THE UTOPIANS.(Boykin Curry)(Biography)

A little more than a year ago, over the Christmas holidays, I descended in a small helicopter onto a stretch of pristine white sand. The beach, set against a striking coral cliff some ninety feet high, lay just east of a golf course--one of the last designed by the late Robert Trent Jones, Sr. Not a building was in sight. This was in the Dominican Republic, on the less travelled north coast, fronting the Atlantic, and I had been invited there by Boykin Curry, who stood on the sand with his fiancee, Celerie Kemble, waving a towel in the air to greet me.

Five minutes later, as I floated in the surf, a young American couple approached from the direction of a nondescript hotel called the Occidental, situated beyond the cliff. Noticing the helicopter, the woman said, "Now that's the way to travel like millionaires. Is it very expensive?" She likely assumed that Curry, sunburned in a faded red bathing suit and a pink T-shirt, and with windblown dark curly hair, was staying at the Occidental as well--a fellow-gringo living it up on the cheap in a country with a per-capita G.D.P. of only sixty-five hundred dollars.

But Curry, who is forty, was a highly successful money manager from Manhattan. He owned the course, the cliffs, the mountains behind the cliffs, the rolling jungles in between, the bluffs out to the east--everything in the area, as far as the eye could see, except for the Occidental. And even that was just a matter of time; he and Kemble, a thirty-two-year-old interior designer, already controlled the hotel's water supply, beach access, and electricity, and were in negotiations to buy and demolish it.

A few months earlier, acting on a tip from a friend of Kemble's, Curry had flown down, drafted a prospectus, and corralled a group of friends, including the musician and eco-activist Moby, the television interviewer Charlie Rose, and the foreign-policy whiz Fareed Zakaria, to help buy an enormous tract of land, known locally as Playa Grande, or Big Beach, and establish what he called a Creative Person's Utopia. ("We are going to keep it Bohemian, and not filled with dentists who got lucky in the stock market," he wrote in one pitch letter.) Except for the golf course, the twenty-two-hundred-acre plot--nearly three times the size of Central Park--was unspoiled. They picked it up for fifty million dollars.

After my swim, I climbed back into the helicopter with Curry and Kemble, and we began touring the property, which extends about five miles along the coast, flanked by a nudist colony and a Rochester doctor's retirement mansion. As Curry elaborated on his vision, it emerged that the utopia he had in mind was a twenty-first-century, jet-setting variety, in which golf, a game he does not play, could be used to subsidize an artists' colony and other noble pursuits. Curry's enthusiasms include organic subsistence farming, environmental conservation, and entomology. ("Boykin will do anything to have an insect named after him," Kemble told me.) He imagined a classical Athenian village--updated--in which four-star restaurants and art galleries could share street space with locally run fish shacks and pool halls; with great public plazas, where Op-Ed columnists like David Brooks and Thomas Friedman might gather to discuss antiterrorism strategy with Zakaria and Rose, and then join Moby and his friend Michael Stipe for a concert on the beach, followed by a nightcap with Matthew Barney, the "Cremaster" artist, observing the migration of the humpback whales, headed east to spawn near Samana.

On the western edge of the golf course, Curry showed me a paved cul-de-sac that was overgrown with weeds--evidence of the Dominican government's aborted attempt to develop the property some years back. "See, sloth is our friend," he said. "They had the foresight, the vision, to keep it all together as one giant property, without breaking it up piecemeal--and the incompetence not to do anything with it. If they hadn't been so incompetent, there would be ten Club Meds here by now."

Sloth had not prevented the government from building the so-called North Coast highway, a potholed two-lane road used occasionally by wild pigs, through the middle of the property. Curry hoped to persuade the government to reroute the road behind the property line. After we left the helicopter and were driving west along the highway, headed to our hotel in the tourist town of Cabarete, which is known for its favorable kite-surfing conditions, one of the car's tires went flat. "The road here is not so pretty," the driver remarked.