Brooklyn’s Coolest, Creepiest House to Be Torn Down for Luxury Rentals
A grand but gone-to-seed Victorian house unlike any other will soon be torn down to make way for luxury rental units, Brownstoner reports. The 111-year-old home, at 111 Clarkson Avenue (around the Flatbush-Prospect Lefferts Garden border), was sold for $2.675 million at the end of September to a developer who asked not to be named. The house would require $1 million in repairs, the broker said, which the buyer deemed financially impractical, so in its place should rise a 50-unit luxury building (it’s a deep lot) with “amazing amenities,” which likely won’t include stained-glass-windowed parlors or grand staircases, as the original home did, nor a metal dome above a long wooden porch or a small wooden balcony on the top floor.
The shitty thing about tearing down this house or any unique building is that we never replace them with anything of equal magnificence; we tear down beautiful old churches to put up blocky schools, big old homes for boxy Fedder homes.
For those looking to wander by a creepy-looking old house now that it’s Halloween season, there’s still always my favorite, 457 Ovington Avenue, which Forgotten NY once described as “a distinctive blond bricked 3-story mansion with a Spanish-style roof. And it is a complete mystery…no one seems to enter or leave; its old-school wide-slat Venetian blinds are always pulled down, the brownstone gradually chipping, the paint is very gradually peeling away, the iron fence is gradually rusting. It seems to be slowly winding down and fading away.” Just like Brooklyn.
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