A Brooklyn Heights townhouse is going up for sale for $6 million — but it’s not the price or square footage that is drawing attention. It’s the next-door neighbor: There is none. NBC New York’s Andrew Siff reports.
A Brooklyn Heights townhouse is hitting the market for $6 million — but it’s not the price or square footage that is drawing attention. It’s the neighbors — or perhaps more accurately, the lack thereof.
Homeowners Judith Scofield Miller and her husband David don’t mind their next door neighbor. That’s because behind the dark tinted windows at 58 Joralemon Street, is nobody.
“It’s a shell of a building with stairways and fans and machinery,” said David Miller.
Yes, the mysterious brick facade on their block is indeed just a facade.
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For more than a century since the MTA first built the Lexington line, the transportation authority relied on a ventilation shaft in case of emergency.
“They needed to have a place if the train stalled in the middle and this was it,” David said.
When looking at the building from the street out front, there’s almost no hint of MTA ownership. There is just a NYC Transit marker on the standpipe.
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And in the backyard — well, that may be a big draw for potential buyers as well. The Millers get the use of that expanded outdoor space, twice the backyard space as anyone else. With only a glimpse of the ventilation fans as well.
“You can hear occasionally if a train goes off the track but once you live here it goes unnoticed,” Judith Scofield Miller said.
But now, with their children grown and wanting to downsize, the retired couple’s six bedroom, 3.5 bath, four fireplace townhouse at 60 Joralemon is on the market. Their 1991 purchase price was $695,000. Their 2022 asking price: just under $6 million. And that price isn’t chasing anyone away.
“We’ve been very fortunate. Very fortunate indeed,” said David Miller.
So far the offers have poured in, because that’s the nature of Brooklyn real estate. Prospective buyers don’t seem to mind that next door is just a façade.
“There’s not a lot of inventory — and also you have the luxury of not having a neighbor,” said real estate agent Jeffry St. Arromand.
Now someone gets the chance to buy the perk — or quirk — of living next door to a piece of transit real estate that has been hiding in plain sight.
