89 State Street #5

The corner of State and Henry Streets has held this house since 1846. City building records date it to that year, and broker copy for the building repeats it, though the listing platforms display a generic 1900, the standard placeholder for anything pre-war. It is a brick rowhouse just over 23 feet wide, sitting on its corner lot much as it has for 180 years.

The date fits the block's documented build-out. The brick Greek Revival rows on State Street opposite Garden Place went up between 1848 and 1852, and the wood-frame and brick houses at 303 to 307 Henry Street, at the corner of State, date to around 1840 to 1845. No. 89 belongs to the first generation of this streetscape, built while Brooklyn Heights was still filling in.

In November 1965 the Landmarks Preservation Commission made Brooklyn Heights New York City's first designated historic district, and the designation report reads like a census of exactly this fabric. Otis Pratt Pearsall's inventory, cited in the report, counted 1,284 buildings in the district, of which at least 684 predate the Civil War, including 405 Greek Revivals. The district boundary itself walks down State Street, and No. 89 sits comfortably inside it.

Unit 5 is the top floor, with tree-lined exposures on three sides, a privilege of the corner. The living and dining room sits under a skylight and holds a wood-burning fireplace, so the main room is lit from above by day and from the hearth after dark.

The bath has been renovated, and the listing describes a double sink, Toto fixtures, and a heated towel bar. There is a washer and dryer in the unit, a quiet luxury in a house of this vintage.

Then there is the roof: an enormous private deck, which the listing describes as planted with a native garden and open to views across Brooklyn to the Manhattan skyline. In a district where the commission guards every cornice, private outdoor space at roof level is the thing you cannot easily add, which makes an existing deck of this size the apartment's singular asset.

The house converted to a cooperative in the early 1980s, with a 1983 alteration on record, and it remains a self-managed five-unit tenants' corporation. There is storage in the basement and a bike room, and both pets and pieds-à-terre are permitted.

Small self-managed co-ops almost never show their hand, which is what makes this summer unusual: two of the building's five units are on the market at once, a garden duplex-style two-bedroom below and this top floor. It is a rare open window into how a tiny corner house lives.

The quiet western blocks of State Street carry more history than the address suggests. One block east, at 169 Clinton Street on the corner of State, H.P. Lovecraft lived through most of 1925 and wrote "The Horror at Red Hook" there. Clay Lancaster's "Old Brooklyn Heights" records that State Street was possibly named for Manhattan's State Street, and Sidney Place, which meets State mid-block to the east, took its name in the early 1830s from Sir Philip Sidney.

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