Shhhh! No flying over the farmhouse library!

2/17/06

In the long-running battle between Somerset Airport and the wealthy landowners who surround it comes a new wrinkle, otherwise known as the tale of the millionaire, the bibliophile and the 57-year-old court order.

The millionaire, former Lucent Technologies Chief Executive Richard McGinn, doesn't like planes buzzing over the Branchburg estate he bought last year for $5 million.

The bibliophile -- the late Viscountess Mary Eccles, known for her unprecedented collection of books, papers and letters written by and about the 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson -- owned the estate until her death in 2003.

Like McGinn, Lady Eccles didn't much appreciate planes disturbing her oasis of scholarship, and she did something about it, filing suit against the owners of her new and noisy neighbor in nearby Bedminster.

Which leads to the court order -- obtained by Lady Eccles from a Superior Court judge in 1949 -- that required pilots flying to and from the Somerset County airport to keep their distance.

Yesterday, in the same Somerville courthouse, McGinn used the venerable order as the basis for a new lawsuit, one that demands a judge hold the airport's owners in contempt of court for failing to comply with the 1949 edict.

"It's the same thing. Planes flying over the property and being a public nuisance," McGinn's lawyer, Leonard Z. Kaufmann, said.

The suit means more trouble for airport owner Dan Walker, already facing four lawsuits filed by residents protesting last year's move to the airport of a State Police helicopter unit from University Hospital in Newark.

Kaufmann said his client's suit was unrelated to the NorthStar Medevac helicopter unit, which is called out day and night to ferry the injured to hospitals.

Rather, Kaufmann said, McGinn bought the property with the explicit understanding that air traffic would remain at bay.

"He certainly knew it when he made the purchase," the lawyer said.

The planes came anyway, even after McGinn appealed to Walker, Kaufmann said.

"My client tried to resolve this amicably," Kaufmann said. "It's gotten to the point where it's apparent the airport isn't going to do anything about it."

The suit seeks a restraining order to keep aircraft from flying over or "in close proximity" to the property. McGinn, who received a $12.5 million severance package when he was sacked from underperforming Lucent in 2000, also seeks payment for punitive damages, lawyers' fees and other compensatory costs.

Walker's father, George Walker, founded Somerset Airport 60 years ago, buying 200 acres in Bedminster.

But Lady Eccles, a Detroit-born heiress and the wife of a British viscount, beat George Walker to the area by three years. Lady Eccles didn't go by that name at the time. She was still married to her first husband, Donald Hyde, a prominent New York lawyer, when the couple bought the 437-acre farm.

They named the property Four Oaks, after the husband's family farm in Ohio.

Mary and Donald Hyde discovered a common interest in books, and they began amassing a collection of works and letters by Samuel Johnson, considered one of the most important 18th-century English writers and the father of the British dictionary.

Hyde, a graduate of Vassar College and Columbia University, continued building on the collection well after the death of her husband in 1966.

By the time of her 1984 marriage to Viscount David Eccles, who helped create the British Library, her collection was considered among the most extensive in the world. Today it resides at Harvard University.

But it once had a grand home in Branchburg. Inside Lady Eccles' white clapboard farmhouse she built an air-conditioned, fireproof library that drew literary scholars from across the United States and Europe.

Lady Eccles didn't want the quiet disturbed by a plane. While the farm was principally located in Branchburg, a portion sat in Bedminster, just 200 feet from the airport. Lady Eccles won her suit in Superior Court in Somerville on May 13, 1949. Thereafter, all nonemergency flights taking off from the airport were diverted away from the farm.

Dan Walker, when asked about the court order yesterday, declined comment. Calls to his lawyer, William G. Mennen IV, were not returned.

Walker, in previous interviews with The Star-Ledger, said he warned pilots to avoid flying over certain properties near the airport. The warnings were made verbally and with signs posted around runways, Walker said.

"Pilots that take off from the airport, the older ones who have been there, tell me that they have to make a significant right bank (turn) after takeoff to avoid the Lady Eccles property," said Alan Harwick, a Bridgewater resident who lives near the airport.

Harwick, also a lawyer representing a residents' group that has filed the four lawsuits against the State Police move to Somerset Airport, has been criticized by Walker and his supporters for complaining, because the airport preceded most of the objectors.

But Harwick argued the same cannot be said about Lady Eccles, who bought her farm three years before the airport came into existence.

"That's why the judge (then) heard their argument," Harwick said. "(Hyde and her husband) acquired acres and acres for their property, and they must not have been too happy when the airport showed up."

Lawyer Robert Knee, past chairman of the Real Property, Probate and Trust section of the New Jersey State Bar Association, said the court order might be enforceable.

"An order is always enforceable unless there's a time limit put on it," Knee said.

Then again, the order could be trumped by the Federal Aviation Administration, the only legal authority that can dictate aircraft routes across the country. Said FAA spokeswoman Arlene Murray: "I don't think it's going to have any weight against the federal laws Congress has give us to direct air traffic."

Staff writers Mark Mueller, Jeanette Rundquist and Peter N. Spencer contributed to this report.

BY RALPH R. ORTEGA
Star-Ledger Staff