679-St-Marks-Avenue-0108.jpg
This one’s not for the faint of heart. This one-time beauty queen at 679 St. Marks Avenue in Crown Heights is ready for a gut and asking $400,000 for the privilege. This is priced at about $80 per buildable square foot. (The house is only 2,700 square feet but the 2.43 FAR allows for another 2,300 square feet to be built.) Is this a good deal? If you think you could condo it and sell the finished square feet for, say, $450 a foot, there’s gotta be some room for profit in the equation, don’t you think?
679 St. Marks Avenue [Douglas Elliman] GMAP P*Shark


What's Your Take? Leave a Comment

  1. Does anyone outhere know if the house at 887 St. Mark’s Avenue was destroyed by fire around 1959 or before or what happened to it? One of my relatives lived there way back. But the house is gone now. There is a church there now.

  2. 11:27:

    Your description of kids playing on a summer’s evening and “throwing shadows a mile long” is exactly what I remember from my Crown Heights’ boyhood.

    Are there many things more pleasureful than a good Brooklyn street?

    NOP

  3. NOP- I loved your post (gee- you and MM can really compete in the literary dept!) I even saved it to read again. I’m a friend of MM’s so you know I mean that in a good way! Wish I had seen the Betsy Ross in its heyday. Sounds like a lot of the old, incredible apartment buildings the Bronx used to have. those are making a comeback now- especially on the Grand Concourse.

    I love these old houses- I grew up in the projects- actually in a great one, Hillside Homes, which is listed as a success story in the architectural guides. It was a wonderful place to grow up- we did have stickball and stoop ball too but something has always drawn me to the old houses. They are very haunting and much more beautiful than a brick box.

    I understand why the B’klyn Children’s Museum had to rebuild, but somehow I think that the way museums display things now, the way they teach, the atmosphere takes away all the mystery and wonder that really engage a child and make them want more. I complain a lot about the disneyfication of the imagination- it’s all put out there in a prepackaged form. It makes “imagination” so easy and preformed- but I guess at that point it’s no longer imagination.

    Still, every summer I love hearing the sounds of kids on the street running around and still playing kid’s games. Last summer I came home in the late afternoon and the sun had lit up the street so it was very golden, and the kids were running around, throwing shadows a mile long and made the sidewalk look like it was moving. The elderly were sitting lined up in their chairs, both sides of the street and our very well fed colony of cats were crossing the street to eat at the next feast.I don’t know- it just was such a beautful Crown Heights moment- Sad to think that future NYers living in big “luxury” condos won’t know moments like that. the neighborhoods won’t be the same, the light won’t be the same, even our daily interactions won’t be the same. But for now it endures.