233 Decatur Street

Decatur Street between Stuyvesant and Malcolm X Boulevards runs through the heart of the Stuyvesant Heights Historic District, the roughly thirty blocks the Landmarks Preservation Commission designated on September 14, 1971. The houses here went up speculatively in the 1890s, and the dominant hands were the builder Eli Bishop and the architect Axel Hedman, often working with Magnus Dahlander. Hedman sits at both ends of the block’s story: the documented Renaissance Revival rows nearby, and the church at 461 Decatur, completed in 1898, that anchors the street. The listing dates No. 233 itself to 1897 and credits Bishop and Hedman by name; that attribution travels with the broker copy rather than the public record, but it is of a piece with the block they built.

What is not in question is the house in front of you. Two hundred thirty-three Decatur is a four-story Renaissance Revival townhouse fronted in carved sandstone, its parlor floor set behind a high stoop and a deep arched entry. It is configured as a three-family, with five bedrooms and four baths across roughly 3,480 square feet, and it has been kept rather than gutted.

Inside, the period work survives in the places that are hardest to fake: carved marble and wood mantels on several decorative fireplaces, curved bay windows still in their original framing, parquet floors, and a stair that climbs to a skylight. A renovated kitchen handles the present. The house is in contract, with the Harkov Lewis Team at Brown Harris Stevens on the listing.