79 State Street

Listing portals date 79 State Street to 1901. The city's lot records say otherwise: 1846, the same year as nearly all of its neighbors, a row of seven house lots running along the north side of State Street from Garden Place to Henry Street as Brooklyn Heights filled in with merchants, brokers, and shipmasters. The house stands 22.5 feet wide at the foot of Garden Place, inside the Brooklyn Heights Historic District, the first district New York protected when the landmarks law arrived in 1965. It has barely traded since: the deed record shows transfers in 1967, 1989, and 1998, and nothing after, nearly three decades now in the same hands.

The rental takes the whole house, five bedrooms and three and a half baths across some 4,700 square feet behind a red brick front with planted window boxes. Eight fireplaces survive, three of them wood burning. The parlor floor runs living room, formal dining room, and an eat-in kitchen with Sub-Zero, Viking, and Bosch; above sit oversized bedrooms, a windowed bath, and a top floor given over to a rec room with custom built-ins, a storage room spanning the width of the house, and a finished roof terrace with skyline views.

The garden level works as a suite of its own: private entrance, a bedroom with a wood-burning fireplace, a second kitchen opening to a dining area and the landscaped garden, a full bath, and its own laundry. Central air and heat throughout, no fee, available the first of September.