38 Douglass Street

Douglass Street has always resisted easy filing. The listing calls this block Cobble Hill; the portals answer Boerum Hill; the Carroll Gardens argument starts a block south at Degraw. The Cobble Hill Historic District, drawn in 1969, never crossed Court Street to settle the question, so the block belongs to whoever happens to be describing it. Even the name is a trick: Forgotten New York notes it has no connection to Frederick Douglass, and east of Fifth Avenue the street gave the name up entirely in the 1870s, trading it for St. John’s Place.

The house itself is a brick multi-family 22 feet 4 inches wide on a 25-by-100 lot, with roughly 2,350 square feet of unused FAR still sitting behind it. It came to market asking $3,995,000 and was in contract by July, after twenty offers that carried it well past the ask.

It runs as a three to four family: eleven rooms, five bedrooms, and the original material left alone. Wide-plank floors run through the parlor rooms, brick fireplaces repeat floor after floor, and on the top story the ceiling opens to exposed timber corner braces, the roof frame showing through the plaster. A turned-banister stair climbs past deep window reveals.

Out back is the deep south-facing garden: planted beds, a hammock slung between trees, and a stone path running the full length of the yard under a mature tree. The unbuilt FAR makes the house a project for whoever wants one; the garden argues for leaving it alone.

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