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Phillips Academy Home

by Theresa Pease

The doorway to Sidney and Nancy Unobskey's early 20th century townhouse in San Francisco's Cow Hollow neighborhood is not just inviting, it's provocative. Fashioned of Burmese teak by sculptor Robert Graham, it includes 28 cast bronze panels depicting a naked nymph in enticing and playful positions. Alarmed against intruders, it is one of four Graham gateways on the Unobskey property.

"When we commissioned this work," says real estate developer and urban planner Sidney Unobskey ’54, "Nancy rejected three panels because she thought they were a little intimidating for a woman to walk up to. They were too sensual. I think if we were doing it again, we would like those panels back. We may have been a little timid."

"Timid" is hardly a word that describes the Unobskeys' approach to collecting. In their sun-splashed living room and dining room alone, the couple displays more than 30 works that range from Chagall paintings to a sculpture by Jacques Lipschitz. A bronze cougar by Gwen Merrill keeps watch outside the door. Paintings, prints and three-dimensional objects by other 20th century artists, including 15 pieces by modern Australian masters, adorn every conceivable wall and floor space in the home the Unobskeys have owned since 1978.

Behind the house, a deck and terraced garden with a magnificent view of San Francisco Bay host an array of other artworks. They include Merrill's white onyx dog, as well as a recent installation by Joel Shapiro and "Two Open Triangles Up," a kinetic brushed-steel sculpture by George Rickey that exactly matches one the Unobskeys gave to Phillips Academy in 1994.

Even the home's basement is dramatic. It includes a 1,200-bottle wine cellar whose floor is an intricate inlaid pattern of exotic woods from Australia and Hawaii. In a nearby lounge area, not only the paintings, but also the English sycamore wall panels, furniture and African wenge wood flooring, are works of art commissioned by the Unobskeys of Christopher Brown, former art department head at the University of California at Berkeley. At Unobskey's insistence, Brown even designed the rugs, handwoven in 26 colors.

"We like to see an artist challenged," Unobskey discloses. "We like to work with an artist and watch him or her grow. Commissioning works, of course, involves being able to take risks."

Getting Art-Smart

It was not always thus. When Sidney and Nancy Unobskey were first married, he earned $80 a week working on a New York construction project and she brought down $152 weekly as a social worker. The newlyweds had a roomy rent-controlled apartment and a bed. Nothing else. So in 1960 they scraped together $2,000 to buy some furniture, then spent the whole sum on a Bernard Dufour painting.

Nancy had grown intrigued with art while viewing original fauvist paintings displayed in her dorm at Goucher College in Maryland, and her husband's exposure had begun when he painted alongside future art giant Frank Stella ’54 at Andover.

"I tried to tell Nancy we could not sit on a painting," Sidney laughs, "but she loved it so much, and I did want to please her."

The art dealer—impressed to have met a pair of 20-somethings who would spend everything they had in the world on a painting—befriended the Unobskeys. He helped them hone their tastes and invited them to store a selection of works on the spacious walls of their fifth-floor walkup when he closed his gallery each summer. It was at the height of New York's abstract expressionist movement, and the young couple was exhilarated by the chance to live intimately with such dynamic creations, none of which they could afford to purchase. But as Sidney's career grew, so did their art collection.

Northern Exposure

While Sidney's taste for art was greatly inspired by Nancy, his flair for real estate was fostered by his grandmother, a Russian Jew who emigrated 100 years ago to Calais (pronounced "callous"), Maine, beside the Bay of Fundy on the Canadian border.

"My grandmother bought up all the real estate she could in that part of the world and created downtown Calais," Unobskey says. Caught up in her entrepreneurial spirit, the family launched ventures that ranged from manufacturing wooden bottle tops to boatbuilding to running Unobskey's, the area's flagship department store.

Although affluent compared to his neighbors, Unobskey's father believed in self-reliance, and so Sidney worked his way through Andover and Yale.

"I was always in deals," he says. "In both high school and college, I sold other kids trips to Bermuda. At Yale, I brokered laundry and dry-cleaning contracts. When our own kids [Laura Shenkar ’81, a venture capitalist in Israel, and Arthur ’85, assistant principal and English department head at Boston English High School] went to Andover and Yale, we did not allow them to make money. I do not believe that's a fair demand to put on a student."

