A 15-foot concrete teddy bear does a handstand in the middle of Richard Patt’s front yard, and Patt doesn’t know why anyone should have a problem with that.
The bear, purchased at an auction, has a painted-on blue-and-yellow-striped sweater, large eyes and a wide-open grin. He used to reside in a miniature golf course. So did the concrete Mad Hatter figure, which greets visitors on their way to Patt’s front door. A handless mannequin leans against a tree. A gray, Indonesian-made statue of the god Ganesh sits proudly between two small Buddhas from China, and a large, rainbow-striped dragon figure serves as a planter. Antique chairs, tables, small figurines and unidentifiable knickknacks of every sort are all over Patt’s 1.7-acre estate. Prehistoric sago palms dot his yard, and his lawn is a popular place for senior citizens from a nearby community to practice tai chi, a combined form of martial arts and meditation.
Patt might call his home “different.” His neighbors don’t use such nice terms.
“I don’t think there’s a real tolerance for diversity here,” says Patt, referring to the stately Devonshire Place community, tucked behind the Texas Medical Center. Patt, who moved into the 100-year-old upper-middle-class neighborhood five years ago and bought his current home three years after that, thinks new deed restrictions being introduced by his community’s neighborhood association are just another way of letting him know they don’t like him around.
“This is one of those neighborhoods where everyone knows everyone,” says Carey Pasternak, whose backyard faces Patt’s home. “Everyone gets together for picnics; all the children play together … Richard just doesn’t fit in.”
Patt, a noted author on pain management and a physician who worked at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center before leaving to open The Patt Center for Cancer Pain and Wellness, doesn’t mind not fitting in. He and his wife, Pauline, just want to be left alone, he says. For him, creating his yard and building his own brick patios and rock gardens are a type of therapy for him, one he wishes his neighbors would understand.
“Working with people who are dying lets me come home and value very simple things,” Patt says. Simple things such as working with brick and stones. “Bricks stay where you put them, and there is a sense of putting something there that wasn’t there before. I like stability. I like solidness.”
It makes sense. He has been working with his hands since he did summertime construction work as a teenager in Baltimore, and he has done some minor building and construction on other homes he has owned (although his current lot is the biggest he has ever had to work with). Collecting antiques and odd items has interested him since he worked in a resale shop growing up. One small shed in the back of the lot houses an authentic cigar-store Indian, a real and complete human skeleton, carved Indonesian wood panelings and a collection of high school marching-band hats.
“I like to find value and establish value and create value where other people have overlooked it,” he says.
But Patt’s role as the neighborhood’s square peg has recently started a small battle that has included accusations of fascism.
The community, made up of 38 single-family homes, operates under two different sets of deed restrictions, according to neighborhood association member Dana Hardin. Initial restrictions were drawn in 1922, and a more restrictive set was drafted in 1977. After Lovett Homes built a set of town homes on the community’s property, several members of the neighborhood became concerned that the area would not be able to support such high-density infrastructure. When Lovett Homes proposed a second set of town homes, members of the association decided to act by creating a new set of restrictions that would make it more difficult for groundbreaking to begin on the second set of homes. The restrictions also would preserve the old-fashioned feel of the community.
This is how Hardin and the neighborhood association tell it. But Patt thinks the restrictions, which govern garage sales, length of time between grass trimmings and the distance of a house from the curb, are just another example of people being told how to live.
“There’s a sense of control. There’s a sense of wanting the world to stop, which is just not realistic,” says Patt, who insists he just wants to express himself and doesn’t want to be a “bad neighbor.”
“I think what we do here is creative, and, even if it’s not, so what?” he says. “I admire anyone who can find a peaceful, nonthreatening way to get through this very mixed-up planet we’re on.”
To counteract the restrictions, Patt and his wife went door-to-door in the neighborhood distributing a lengthy document ominously entitled “Smoke, Mirrors and Deed Restrictions,” which asked, “Are the newly proposed deed restrictions fascist in nature?” At a February 28 association meeting, tempers flared.
“During the meeting I did lose my temper, but being called a fascist kind of pushed me over the edge,” says Hardin, who served on the three-member committee that drafted the new restrictions. “He was disrupting the meeting.”
Hardin, who admits to not liking Patt’s decorations, thinks his complaints are unwarranted and unfair. The committee simply was working with a standard set of deed restrictions drafted by the city attorney, she says. In fact, several compromises were made that lengthened the amount of time between grass trimmings and did in fact allow garage sales.
“Some people were violently opposed to garage sales,” Hardin acknowledges, “but there can be one garage sale per year for no more than three consecutive days.” And, despite the wishes of several residents to ban lawn art, no restrictions were set in place that would force Patt to move his collection.
“We tabled the lawn-art issue, because you can’t govern taste,” says Hardin.
But some wish you could. Including Pasternak, who has had a few run-ins with Patt about the state of his home. Pasternak doesn’t like the fact that Patt and his friends get together late at night to play music. He says Patt and his wife have shaved their heads and wear leather jackets.
“He’s a very unusual person; I just don’t know how else to say it,” says Pasternak. “His presence has caused me a lot of concern about the quality of my life because he feels he can have his own agenda. I think [the deed restrictions] are desperately needed so we can have a more concise, uniform neighborhood and not have something bizarre highlighting it.”
But not all the neighbors are bothered by Patt’s unusual home.
“I believe in people having property rights without a lot of undue influence from anyone not owning that property,” says Patt’s neighbor Hugh Ford. “If Dr. Patt wants to landscape his property, he should be able to do it in any fashion he wants to.”
In fact, he can. Because Patt’s home falls under the 1922 deed restrictions, he doesn’t have to operate under the new ones even if they are accepted by the required 75 percent of the community members.
“I feel he was unduly unfair to the rest of us because it doesn’t even affect him in any way; we weren’t even expecting his signature,” Hardin says.
But Patt argues it’s the principle of the thing. He thinks people should pay attention when someone starts telling them what’s in their best interests.
“This is a wonderful neighborhood,” Patt says. “But instead of focusing on things I think are meaningful, there is a great deal of emphasis on telling people how to live. I’m a member of the association only because I want to sit at the table and hear what’s going on.”
Hardin insists all she and the other community members are trying to do is hold onto the beauty of the old community, where many homes have unusual architecture or history.
“We don’t want to change the flavor of the established community,” says Hardin. “And most of the homes here have something unique about them.”
Apparently, 15-foot concrete teddy bears are just the wrong kind of unique.
This article appears in Apr 1-7, 1999.