Building of the Day: 2 Miller Avenue

Brooklyn, one building at a time.

Name: Private house
Address: 2 Miller Avenue, aka 67 Sunnyside Avenue
Cross Streets: Highland Blvd and Sunnyside Avenue
Neighborhood: Cypress Hills
Year Built: sometime between 1904 and 1908
Architectural Style: Colonial Revival
Architect: Unknown
Landmarked: No

The story: Many years ago, when I still lived in Bed Stuy, I was in the company of a friend who was always house hunting for investment properties. He generally bought foreclosures, and pre-foreclosures, and flipped them. He was interested in several houses in Cypress Hills. At the time, I had never been to Cypress Hills, and since I’m never one to turn down looking at houses, no matter where they are, I joined him. We drove all around the neighborhood, and I thought Cypress Hills was really interesting, a combination of Victorian-era houses and blocks of houses dating from the teens and 20s. One of the houses he was interested in was this one.

At the time, it was empty and semi-boarded up. The grass was tall, but the gate was unlocked, so we wandered around the property and tried to look in the windows. It was an interesting property for several reasons. First of all, the house sat on top of a hill, with the property sloping down from Highland Blvd down to Sunnyside Avenue below, a pretty steep grade. The lawns, which were pretty large, extended on both Sunnyside and Highland, and the house was smack in the middle of the lot.

The main entrance to the house was on the Miller Street side, accessible from the street by a steep set of stone stairs. You could get to the house from Highland, after walking across the large lawn, but you still had to walk around to Miller in order to get in. The entrance was a fine looking Colonial Revival portico. I remember looking in the sidelight windows and seeing beautifully patterned Lincrusta wallpaper in excellent condition in the hallway. Ok, hooked, he should buy it.

Of course, the house was locked, so we continued to walk around. The back of the house faced inward towards the property next door, and had a back door. The kitchen would have been back here, and the dining room (s). There had been a stained glass window back here, too, perhaps in the formal dining room. The stained glass had been broken, but the window was boarded up. I found a couple of small shards of colored glass in the grass, which I think I still have somewhere.

The side of the house facing Sunnyside Avenue was the most interesting. The house was perched at the edge of the embankment, and had a parlor floor attached sunroom and a magnificent columned porch overlooking East New York. It was supported below by pilings and columns, leaving the basement open underneath, allowing for an entrance there, as well. The effect was that of a country estate, overlooking a rich vista. At the bottom of the hill lay all of East New York, and beyond that, Jamaica Bay.

The rest of the property below the house consisted of the sloping hill, covered with scrub trees and dead plants and garbage. On Sunnyside, the property ended with the stone wall, which runs the length of Miller Street. The lot was 50 feet wide and 220 feet long. This was large. The rest of the house consisted of a bedroom floor and an upper attic floor with dormers looking out over Sunnyside and Miller.

I wanted my friend to buy the place as soon as he could. The potential was obvious, the house was unique, and the property was huge. The price was also very reasonable, although I don’t remember what it was, except it was under $150K. He liked the house but couldn’t see rushing into buying it, as East New York had a worse reputation than Bed Stuy, where we both lived, and he thought the price was too high. He thought it would make a great B&B, but was not really willing to do much with it beyond talking about it. He was going to try to lowball the owner, and if he could get it, great. If not…oh, well.

Why the universe never granted me available funding, I’ll never know, because I would have jumped on it in a minute. Needless to say, he offered the guy a ridiculous price, got laughed at, and moved on. He eventually bought a foreclosed house in Crown Heights for much more, which he ended up selling to me, and the rest is history.

Every once in a while, when I rented a Zip Car, and went out that way, I would drive by the house to see what happened to it. Someone bought it, of course, and fixed it up, although they never landscaped it. I wish we could have seen the interior – according to Property Shark, it is still a single family house, a whopping 6,493 square feet of house. Although today, it looks like a lot of people live there, there are almost a dozen cars in the yard. A huge house with a killer view, and a lot of land. Maybe it’s a good thing I never saw inside. Breaking up is hard to do.

(Photograph:S.Spellen)

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