The demands intensified in Unobskey's sophomore year of college, when his father died, and again in his senior year, when his uncle died. Around the time he received the B.A. degree in history, disaster struck again in the form of a fire that destroyed the family's commercial real estate holdings in downtown Calais.

Wheeling & Dealing

For awhile things looked bleak. The insurance money was not sufficient to cover the mortgages on the damaged properties, much less rebuild the facilities as the tenants' leases demanded. The local bankers, who had loaned huge sums to Unobskey's dad on a handshake and a smile, refused to extend such treatment to a near-bankrupt 20-year-old history major. Worse, the Internal Revenue Service was looking for an inheritance tax.

With the help of a creative IRS agent, a cold phone call to the head of J.J. Newberry's, and a summit conference he audaciously set up for his creditors in a Bangor bank office, Unobskey managed to turn it around.

"I wrote this elaborate survival scheme on blackboards all around the room, and by the time the wheeling and dealing was over, I had money from the city of Calais, the banks and everyone else I could think of. We were going to build a shopping center. Suddenly, from that 'training,' I found I was a real estate developer. We rebuilt downtown Calais, and the project made money for everyone," Unobskey recalls.

Lest one doubt that extreme serendipity was at play, Unobskey likes to point out that, while he was putting this project together, an unforeseen stopover on a business flight through Boston led him to a party. It was there he met Nancy, who was then a graduate student at Simmons College's School of Social Work.

Developing the Developer

Through a friend of his mother, Unobskey obtained the construction job in New York, where he was part of a three-person team over-seeing the rise of the giant Pan American Building, which towers over Grand Central Station. Unobskey's main task was, in the most literal sense of the words, to keep the railroad running.

"New York is a wonderful place to live if you are very rich or very poor. Nancy and I were very poor, and we found a lot to do in the city," he says, noting for example that the twosome would stand outside Lincoln Center and ask people leaving between the scenes of musical performances for their ticket stubs.

"We never saw the first act of anything, but we had a lot of fun," he notes.

After working on the Pan Am building, Unobskey took a job at Food Fair Properties to learn more about shopping center development. By 26, he was in charge of management and leasing for the nation's largest shopping center management company.

The Malling of America

As the country's interstate highway system, begun by President Eisenhower in 1956, served to lead Americans away from downtowns and toward other sorts of mercantile centers, Unobskey rode the wave. Working for General Cinemas, he pioneered the idea of multiple movie screens under one roof. With the famed A. Alfred Taubman, he created some of the largest shopping centers in the world.

"We've moved 19 times," Unobskey says. "One of those moves was to Australia, where I did the planning for downtown Sydney, worked on the downtowns of other major cities and replanned all the major shopping centers in the Melbourne area. I planned the first regional shopping center in Singapore. I've worked in Malaysia, Hawaii, all over the United States. The last time Nancy and I lived in New York was in the mid-1980s, when I went there to do the planning for the redevelopment of Times Square."

Still, the Unobskeys have two places they consider home. One is San Francisco, where Sidney put in four years as the local planning commission's president and where Nancy, still a social worker, has spent seven years working on senior women's issues for the California Pacific Medical Center. The other is Calais, where Unobskey continued to be a registered voter right into the 1990s.

Endowing a Vision

Hoping to improve education in what he calls "the poorest area of the poorest state in the nation" and to boost teacher training in both Maine and neighboring New Brunswick, Unobskey recently decided to make a major investment in the town that knew him when. Initially, he offered to give to the University of Maine 17,000 square feet of former retail space plus a large grant to establish a new Calais campus in excess of 40,000 square feet. The university declined ownership of the buildings in question, but agreed to rent them from Unobskey for $7,000 a year. He in turn will donate the $7,000 annually to the university for teacher education and programs involving local school systems. What's more, the Unobskeys have made several generous grants to establish an innovative learning center that opened its doors on the new Calais campus this past winter. Known as the Unobskey School, the fledgling facility will include a School of Outdoor Living offering everything from one-week wilderness survival courses to master's and doctoral programs. The training will have relevance, Unobskey predicts, for wilderness guides, rangers, naturalists, photographers, fishermen and others who make their livings close to nature.

"I wanted to create a school that would be world-class, and that would be set apart from anything else," Unobskey says. "I believe this new venture has the potential to change the economics of the entire region."