In 1976 Dickey Doo, a 1950s rock ‘n’ roll singer, completed construction of his palatial dream home — called Xanadu — into the face of a quarry in Upper Makefield, off of Taylorsville Road.
Less than two years later, the one-time mega star’s dream house was all washed up.
What was once a fabulous mansion (with an indoor swimming pool, 20-foot high doors, and a living room big enough to entertain 100 people) had become a dilapidated three-story reminder of the technical miscalculations and financial problems that befell Richard A. Doo, formerly of the rock group Dickey Doo and the Don’ts.
Xanadu (named for Kubla Khan’s palace of pleasures in William Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan”) was designed by Doo to be a fusion between earth and man, “which should reflect exactly what I’ve become, what I’ve evolved into — whatever that is,” he explained in a 1976 interview.
In 1977 Doo sold his, er, “evolutionary reflection” to a religious sect (the Universal Church of Neuropathy) and skedaddled.
A year later, Upper Makefield officials decided that the building, which was sagging, rotted and expected to collapse, was too dangerous to be left standing. Vandals had already stripped the structure of many valuable fixtures, carpeting, doorways and windows.
And so, in 1980, Xanadu merged with the infinite. It was four years old.
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