The estate at 101 Jungle Road was the longtime home of the late Elaine Schuster and her late husband, Gerry. The new owner is a Wisconsin-registered limited liability company.
On the market for a little more than two years, a Palm Beach oceanside estate once listed at about $63 million has changed hands for a recorded $42.5 million.
The estate at 101 Jungle Road in the Estate Section was the longtime home of the late Democratic political activist Elaine Schuster and her late businessman husband, Gerry. Elaine Schuster died at 90 in August 2022, and her husband of 65 years died at 89 in 2019.
The buyer was a Wisconsin-registered limited liability company named PB Jungle 101 LLC, according to the deed recorded Oct. 2. The registered agent for that entity is real estate attorney Martin W. Meyer and its principal address is that of Marwicke & Goisman, the Milwaukee law firm where Meyer works. No other information about anyone connected to PB Jungle 101 LLC was immediately available in public records.
The house was sold by three co-trustees of a trust in Elaine Schuster’s name. They include the Schusters’ sons, Mark Shuster and Scott Schuster, both of Palm Beach; and Brian Callahan of Fort Meyers.
The former Schuster property measures nearly an acre, including a beach parcel with 200 feet of shorefront on the opposite side of South Ocean Boulevard.
The centerpiece of the estate is a six-bedroom, neoclassical style house with Georgian and Bermudian architectural influences.
Built in 1955 but later extensively renovated and expanded, the house has 13,230 square feet of living space, inside and out. Of that total, 10,033 square feet is air conditioned.
Among its features, the house has an oceanside loggia with a terrace above it. At the rear of the property, a swimming pool has a cabana and is set amid lush landscaping.
The estate lies about a mile north of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club.
The original price tag had dropped to about $60 million in March 2023, and landed at $54.9 million in January, according to records in the multiple listing service.
The estate had been under contract since Aug. 2, and the sale closed Sept. 30, the MLS shows,
The property’s higher-than-usual elevation ensures that the first floor offers “beautiful, sweeping views” of the sea from nearly all the primary rooms, said the sales listing prepared by listing broker Christian Angle of Christian Angle Real Estate. At some lower-lying Estate Section properties, ocean views are limited to the second floor.
Angle couldn’t be reached for comment.
Agent Margit Brandt of Premier Estate Properties represented the buyers, according to the closed MLS listing.
Brandt declined to comment and Meyer couldn’t be reached, so it’s unclear whether the new owner plans to raze the house or keep it intact. If the house is not razed for replacement, it would likely require a renovation, according to people familiar with the property.
The estate entered the market Sept. 3, 2022, when the pandemic-inspired real estate boom was just beginning to settle into some semblance of normal after launching Palm Beach residential prices into the stratosphere.
This past spring, the estate joined the MLS’s “land” listings as a potential tear-down. But property was never pulled from the single-family offerings.
“We wanted to provide optionality on how the property could be considered” by would-be buyers, Angle told the Palm Beach Daily News in April about why the estate had entered the land listings.
A buyer who wants to build a new oceanfront home on a sizable lot has limited options in Palm Beach, especially in the Estate Section, Angle said at the time: “It’s hard to find 200 feet of oceanfront (for sale).”
Elaine Schuster paid a recorded $7.7 million for the house in 2001, according to property records. The house was last owned by a trust in her name, for which she served as the co-trustee with Mark Schuster, according to courthouse documents.
The house underwent a major renovation after its was severely damaged by a fire in May 1983.
The front door faces Jungle Road. On the east side of the house, a loggia with a terrace above it faces the sea. The terrace leads from the second-floor primary bedroom suite, which has an office, a “morning bar,” dual bathrooms and walk-in closets, the listing says.
The floorplan includes a formal dining room and an expansive living room affording ocean views on one side and views of the pool area on the other. The library has custom built-in cabinetry, and there also is an exercise room.
The Schusters divided their time between their homes in Palm Beach, Boston and Osterville, Massachusetts. But they had the house on Jungle Road homesteaded as their primary residence in the Palm Beach County tax rolls.
The Schusters were prominent Democrats. In 2009, President Barack Obama appointed Elaine Schuster to serve as the public delegate to the United Nations General Assembly, where she focused on human-trafficking issues. Among her public-service initiatives, she founded in 2004 The Elaine and Gerald Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts.
Her husband was the founder, president and CEO of Continental Wingate, a family company that focused on financial services, real estate development, property management, and health care companies.
The house had landed under contract within six weeks after it was first listed, but that deal soon evaporated. By early January 2023, the listing was returned to the “active” category in the multiple listing service.
The house was built in the 1950s by the late Barbara Vanderbilt Whitney Henry, who at the time was married to the late Samuel Peck and later wed George W. Headley. Her estate sold it in 1983 to the late Peter A.B. Widener III and his wife, Daphne, property records show. After the Wideners divorced, they deeded the house in 1988 to Ridgeley Webster Harrison and wife Josephine, who in turn sold it to Elaine Schuster.
dhofheinz@pbdailynews.com
Source: Palm Beach Daily News