212 Lefferts Place

Lefferts Place is one of central Brooklyn's earliest residential streets, and it carries the name of the family that owned the ground. The Lefferts were major landowners across what is now Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights, and from the 1850s their heirs began selling the land in large plots for freestanding suburban villas, country houses for men who still commuted to lower Manhattan by stage and horse trolley. Speculative rows filled the gaps that the villas left, and by 1900 the street was nearly built out. It sits on the line that today divides Clinton Hill from Bed-Stuy, which is why Corcoran files 212 under one neighborhood and the deed reads as the other. Both are true.

212 Lefferts Place belongs to the second wave, the speculative building that closed the street up around the turn of the century. It is a brownstone of 1900, a legal two-family carried across five stories, and no architect or builder is documented for it, so the honest version is that it went up as one of the rows rather than as a named commission. What sets it apart is the land underneath, a lot that runs 120 feet deep and leaves room behind the house for an extra-deep private garden, the kind of yard the early villa plots once took for granted. The house is offered as a renovation project, which is to say the bones are here and the finishing is not.

Inside are twelve rooms, six bedrooms and five baths spread over 4,165 square feet, configured as two duplexes in the way these double brownstones often were. The asking price is 2,299,000, which on this street buys depth more than polish: the frontage, the stories, the unusually long garden, and the work still to be done to bring them together. It is listed by the Nadine Team at Brown Harris Stevens. What it really offers is a chance to finish a house on a street that was building itself before most of Brooklyn had, and to keep the garden that made the block worth settling in the first place.