20 Henry Street #4BCS

Before it was anything else, 20 Henry Street made candy. The building went up in 1892 for the Mason, Au and Magenheimer Confectionery Manufacturing Company, which had outgrown the Fulton Street shop it had occupied since 1864. Its architect was Theobald Engelhardt, the son of German immigrants and one of Brooklyn's most prolific builders of factories and breweries, and he gave the confectioner a sturdy brick works with unusually large windows, cut for light and for the people working inside.

This is where Mason Mints, Mason Peaks, and Dots were made, and the factory ran until 1949, when the company moved its operations to Long Island. The brands outlived the building's candy years; they passed eventually to Tootsie Roll, which still makes Mason Dots and Mints today. Brownstoner has recorded the neighborhood's favorite memory of the place: old-timers in the Heights recalled factory workers tossing candy down to the kids on the street below.

The factory's second act was stranger and, in its way, just as sweet. In the 1970s it became Mitchell-Lama artists' housing, described as Brooklyn's only government-financed artists' building, and a tight-knit community lived and worked here for roughly thirty years. A new owner opted out of the Mitchell-Lama program in 2003, and by 2004 the building stood empty.

What followed was a long, stalled conversion saga that finally resolved in 2010, when Canyon-Johnson Urban Funds, the real estate venture backed by Magic Johnson, acquired the property. PKSB Architects completed the conversion in 2012: the restored seven-story factory, a new low-rise garden addition beside it, and thirty-nine residences in all, the two structures woven together with a shared landscaped garden, metal treillage, and a green roof.

The conversion had to earn its place. The building sits inside the Brooklyn Heights Historic District, so every move went through full Landmarks Preservation Commission review and public hearings. PKSB chose continuity over erasure, retaining and refurbishing facade work from the 1970s originally carried out by Lee Harris Pomeroy, a quiet acknowledgment that the artists' era was part of the record too.

Residence 4BCS is two lofts joined into one, a 2,681 square foot three-bedroom with a dedicated study, and the combination reads as a single, settled home rather than a sum of parts. The factory's original fabric does most of the talking: exposed timber columns and beams run through the rooms, and the oversized arched windows announce the nineteenth century from every angle. The listing credits the combination to Elizabeth Roberts Architects.

Against those industrial bones, the finish work is warm and deliberate. Teak paneling, custom glass and steel partitions, and bespoke millwork temper the rawness without dressing it up, letting the timber and brick stay legible. Two private storage units convey with the residence.

Brooklyn Heights became New York City's first designated historic district in 1965, and it remains a neighborhood of rowhouses, which makes a genuine factory loft here a scarce thing. Combinations like this one manufacture what the Heights almost never produces natively: a loft at family scale, inside protected nineteenth-century fabric.

The market rendered its own verdict. The residence was listed on June 19 and a contract was signed within twelve days, about as clear a statement as exists on the demand for authentic industrial space in a brownstone district.

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