Marblehead Mansion Comes Crashing Down

"Marblehead home razed after 18-year legal battle" by Brian MacQuarrie   |  Globe Staff, February 22, 2012

MARBLEHEAD - In the end, the giant claw of an oversize backhoe needed only hours to do what 18 years of litigation, hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, and a bottomless well of angst and acrimony had been unable to accomplish before yesterday.

Beginning about 7:15 a.m., by court order, Wayne Johnson’s 5,000-square-foot, million-dollar house overlooking Marblehead Harbor finally came tumbling down.

Johnson, a financial adviser in his 70s, is moving to a rental apartment in Salem, ready “to pick himself up and start a new life in a new location,’’ said David Noonan, his attorney.

But Johnson’s neighbors in Marblehead, pediatricians John and Ruth Schey, are basking in the unfamiliar glow of natural sunshine, unblocked by the 35-foot-tall house that rose beside them in the mid-1990s, their attorney said.

“For the first time, it was light inside this beautiful house,’’ Frank McElroy, the Scheys’ attorney, said yesterday morning.

Massachusetts Land Court ruled in 2000 that the Johnson home on Bubier Road must come down, because the lot on which it sat did not meet the town’s minimum-width requirements, McElroy said.

But a string of expensive appeals, which featured a battle of intractable wills between neighbors who lived only 28 feet apart, led to a dozen years of waiting and wondering....

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