For Rent: Idyllic Family Home in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn

UPDATE: It’s rented!:-)

ASK MY KIDS, they’ll tell you: Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, is a great place to grow up. Especially on Verandah Place, the most coveted block in perhaps the most charming neighborhood in brownstone Brooklyn. It’s a row of mid-19th century brick carriage and mews houses, with a vest-pocket park right across the street and a highly regarded public elementary school two blocks away. Never was there a better street for skateboarding or jumping rope; car traffic is minimal. The river, the harbor and Brooklyn Bridge Park are a few blocks away; so are the best Middle Eastern and Italian groceries you’ll find in NYC.

And how often does a four-story, five bedroom, three bath townhouse with a great garden come up for rent on Verandah Place, especially one that’s just undergone a two-month spiffing up from top to bottom? Not often, let me tell you. If I could afford it, I’d live there myself (and did, for 20 years), but right now, it’s for rent, with a long lease possible.

Our 1850s townhouse is bright and ridiculously charming, full of simple details that characterize its classic architecture: original cove moldings, four-panel doors, rare black marble fireplaces (two working) and harmonious, perfectly square rooms.

Live there, work there — the garden level would lend itself beautifully to use as a studio or professional office, or as a guest suite, play or media room.

The entire house is freshly painted, with newly refinished floors. The kitchen has custom cabinets, honed granite countertop, Sub-Zero fridge and Viking stove next to a large dining room with wood-burning fireplace.

But why take my word for it? Have a look at my many photos, below. The official listing is here. Check out the professional photos on the realtor’s site (especially if you want to see the park across the street), or contact me at caramia447 (at) gmail (dot) com for further details.

P.S. Scroll all the way down to read some quirky factoids I’ve pulled together about Six Verandah Place and its location.

Welcome!

Parlor floor entry. Stairs go down to studio/garden level. Library/den to left, formal parlor ahead to left, beyond classical columns.

Library, den, media room, what have you. 15’x15′. Closet to right, double entry doors.

Come on in to parlor/living room. Door straight ahead leads to wrought iron balcony down to garden.

Major gap here: The photos above show just two angles on a 15’x22′ room with a marble mantel and two six-over-six windows overlooking the garden. Now up we go to the second floor…

Room straight ahead can be used as study or small bedroom. Overlooks garden. I wrote many a magazine article there.

View from dining room into hallway. Staircase, of course, original.

Dining room. About 15’x18′. Marble fireplace burns wood. Knoll credenza stays.

Bathroom on second floor has stall shower, washer/dryer, window overlooking street.

Coming up to top floor landing…

Master bedroom has skylight, arched windows, two closets, overlooks garden, rooftops.

2nd top floor bedroom.

3rd top floor bedroom.

Top floor bathroom with deep soaking tub.

Oh, wait! There’s another whole floor downstairs, on the garden level… and a full storage basement below that.

Two room studio can be used for myriad purposes. Guest suite, playroom, teen hangout, professional office. Another access to garden.

        

Garden-level bathroom has full tub, 1940s green tile.

Private garden with slate patio.

THE LORE OF SIX VERANDAH PLACE

• The house is pre-Civil War, built in the mid-1850s.
• It has more original interior detail than any other on the block (and I’ve been in most of them). That includes 4 marble mantels, cove moldings on the parlor floor, and the staircase/balusters. The ornate fixture in the front entry hall was once a gas fixture and is original to the house.
• Legend has it that the house is part of a row of five, all built by one gentleman on Warren Street for his five daughters and their families. These were not carriage houses, though there are several on the block; they were always one-family houses.
• The house is backwards! (That may be true of the whole row of five.) What is now the front facade of the house was originally the rear facade. If you stand in the garden and look up, you see its full size.
• The house is backwards probably because access was from Warren or Henry Street. There must have been an opening or possibly a road that ran through what is now the back garden in the 19th century.
• The rear parlor (living room) was originally the front parlor. We opened up the hallway and inserted the columns (which are salvaged porch columns) in the late 1980s, shortly after we bought the house.
• We also raised the ceilings on the top floor in the two back bedrooms (when we bought the house, those two rooms were an attic you couldn’t stand up in) and added the three arched windows.
• The kitchen dates from 2000. Cabinetry is custom maple, and the appliances (Viking, Bosch, Sub-Zero, etc.) have all been professionally refurbished.
• Cobble Hill Park became a park in the 1950s. Prior to that there was a church there, and Verandah Place was gated. The church was torn down, and a supermarket was set to go up in its place. The community objected, and the park was created. The sandbox is centered on a unique concrete dolphin that has been there since the ’50s and was preserved in a 1989 park renovation.

