126 Greene Avenue #4W

In 1897, owners Kluber and Ryan filed plans for a four-story apartment house at the corner of Clinton and Greene Avenues, with Frank Holmberg as architect, per Brownstoner's archival research. It went up in brown brick dressed with cream stone banding, quoined corners, and a bracketed cornice, and it still answers to two addresses: 383 Clinton Avenue on the building's paperwork, 126 Greene Avenue at this entrance.

By late 1898 the Brooklyn Daily Eagle was running advertisements that called it the handsomest apartment house in the Borough of Brooklyn. The copy promised suites of eight and nine outside rooms, electric passenger elevators, and liveried hall attendants, luxury as the Gold Coast understood it.

The building also marks a turn. Clinton Avenue had spent a generation as a street of freestanding villas, and an apartment house this ambitious, on this corner, announced that the fashionable way to live on mansion row could now be a flat. Over the following century the nine-room originals were divided; Brownstoner counts sixteen apartments in the building today.

4W takes the top floor, five rooms arranged around a central hall: living room, study, two bedrooms, and kitchen. The living room keeps a wood mantel with its original tile surround and a small stained glass window; the primary bedroom holds a columned stone mantel, and picture rails survive throughout.

The kitchen was expanded out of the apartment's original pantry, and the listing adds a Bertazzoni range and a renovated bath. Storage is honest about the building's age: a walk-in closet off the hall is the apartment's only closet, backed by deeded storage downstairs.

Then there is the roof. The listing describes approved plans for a private deck above the 1898 cornice, putting the potential space at roughly nine hundred square feet with a sight line to the Freedom Tower, a skyline the liveried attendants downstairs never saw.

Clinton Avenue was Brooklyn's Gold Coast. Charles Pratt, then the richest man in Brooklyn, built at 232 Clinton in 1874 and put up houses for his sons at 229, 241, and 245 across the street; the Pfizers and other industrialist families followed between 1880 and 1915.

The Clinton Hill Historic District, designated in November 1981, protects roughly 1,100 buildings, one of the largest contiguous landmark districts in the city. That designation is why the cornice, the quoins, and the stone banding read today much as they did when the Eagle's copywriter got carried away.

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