Historic Clinton Hill Townhouse Sells for $9.4 Million, Sets New Neighborhood Record

By Michael Gonik

It should come as no surprise that Clinton Hill, wedged between the still-in-mid-transition western edge of Bed-Stuy and a fully cooked Fort Greene, is becoming one of the city’s most desirable (and competitive) housing markets. Sure, there’s the ready access to A, C, and G trains–and an embarrassment of delicious spoils in any direction—but you don’t need to spend too much time lapping its micro-parks, community gardens, and gargantuan, pristinely preserved single-and-multi-family brownstones to get a firm sense of why this might be the case. It’s, frankly, fucking gorgeous, and, if you’ve got the bag to handle a five-figure mortgage, an easy sell. I mean, even that diabolically grey and out-of-place modern monstrosity with an orange accent at Classon and Greene managed to finally leave the market a few months back (presumably due to its unbeatable proximity to Speedy Romeo).

This is all to say that new standards are emerging elsewhere in the historic and picturesque North Brooklyn neighborhood, specifically in the cost of well-maintained and recently renovated Victorian-era homes. Take, for instance, 374 Washington Avenue, a 7,000-square-foot five-bedroom townhouse that, according to Curbed, just went for about $9.4 million and set the latest, but certainly not last, record for the most expensive home sale in Clinton Hill history. With its stunning interior details and fidelity to the era in which it was built (constructed at some point in the 1880s, per Brownstoner), the roughly 150-year-old home at 374 snatched the title from the Pfizer Mansion, just a block or so away on Washington (arguably not even in Clinton Hill, but neighborhood boundaries and who gets to etch them are an entirely different matter), which went set the previous record with $9.05 million sale back in 2021. What else might explain the exorbitant price tag on the home? A broker at Leslie Garfield claims that beyond the high ceilings, wide build, and all the living history, 374 benefitted from a high-quality renovation that made it damn-near “turnkey.” But we like to think whoever’s moving in just wanted to be close to the library (literally next door).