Want more info? Email me: caramia447 (at) gmail (dot) com.

Researching a Cobble Hill Alley

Verandah Place in the 1930s

A COUPLE OF HOURS SPENT IN THE STACKS of the Brooklyn Historical Society’s library goes a long way toward understanding what Brooklyn was really like in the days when our brownstone neighborhoods were first carved out of farmland into building lots — who lived here, and just how it all came to be.

Last Saturday, I took part in the BHS’s ‘Research Your Old House’ workshop, an introduction to the resources of this venerable institution. It’s now open Wednesday, Thursday and Friday from 1-5 without appointment, to use books, periodicals, atlases, scrapbooks, directories, files of newspaper clippings, and a database of digitized images and oral histories.

For the two dozen who attended the workshop, there’s probably nothing more thrilling than sitting in a balconied Victorian-era chamber and being handed a stack of brittle papers with 19th century drawings and notes detailing the conveyance, or transfer, of property over the decades. You almost can’t believe you’re being allowed to handle them at all. These documents are called  Land Conveyances, and they show the grantor (seller) and grantee (buyer) in every real estate exchange going back to 1699, and provide leads for follow-up research — original deeds and such — at the Brooklyn Hall of Records a few blocks away.

Verandah Place today

There’s lots more, but I didn’t get past the Land Conveyance documents, as the sheaf of papers pertaining to the Cobble Hill block I was researching —  bounded by Warren (formerly John), Henry, Congress, and Clinton Streets, that includes today’s Cobble Hill Park, and Verandah Place, a mews alley on which my family has owned a house since 1986 — was at least 3 inches high. It took me the whole two hours to go through the stack, in the course of which I discovered, among other things, that:

• A 170’x245′ plot of land that later was to include our house was conveyed in 1838 by Conklin Brush (mayor of Brooklyn 1851-2) to George S. Howland, along with an “alley 20 feet wide lying immediately north thereof as laid down on said map”
• By 1853, the land had passed to Edward W. Dunham, and the unnamed alley of 20 feet “is to be kept and used in common to all lots between Henry and Clinton Streets”
• In May 1854, a plot of land — whether with or without a house is not clear from these papers, but measuring the exact dimensions of our lot (21’x65′), and the correct distance from the corner of Henry Street, was granted to Stephen B. Harriman by Edward W. Dunham. [If you go to the BHS library to research a house, you need to know the distance of the house in question from the nearest street corner, as there are no lot numbers or addresses, and the surveyors’ pencil sketches that accompany the Land Conveyances are not to scale]. The alley is now written as Veranda Place (no final “h”). I believe this was the first sale of the new house, which I’ve long known dates from the 1850s. It seems that Stephen B. Harriman was the first owner. But did Dunham build it?
• Ten years later, in October 1864, the house passed from Harriman to Eliza A. Denham (not Dunham?) and then, in 1868, from Amanda P. Harriman (the notation ‘….of Stephen B’ – wife? mother? daughter? – is illegible) to Charles A. Eckert (what happened to Eliza?), a wine merchant who had a business at 123 Atlantic Avenue
• Eckert owned the property (and many others in the area) for 24 years, until he died in 1892. His executors sold the house to Ann Burns, wife of Michael Burns (why all the women’s names on these documents?)

It only got more interesting when I got home. As it turns out, there’s plenty that can be discovered without leaving your house at all, particularly the online database of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, which published from 1855 until the 1960s. It’s been archived by the Brooklyn Public Library in its entirety and is searchable by keyword. What a goldmine! I can’t believe I didn’t know about it before.

Reading through the Eagle‘s ads and articles, and searching on the names of the various people in the Land Conveyances — learning about the death of one early owner’s 2-year-old, for instance, and seeing the ‘Situation Wanted’ ads for laundress and housecleaning positions run by residents of our address — finally began to make the abstract real for me.

One priceless article, from Dec. 2, 1900, below, reveals that Verandah Place at the turn of the 20th century was so rowdy the neighbors on Warren Street tried to wall it off. They had to put up with “riotous conduct,” “maudlin songs,” and “language more forcible than polite float[ing] out of the rear windows of the tenements, across the sodded lawns and into the dining rooms of the Warren Street residents,” not to mention the “decaying fruit and vegetable matter cast daily into their scrupulousy clean backyards.”

Another clipping with the same date, below, actually shows a picture of the board fences erected by the irate Warren Street neighbors, and describes the tenants as “poor people, whites and blacks.”

