chain saws buzzed on the property
from mid-February until late March of that year, often until 11 p.m.
The letter said car headlights provided illumination and a sport
utility vehicle and a Ryder truck were used to pull down partially
cut trees.

The residents of Swims Valley Drive worried that the city would not
penalize their neighbor for cutting down trees without a permit.

Sarkis Agasarkisian said his brother was not fined because he got a
tree-removal permit after one fell on his house, damaging the roof.

The city’s senior arborist, Frank Mobley, would not talk about the
case, saying records did not exist from that period.

One question lingers. Even if Sarkis Agasarkisian thought he could
build a massive driveway with impunity, why would he want to?

Schlegman, the architect, insists Agasarkisian could have repaired
the drive with much more subtle engineering – a road that hugged the
contours of his property and retaining walls that held a lesser
amount of rock under the lowest point. He said he was baffled by the
site development decisions of the Agasarkisian brothers. “Why do
these people want to live in ugly homes?” he asked.

Goodgame, who has lived on Swims Valley since childhood, speculates
that Armenians and Buckhead natives may have different ideas of
beauty. “It’s cultural: I’m beginning to think that trees are
something they don’t like,” he said.

One expert on Armenia said there may be cultural issues at play.

Dennis Papazian, a history professor at the University of Michigan at
Dearborn, said Armenia is called “the land of stone.”

Built for the ages

“There are a lot of rocks there,” said Papazian, who directs the
university’s Armenian Research Center. He said Armenians have built
with stone for 3,000 years. “There is a tendency for Armenians to
overbuild. That is a cultural characteristic.”

On a visit to post-Soviet Armenia, he noted how newly prosperous
farmers were building farmhouses. They used steel and stone and
concrete. “They look like little fortresses, and they’re fairly ugly,
to be honest,” said Papazian, who was born in the United States. He
said Armenia was the site of frequent invasions, which led to
deep-seated psychological insecurity.

“If you didn’t build for the ages,” he said, “they would tear it
down.”