946 East 15th Street

The parlor floor is one long room, with a large bay window at the front, original inlaid wood floors, exposed brick and beams, and a dining area at the back where wood accordion doors fold open onto a sassafras deck and a grassy yard behind it. There is a front porch for the other end of the day. Three bedrooms on the second floor, under painted wood floors and stained glass windows, two more windowed rooms on the third that the listing leaves open as bedrooms, a guest suite, an office or a studio, and a semi finished panelled basement under all of it.

The house is detached, on a twenty five by hundred foot lot, with mature trees at the back and room to plant. The Q stops a block away at Avenue J.

The city's lot record gives the build year as 1910, and it is not the only one: 940, 944, 946 and 950 East 15th Street sit on consecutive lots, all built that year, all on identical twenty five by hundred foot plots, and three of the four carry exactly the same recorded building area. The rest of the blockfront immediately north went up fifteen years later, in 1925. Four matching houses from a single year is the signature of one builder working a speculative row, though the name has not survived into any record that is online.

Morris and Marian Samuels bought the house from Grace Kidd on 4 December 1967, cleared the mortgage by 1987, and held it until November 2016. Half a century in one household, in one house. The work the listing describes came after: an interior renovation filed with the Buildings Department in 2017 by the architect David Johnson, carried out by Century General Contracting, with a small thirty six square foot enlargement at the back.

This part of Midwood sits a quarter mile outside the Fiske Terrace and Midwood Park Historic District, which stops at East 17th Street, so none of that work needed a landmarks certificate. It is why the brick and the beams are exposed and why the accordion doors open where they do.