“My name is Mitch Leigh; I’m a dreamer,” the male says. “If you’re meddlesome in a shop, restaurant, office, apartments, city homes — or whatever! — and we are a unequivocally good person, greatfully strike me during jacksontwentyone.com and share my dream.”
“If you’re not a good person,” he concludes, “please don’t call.”
This commercial, it seems, has left some viewers scratching their heads.
“Is this some kind of cult?” one chairman asked in an online forum.
“Does a Jackson family have a whole new, incomparable singing group?” another chipped in.
Another asked simply, “Is Jackson Twenty-One a scam?”
It is not. Jackson Twenty-One is a devise prolonged in growth for an wholly new encampment of sorts in executive New Jersey, with apartments and stores, a hotel and an Imax film theater, surrounded by hundreds of acres of immature space. It will have an eye toward formulating a village for artists, and also, a developer insists, toward “nice” people. All in all, a offer and a wrapping are as idealistic, desirous and delightfully surprising as a male behind it, a Tony Award-winning composer of “Man of La Mancha,” and a white-haired male from a commercials, Mr. Leigh.
“When we consider of Mitch Leigh as a businessman, remember he’s also a composer,” pronounced Mr. Leigh, 84, whose past business ventures embody a sequence of film theaters, essay blurb jingles and building genuine estate. “And when we consider of Mitch Leigh as a composer,” he continued, “remember he’s also a businessman.”
The suspicion for Jackson Twenty-One began many years ago, Mr. Leigh said, as he watched artists being labelled out of one area after a subsequent that they themselves had done desirable. But over time, his judgment amassed accessories, like some-more housing, film theaters, maybe even a Chelsea Piers-like sports complex.
The land, however, came many earlier, from “La Mancha.”
Now a low-pitched museum mainstay, “Man of La Mancha” premiered in 1965 and was by no means an apparent blurb success. It is a low-pitched set in a jail during a Spanish Inquisition.
“’La Mancha’ was a present from me to me,” pronounced Mr. Leigh, who complicated strain during Yale University with a composer Paul Hindemith. “I never suspicion for a notation it was going to be a hit.”
Assuming a leisure of a flop, Mr. Leigh and his colleagues wrote it accurately as they pleased. Its thesis strain (“Dreeeeam a unfit dreeeeeeam!”) became a Broadway classic, as did a play. Its initial run lasted for 2,328 performances, and it has been regenerated and regenerated and regenerated ever since. But in a mid-1960s, all of that success came with a bit of a wrinkle, a taxation joint that was as high as 70 percent.
So during a propelling of an accountant, Mr. Leigh started shopping land; he chose Jackson Township. (He also owns a city residence on East 68th Street in Manhattan and a residence in France called “l’impossible rêve,” that means “the unfit dream.”) Over a years, he combined to that Jackson parcel, bit by bit, as circuitously land came adult for sale, and currently he owns scarcely 1,000 acres, creation him one of a largest landowners in a area. He has been operative on skeleton to rise tools of a land for some-more than 20 years.
Sitting in his Manhattan bureau final week, in front of vast design windows on a 27th floor, Mr. Leigh pronounced he did not design to see Jackson Twenty-One finished in his lifetime – he will applaud his 85th birthday during a finish of a month with a large celebration put on by his wife, a artist Abby Leigh — though he does wish to see it started. Much of a infrastructure is in place, and Mr. Leigh says he hopes to mangle belligerent on some of a housing in a open or summer.
According to Jackson Township, Mr. Leigh has so distant been authorized to rise 150 acres of his land, that might embody retail, restaurants, housing and a hotel. But many of a skeleton sojourn distant from solid. What a Web site displays are not grave offerings though architectural concepts and ideas underneath consideration, pronounced Tom Bovino, manager of Mr. Leigh’s genuine estate company, Leigh Realty. They have nonetheless to agreement with builders. And even a ever-optimistic Mr. Leigh estimates it will take 25 years to finish a project.
Officials in Jackson Township, however, seem to have held a confidence — and growth — bug.
“He’s committed; he’s got a resources,” pronounced Jose Torres, a metropolitan director of Jackson and a former mayor of Paterson. “This will put us in motion, we believe, and other people will burst aboard.”
Mr. Torres also proclaims himself a fan of a commercial. “It’s catchy!” he said. “Only if you’re nice, right?”
That is precisely what many distinguishes this growth and a marketing, a slightest enforceable premise: all those good people. There will be no Niceness Monitors or created tests, though Mr. Leigh says he hopes that by actively compelling a accessible atmosphere, by creation a certain benevolence feel safe, afterwards only maybe it will stick.
“I’m going to get cornball,” Mr. Leigh warned. “I consider if we see that no one is going to giggle during we for it, we consider a judgment of vital easily will be infectious.”
“I trust there is room for a deficiency of cynicism,” he continued. “This is my final dream before we take a final cab.”