897 Lincoln Place

Lincoln Place between New York and Brooklyn Avenues was conceived as a single idea. Around 1906 and 1907, Axel S. Hedman, a Swedish-born architect who emigrated in 1880 and worked out of Brooklyn until his death in 1943, drew the full run of roughly fifty row houses on both sides of the street. He was among the most prolific designers of his generation, with hundreds of houses across Crown Heights, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Park Slope, and Lefferts Manor to his name. Most of the Lincoln Place run, 897 included, he faced in Renaissance Revival limestone, a vocabulary he carried home from the 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago and its white classical city. The block reads as one continuous composition rather than fifty separate addresses.

What Hedman composed here was a street, not a house. 897 Lincoln Place is one bay of the row at 893 to 901, each front detailed to belong to the whole while keeping its own measure. The limestone, the cornice line, the rhythm of stoops and bays, were meant to be read together at walking pace. In 2011 the Landmarks Preservation Commission drew the Crown Heights North II Historic District around this section, more than six hundred buildings, and the row fell inside the lines. The designation protects what the block always was: a planned limestone composition that has held its proportions for more than a century.

The house is a two-family of about twenty feet, three stories over a full basement, 3,268 square feet across sixteen rooms, six bedrooms and three baths. The arrangement is the old Brooklyn one, an owner duplex spanning the garden and parlor levels with a private backyard, and a rental flat above. It comes in original, estate condition, the kind of interior that still carries its bones and asks to be brought forward rather than gutted. The asking price is 1,500,000, and the listing is held by Jare'd Goodloe of Compass. What changes hands is a full share of Hedman's block, one bay of a row built to be seen as a single street.

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