66 Washington Avenue #3

The listing dates 66 Washington Avenue to 1930, but the record runs deeper. The Romanesque brick building went up around 1892 for the Van Glahn Brothers grocery, and was later folded into the Rockwood and Company chocolate works, which moved to Brooklyn’s Wallabout in 1904 and grew into the second-largest chocolate maker in the country after Hershey. Rockwood is credited with popularizing the sprinkle and, later, the chocolate chip; this is a contributing building in the National Register’s Rockwood Chocolate Factory Historic District.

Residence 3 is a corner loft of about 1,123 square feet, its industrial frame left legible: exposed timber beams, ceilings rising past thirteen feet, and the building’s own round Romanesque arches. The kitchen is finished in brass and marble, a mezzanine lounge floats above the main room, and an original skylight sits over the primary bedroom. Two bedrooms in all.

Clinton Hill’s western edge, along the old Wallabout industrial belt, has turned its factories into some of Brooklyn’s best lofts, and this is among the most characterful. The chocolate is long gone; the arches, the beams, and the light are not.