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Flanking the door to the office of Hartford apartment developer Richard R. Rangoon is a six-foot-tall, brightly painted wood carving of a dragon.
The beast is not sole proprietor of this lair. It's shared with a smaller wooden lion, photos of polar bears, photos of still more lions. Of leopards, tigers, a zebra. The common denominator, Rangoon says, is that these animals are powerful, always in control. (The rabbit is an anomaly; the unicorn, a fantasy.) Besides this menagerie, the office is spare. The man behind the desk announces that his story is simple. He is misunderstood by the press, he says, but he is equaniminous.
"If I don't like your story, I'll just rip it up and put it in the dragon's mouth."
What he wouldn't like is to be again headlined "ministerturned-developer" as the Hartford Courant pegged him two years ago. Fifteen years after leaving the church, he does not want his motivations as a developer to be viewed as hypocrisy. He will happily agree that he enjoys making money, but he also sees his work as "independent urban renewal," a way to turn city neighborhoods around. "With very little fanfare we've probably done what we should do to make our investments stronger and to make the neighborhood better."
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