72 Poplar Street #PH

In 1912, the architects Beverly King and Harry Walker gave Brooklyn a police station dressed as an Italian palazzo. The five-story Renaissance Revival building rose on Poplar Street between Henry and Hicks, and the AIA Guide to New York City would later describe it as "a Florentine palazzo with a soaring cornice." The costume was deliberate. Station houses of the era were built, as Brownstoner put it, "like a fortress or castle... to impress upon that same populace, with stateliness and gravity, the rule of law."

For roughly eight decades the building belonged to the NYPD, serving as the 84th Precinct station house. By 1992 the precinct had outgrown it and decamped to a new facility at Tillary and Gold Streets, and department training operations at the Poplar Street address wound down by April 1993. What remained at the end were six units of the Internal Affairs Division, which gives the building's police chapter its strange final image: the department's internal watchdogs were the last officers working the old palazzo.

Turning a landmarked station house into homes took a decade. The city auctioned the building in 2004, and the Landmarks Preservation Commission rejected the buyer's plan to add stories; the building sits inside the Brooklyn Heights Historic District, the first historic district New York ever designated, and the commission was not inclined to let the cornice line drift upward. Approval for a residential conversion finally came in April 2012.

The Daten Group completed the work in 2014, carving fourteen condominium units out of the former precinct house, with a redesign by Freyer Collaborative Architects and interiors by Richard Mishaan. Even the complex's old carriage house was reborn, as a single-family townhouse.

The penthouse takes the entire top floor: three bedrooms, three baths, roughly 2,000 square feet of interior. The remarkable arithmetic is on the roof, where a wraparound terrace runs 2,468 square feet. The outdoor space outmeasures the apartment it crowns, an inversion that shows up on the floor plan before it shows up anywhere else.

The listing describes a great room lit by three walls of oversized Marvin windows, a gas fireplace, and an Elam Kitchens chef's kitchen fitted with Sub-Zero and Wolf. It goes on: white oak floors, marble baths, a heated floor in the primary bath, and a terrace garden designed by Brook Landscape. The penthouse found its buyer after 59 days on the market and is now in contract.

Poplar Street is the northernmost street in Brooklyn Heights, the quiet seam where the neighborhood's brownstone grid gives way to the Brooklyn Bridge approaches and DUMBO beyond. Landmark protection has kept the block low and intact, which is why a rooftop up here still reads as open sky.

From the top of the old station house, the position works both ways: the Heights and its promenade in one direction, the bridge and the borough's busiest waterfront in the other. It is an address that spent eighty years watching the neighborhood. Now the view runs the other way.

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