All that really paints a picture. My fond imaginings that our house was lovingly occupied and cared for in earlier years have been dashed. But I can’t help identifying a little with the ‘obstreperous’ residents of Verandah Place. We had a few wild parties ourselves over the years. Fortunately, our neighbors on Warren never got quite that pissed off.

 

Mews-ing in Cobble Hill

Cobble Hill Park, Brooklyn

WHAT IS IT ABOUT A MEWS that I (and others) find so irresistible? Nineteenth century brick carriage houses are neither as elegant nor as large as your classic high-stoop brownstones, but in neighborhoods like Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill, they can cost just as much.

I guess you can’t put a price tag on that sense of being hidden away in a place time forgot, where people never stop exclaiming — even after years of residence — how remarkably quiet it is, how hard it is to believe you’re right in the middle of the city.

Verandah Place, looking west

The dictionary definition of a mews is “a street lined by buildings originally used as stables but now often converted into dwellings.” It’s a chiefly British usage, apparently. In this country, use the word ‘mews’ and you’re likely to hear, “Oh, you mean that little alley with the cute brick houses?”

I should know about living in a mews. For twenty years, from the mid-’80s until a few years ago, my family lived on Verandah Place in Cobble Hill, in a house we still own. There are other carriage houses in the neighborhood, but it’s the only mews (Brooklyn Heights has three that I can think of: Love Lane, Hunts Lane, and Grace Court Alley). I remember the original ad that brought us to the “coveted mews block,” and how I knew instantly that yes, I would be happy there. It was an ideal place to raise kids, on a traffic-free lane perfect for skateboarding and ball-playing.

Only a few of the houses were actually stables or carriage houses, with doors wide enough for carriages to enter. A couple still have intact pulleys, used for raising bales into the hayloft. The rest were small working-class dwellings. Ours is one of five built in the 1850s for (legend has it) the daughters of a homeowner on neighboring Warren Street.

There wasn’t always a park across the way. Until the 1950s, there was a church, and Verandah Place was gated. (I’d love to know where the name came from and whether some of the houses had verandahs. I’ve never seen them in a mews, but cast-iron balconies were not unheard-of in the area). The church was torn down, and a supermarket set to go up in its place. The community objected, and Cobble Hill Park was created in the 1960s.

I was reminded of the international appeal of the mews when I saw the one in central London, below, in last month’s New York Times real estate section. The pink house, once a stable, has 2BR and 2 baths and is on the market for the equivalent of $2.4million, more or less what the Cobble Hill mews houses would go for today. Click here to read all about it and see a slide show of the interior. 

Whole House in Cobble Hill Can Be Yours Tomorrow!

KNOW ANYBODY WHO WANTS TO RENT a 5BR, 3 BATH TOWNHOUSE in Cobble Hill? A truly special four-story house, on a coveted park block, with great light, two working fireplaces, a high-end kitchen, wood floors, lots of original detail, and a delightful garden?

That would be mine. It’s been vacant for two whole weeks, and I’m getting nervous.

Sure, I was smug a few months back, sitting pretty with my rental property 100% occupied, crowing about the strength of the rental market. That was when I thought I could, as usual, segue easily from tenant to tenant. That was before this damn recession affected me personally.

I even had the nerve to start a blog subtitled “Old Houses for Fun and Profit.” Well, forget the profit. With the Cobble Hill house unrented, my monthly income is suddenly halved, and there’s no fun in that, either.

I thought I was doing everything possible to rent the place, listing it with several brokers and painting the house top to bottom. But I haven’t tried blogging about it until now.

So: if you are (or know someone who is) a large, solvent family in need of an extraordinary dwelling in a prime Brooklyn neighborhood to the tune of $8,000/month — a lot of money, granted, but it’s also a lot of house — e-mail caramia447@gmail.com without delay, and save a hefty broker’s fee.

