Two houses, one lot
259 8th Street is a roughly 22-by-100-foot Park Slope lot with two buildings on it: a three-story row house at the sidewalk and a two-story carriage house at the rear, separated by a 30-foot-deep garden of roughly 675 square feet. A gate and walkway west of the front house lead back to both. The city's lot record confirms the pair as two buildings on a single tax lot and dates the property to 1899, inside the 1880s-and-90s range the listing gives; treat the year as the city's rather than a building permit's.
The front house reads, from the street, as a painted wood-frame house over a brick base, with a stoop and a bracketed cornice; its neighbors read as frame houses too. The carriage house behind it is red brick with a green door. That mix is the block's own character: when Charles M. Higgins put his India ink works up at 240-244 8th Street in 1898, Brownstoner records it landing in the middle of a residential block of modest brick row houses, frame houses and tenements.
What you get
Four apartments, all vacant at closing. The front house holds an upper duplex of two bedrooms and two baths with a south-facing parlor-floor living room on original wide-plank 19th-century pine and a deck of about 110 square feet over the garden, and a garden-level one bedroom below it with its own entrance and a door to the garden. The two could be joined into a single house without much surgery. The carriage house holds two one-bedroom units, both facing south onto the garden, with side windows toward the neighbor's garden to the east.
The block between Fourth and Fifth Avenues sits outside the Park Slope Historic District, and the lot is zoned R6B: the city records a built FAR of 0.78 against an allowed 2.0, which is the room to expand the listing points to. Taxes run about $439 a month.
