390 Ninth Street

Ninth Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues went up almost all at once. Nearly every lot on the block carries an 1899 or 1901 date in the city's land records, two-family brick houses built to a common pattern behind flat classical cornices. 390 Ninth Street is the exception. Its recorded year of construction is 1920, and the facade says as much: red brick in a warm range, a round-arched entry with a rowlock brick surround and a polychrome tile panel above it, and a broad front-gabled dormer with chevron panels set into a shingled roof slope. It is Arts and Crafts vocabulary dropped into a turn-of-the-century row, and it reads that way from the sidewalk. Behind the red door, numbered 390A, an encaustic tile floor in red, black and white runs to the stair.

The block sits outside the Park Slope Historic District. The 2012 extension of the district stops at Seventh Avenue, taking in only the corner buildings at the far end of this blockfront, 444 Ninth Street and the Seventh Avenue storefronts, and leaving the rest of the block unregulated. The Department of Buildings property profile for the address lists no landmark designation.

The upper residence is a triplex of just over 2,000 square feet, seven rooms across three floors, which is house scale rather than apartment scale. Herringbone oak runs through the entertaining floor, where tall multi-pane casements face the street and a wood-burning fireplace sits under a paneled mantel. A period cast iron firebox survives in one of the three bedrooms. The kitchen is fitted in white cabinetry with a farmhouse sink and a range beneath a hood; the baths are marble, with radiant heat underfoot and a steam shower. Two and a half baths in all.

The top floor holds a study a few steps up from its landing, and past it the private deck: wood decking, a grill plumbed to a gas line, a fire feature, and a long view north over the low roofs of the Slope to New York Harbor and the downtown Manhattan skyline. Central air is ducted, there is a washer and dryer in the unit, and a storage locker and shared roof deck come with the building.

The house was a two-family before and after its last serious campaign. In August 2014 the architect Anthony Bonsignore, RA, filed an alteration for owner James Houston covering interior renovation throughout, plumbing and mechanical work, and replacement of a damaged roof and penthouse, with a new certificate of occupancy for a two-family. The job was signed off in February 2016. A condominium declaration followed, dated September 2017 and recorded that December, splitting the house into two units and creating the residence on offer here.

Unit A first traded in October 2018, then again in May 2024. It has come back to market roughly twenty-six months after that sale, four days into its second listing, with the F and G at Seventh Avenue and Ninth Street letting out at the corner of the block.