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THE LORE OF VERANDAH PLACE

A few quirky tidbits about the house and its location:

• The house is pre-Civil War, built in the 1850s.
• It has more original interior detail than any other on the block (and I’ve been in most of them). That includes 4 marble mantels, parquet floors on the parlor floor, cove moldings on the parlor floor, and the staircase/balusters. The ornate fixture in the front entry hall was once a gas fixture and is original to the house.
• Legend has it that the house is part of a row of five, all built by one gentleman on Warren Street for his five daughters and their families. These were not carriage houses, though there are several on the block; they were always one-family houses.
• The house is backwards! (That may be true of the whole row of five.) What is now the front facade of the house was originally the rear facade; that’s why the front is unimpressive.  If you stand in the garden and look up, you see its full size.
• The house is backwards probably because access was from Warren or Henry Street. There must have been an opening or possibly a road that ran through what is now the back garden in the 19th century.
• The rear parlor (living room) was originally the front parlor. We opened up the hallway and inserted the columns (which are salvaged porch columns) in the late 1980s, shortly after we bought the house.
• We also raised the ceilings on the top floor in the two back bedrooms (when we bought the house, those two rooms were an attic you couldn’t stand up in) and added the three arched windows.
• The kitchen dates from 2000. Cabinetry is custom maple, and the appliances are all status symbols (Viking, Bosch, Sub-Zero, etc.)
• Cobble Hill Park became a park in the 1950s. Prior to that there was a church there, and Verandah Place was gated. The church was torn down, and a supermarket was set to go up in its place. The community objected, and the park was created. It was renovated in 1989.

GARDEN VOYEUR: Foolproof Plants for Brooklyn Backyards

THIS IS WHERE I cut my gardening teeth: the 21’x35′ backyard on Verandah Place in Cobble Hill where we lived for twenty years, above, as it looked in May/ June.

We inherited a graceful Japanese maple, a stand of honeysuckle (abelia ‘Francis Mason,’ I later learned), and climbing hydrangea that served to disguise a rusted chain-link fence. There were a few slabs of slate on the ground, which we gradually expanded to a good-sized patio, with pieces salvaged from vacant lots in Red Hook and contributions from friends (I remember one summer night being surprised by a delivery of bluestone slabs from a friend who saw them going begging someplace).

We added a small wrought iron balcony and steps going down into the garden from the parlor floor, and had some old-school masons build steps and a landing with bricks and railroad ties — nothing elaborate — leading down to the well area.

Little by little, through trial and error, I learned how to create a garden. The main challenge: excessive shade. Though south-facing, sun was limited by gargantuan ailanthus trees in the neighboring yards.

A couple of the principles that served me well:

• Use variegated foliage – that is, shade-tolerant plants that don’t flower showily but have green and white foliage to bring light to dark corners of the garden, e.g. ‘striped’ hosta, caladium bulbs, variegated lirope (the festive-looking silver stuff in the left foreground below), vinca and ivy – anything at all that comes ‘variegated.’

Below: The white feathery plumes on the right (there’s a purple one too) are astilbe — shade-tolerant, reliable, ironclad.

• 

• Limit color for cohesiveness. I stuck to a palette of blue, purple, pink and white. Very little orange, red or yellow, a situation partially dictated by circumstances; most hot-colored flowers require a lot of sun.

Most satisfying: oak leaf hydrangea along the back line of the property. Three plants (expensive at the time; about $50 each) grew in a couple of years to create three-season glory, with huge, neat, colorful leaves and massive white panicles from June until frost.

See below for more plant suggestions. Any and all of these are recommended for Brooklyn backyards; they’re foolproof and readily available.

Below, left to right: chartreuse andromeda, Japanese fern, ‘money plant’ (those purplish flowers will turn to dry, translucent, coin-like things come fall), the blue spikes of ajuga, all under a climbing hydrangea, soon to flower white.

Below, a deep shade corner, with (left to right) the round glossy leaves of European ginger, Japanese fern, small leaved ivy and small-leaved chartreuse hosta, and yellow-tipped houtonia — pretty, with white flowers, but invasive — you have to be prepared to pull it out where you don’t want it.  The cardboard is from a package of caladiums, to remind me where I planted them (they don’t show up till July).

Below, my favorite afternoon reading spot. Left to right: pink creeping phlox; white ‘starry eyes,’ a sun-loving groundcover; the remainder of some pink bleeding heart (easy, showy, great for shade); small white flowering bulbs (the name escapes me  – anyone?); variegated hosta; blue wood hyacinth in the background.

This last picture, below, is a bit earlier in the season — late April. The hostas are just coming in. The fuchsia azalea was too gaudy for me; I got rid of it. In the foreground, you can see brownish huechera (coral bells), more ‘starry eyes,’ yellow-flowering lamium or dead nettle, and some tiny hybrid tulips on long thin stems — ordered early on from a bulb catalogue, they came back year after year, providing great pleasure.

Mind you, these are all perennials, not annuals. They don’t flower all season, just for a few weeks. But you plant them once and have them for years with no additional effort or expense. Perennials are the way to go if you’ll be staying put for any length of time. You can divide them in spring or fall to create more of the same, and take some with you if you move.