Key West, Florida Pritam Singh's Strange Career

By RICHARD CONNIFF

At 9 o'clock on a weekday evening, having just flown in from his Vermont retreat, following the previous week's human rights mission into the hills of El Salvador, Pritam Singh is touring the best piece of real estate on Key West: the Truman Annex, a former Navy property where Harry Truman had his Little White House.

Singh owns the place now, and one is unsure which jarring and inapposite piece of his biography best begins to explain him: That he is a former SDS organizer who is building a Ritz-Carlton hotel? Or that he is a developer whose fondest wish is to run away with Sea Shepherd, a Greenpeace splinter group, and ram whale ships? Perhaps that he is a 36-year-old Massachusetts- born Sikh of French-Canadian extraction, in a turban and a Ralph Lauren polo shirt? Or that he read about this 102-acre property one Sunday in 1986 and bought it on a hunch three days later for $17.25 million, outbidding a group of Alaskan Indians bearing federal pollution-compensation credits? Around Singh, one sometimes needs to stop, press rewind and take it all in once more, slowly.

"This is exciting," he tells his architect, surveying the half-finished plaza he has conceived as the social center of the new community he is building. "Have you done the guardhouse? Let's go see the guardhouse." Singh is minutely attentive to aesthetics, even with interest costs and overhead running $30,000 a day. The guardhouse, it turns out, is coming along nicely, except for some ugly screens, which Singh promptly removes from the muntined French doors. He peers at a Government facility up the road: "Now we gotta get the Navy to straighten out the Stalag 13 look there. Those guys are so subtle."

When he is done with the $250 million project in 1992, Singh intends the Truman Annex to be an environmentally sound, architecturally pure, socially engineered complex of 700 homes, condominiums, shops and hotel rooms. His design guidelines, reflecting the conch-house architecture of historical Key West, run to 27 dogmatic pages: "White is the preferred and approved basic color for all structures." "Each single-family unit shall have a bougainvillea within the front-yard area . . ." What he is building is an enclave away from the trashed-out, mixed-up modern world, and he gleefully plans to earn a pile of money doing it.

Singh has sea-blue eyes, magnified by thick, round glasses; his beard, unshaved since he was 17, is sparse and wiry. Born Paul LaBombard, he was, in adult eyes, a bad influence on anybody who knew him as a teenager. He ran away from his working-class family, smoked dope and organized a high school SDS chapter. Lacking money for college, he spent two winters camping out and gathering shells for a living in Key West. He was arrested at the Mayday antiwar demonstrations in Washington in 1971, and spent three days locked up in the basement of the Department of Justice. Afterward he sought spiritual growth in a Sikh ashram in Massachusetts, where he remained for five years before revolting against the power-hungry leader.

Singh says his past and present connect perfectly. He was always good at organizing things. He has always tried to live a moral life. "I don't see any divergence in my program," he says. In 1979 he borrowed $7,500, started rehabbing buildings in New England and prospered; luck or savvy got him into Key West before the Northeast real estate market went flat.

The odd thing is that he never stopped being a Sikh, and he remains full of admiration for the social reformers who founded the religion: "These guys were, like, wacko. They just appeared out of nowhere and were talking about justice and equality. Treat women equally, serve the poor, defend your rights. It fits the social and revolutionary agenda of the American republic to a tee." He shrugs. "Except that we wear beards and turbans."

Singh can be disarmingly frank about his failings: he has dealt with the problem of homelessness in Key West by putting up gates to close off his streets at night. His complex includes more affordable housing than required, but up to half may go to friends and vacationers, rather than to year-round residents.

He is most ardent about environmental issues, having become a rehabber at least partly because he believes it is wrong to build on open land. An aide informs him that Greenpeace will be tying up at his dock on Thursday morning. "That oughta impress the Japanese guys," he jokes, referring to a group of financiers arriving the same day with the prospect of a $100 million loan. He dreads the idea of having lived in a period of ecological collapse and done nothing but good deals.

He also dreads power, which he admits is what he enjoys most about being a developer. "I read the papers and I think, 'I could do that deal. Grrrrr.' " He makes a low self-mocking growl. "I could make $50 million on that deal." The fingers of both hands wriggle in acquisitive frenzy. Sheer insatiability has convinced him that he must give up the business after Key West. "I'm successful only if I can walk away from it and deal with who I really am." He aims to retreat to his sprawling farm in Vermont, where he has built a private Stonehenge, a Jeffersonian library in the middle of the woods, a Japanese teahouse. Cross-cultural follies.

Singh's efforts have generally gone down well among the blithe spirits of Key West. Without Singh, the Truman Annex might have become "Meldorado," a pirate theme park. But if islanders appreciate having a developer as sensitive as Pritam Singh, they are also worried that he is exerting a more profound influence on the island, as an apostle of good taste in a place long known for exuberant tackiness.

Key West has begun cracking down on noise, street vendors, store windows filled with obscene T shirts. Singh acknowledges his power to influence this trend: he will in time be paying 25% of the island's tax revenues. Before the recent election, two of the five city commissioners were, by amazing coincidence, slated to have shops in his coveted retail space. But he argues that the city would be adjusting its image, growing up, even without him.

It's possible to grow up, he suggests, without becoming dull. Among other anarchic touches, he plans to rent office space in his complex to environmental groups that "will drive other developers crazy." He is restoring the Little White House to its tacky Truman-era splendor, spending $15,000 just to repair the Sears, Roebuck fluorescent lights on the porch. Presidential bad taste doesn't trouble him, in part because he has income projections for his planned Truman museum. "The Little White House is a little gold mine," he says. But he also claims he does not mean to make Key West precious and yuppified.

"Yeah, you've got the nice guardhouse," he says. "You've also got Harry Truman in the middle, and across the street you've got the Peekaboo Lounge." For the foreseeable future, Key West also has Singh, who is weird enough all by himself to keep the place interesting.

"Eh," he shrugs. "It works."