Michael Jackson To Keep ‘Neverland’
Michael Jackson managed to keep his hands on Neverland after he cut a deal this week in order to keep it off the auction block. Unfortunately it seems that with his financial troubles he took away the magic that once gave the 2,500 acre wine country its appeal. It used to be one of the places that people always wanted to visit – but now it is something that is vanishing into the past like Michael Jackson himself.
Jackson hasn’t been seen in this bucolic area of oak-studded hills since he was acquitted in June 2005 of molesting a 13-year-old visitor to his estate, and his absence leaves the future of Neverland, a sort of Hearst Castle for 12-year-olds, in doubt. “We’re all, of course, wondering what’s going to happen. We’ve heard rumors but we don’t know anything,” said Kim Morrison, one of the administrators of a private school located just across the road from Neverland. One of those rumors has soccer star David Beckham interested in the property. “I wouldn’t mind having a new neighbor. It would be nice to have Beckham there,” laughed Morrison, although she quickly added that Jackson “was always a good neighbor.”
Before Thursday’s deal was announced, the property was scheduled to be auctioned March 19 because Jackson had gone into default. Financial Title Co. of San Francisco said he owed $24.5 million on the former cattle ranch he bought from real estate baron William Bone in 1988. Jackson, then just 29, was at the height of his career when he purchased Neverland, naming it after the mythical land of Peter Pan — where boys never grow up. He had become a pop superstar before his 12th birthday, and he has said he created Neverland in an effort to obtain the childhood he never had.
These days all is quiet at Neverland except for the squawking of a few of exotic birds that continue to roost in the trees. The other animals are gone and the only outward thing to distinguish Jackson’s home from any other is the guard shack with its satellite dish just inside the locked front gate. “Nobody is living here,” says a friendly but otherwise reticent guard who has been ordered not to talk to anyone. The shuttered amusement park sits out of sight, but recent aerial photos show it beginning to fall into disrepair. It’s a far cry from Jackson’s heyday in the 1980s and ’90s, when hundreds of children might be playing there.