Real Estate

Award-Winning Bushwick Townhouse With Parking, Once Income Restricted, Asks $1.375 Million

This brick two-family on Noll Street in Rheingold Gardens updates the Brooklyn row house idiom with reinterpreted Art Deco sunburst metalwork details.

by Stephen Zacks

01/21/2019 4 minute 0

This two-family attached brick townhouse in Bushwick’s Rheingold Gardens has mansard roofs and dormers on the second floor suggestive of early Dutch settlement, before mid-19th-century German immigrants turned the area into the center of Brooklyn’s Brewers’ Row. Part of the first phase of the large-scale development named after the 6.7-acre brewery complex demolished in the 1980s, it was designed by Magnusson Architecture and Planning (MAP) as a modern update to the Brooklyn row house idiom with reinterpreted Art Deco sunburst metalwork details.

Inside 26 Noll Street, we see an open living room and kitchen with an island, subway tile backsplash, and stainless steel appliances with tall sloping ceilings. There’s a walk-in closet in the generous master bedroom, and white-tiled bathroom, but without floor plans it’s hard to discern how it’s all organized. The renderings imagine a “virtually staged” future for the units but don’t clarify much either. According to the certificate of occupancy, it’s configured as a floor-through apartment over a duplex.

There’s room for parking in the rear, as well as a parking spot-size patio.

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Rheingold Gardens began as a low-income infill housing development initiated by former Assemblyman and Brooklyn Democratic Party boss Vito Lopez to replace an area that had become a dumping ground after the 1977 blackout devastated this area of Bushwick.

They won plenty of awards, including a 2006 Building Brooklyn Award for Brownfield Redevelopment from the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, a 2009 New York City Brownfield Award for Community Outreach from the New York City Partnership of Brownfield Practitioners, and a 2009 John Clancy Award for Socially Responsible Housing from the Boston Society of Architects / American Institute of Architects, which noted, “Overall, we found this a very humanizing response to urban housing.”

Subsidized by low-income bonds by the New York Department of Housing, Preservation and Development, this one was purchased by the current owner in 2005 for $328,948, according to ACRIS. At the time, the properties were sold by lottery to buyers who met the income restrictions, the Times details. If income restrictions still apply, they are not mentioned in the deed or the listing, so we recommend inquiring about it. The loss of these townhouses as low-income housing would be a boon to the present owners although somewhat unfortunate as a matter of public policy.

For reasons that have never been clear to us, the rest of the undeveloped former Rheingold Brewery fell into private hands. It was subsequently rezoned, the result of which has recently started to come onto the market as 80 percent market-rate and 20 percent affordable rental buildings, such as ODA’s 10 Montienth Street.

Now this Noll Street townhouse is on the market for $1.375 million, with monthly taxes of $239. Melissa Kantrowitz of Douglas Elliman is showing it. What do you think?

[Listing: 26 Noll Street | Broker: Elliman] GMAP