Brooklyn Condo in Historic ‘Graham Home for Old Ladies’ Is for Sale
AS the city’s housing market soared over the last decade, many abandoned buildings and old factories were developed into condominiums. Few of those conversions, however, have as rich a history as the condo at
The 4.5-story building, known more popularly as the Graham Home for Old Ladies, was the creation of John B. Graham, an apparently generous 19th-century lawyer who financed the living quarters “in consequence of his sympathy with the indigent gentlewomen who had, by previous culture and refinement, been unfitted to accept willingly the public asylum provided by the state,” according to the Clinton Hill Historic District Designation Report of 1981.
Back in the 1800s, to be accepted as a resident, “a lady had to be over 60 and bring satisfactory testimonials of the propriety of her conduct and the respectability of her character,” according to an article in The Fort Greene Association Newsletter, published in 2001, the year the building was converted into 25 condos, “and come provided with a good bed and furniture for her room.”
For more than a century after its founding, the
But by the 1980s, there was another kind of lady residing in the building, which by then had become the Bull Shippers Plaza Motor Inn. These were “ladies by the hour who brought only scanty-panty testimonials of propriety,” according to the 2001 Fort Greene Newsletter article.
After the Bull Shippers went out of business, the city took over the property and turned it into a single-room occupancy hotel, which soon became a magnet for crime, according to residents of the neighborhood and newspaper accounts.
A succession of developers then bought the building, but it remained empty through most of the 1990s, and its original charm as a Italianate brick building was long obscured by dilapidation. While it stood abandoned, the building appeared to be something of a haunted house to neighbors. It was also a large canvas for graffiti, one of them by a famous artist known as MERZ.
Then, in 2000, the BRP Development Corporation bought the property and began renovations that restored the original facade and details like the stone lintels around the second- and third-floor windows, according to the developer. A plaque that reads, “The Graham Home for Old Ladies” was attached to the building, above the front door, and current residents seem to relish the name. (The condominium board president, Don E. Harrison, refers to his neighbors as “the old ladies,” regardless of their age.) An elegant circular driveway sets the building apart from the others on
The developer said that all 25 condos sold out when they went on the market in 2002. One of the first residents, Michael Schober, is the building’s unofficial historian; he became fascinated with the story of the home and filled a binder with news articles dating to the mid-1800s.
Now a first-floor condo, with three bedrooms, two bathrooms and 1,314 square feet of space, is on the market. Like 11 other apartments in the building, it comes with a parking space. In the listing on the Corcoran Group’s Web site, the asking price is $849,000, down from $869,000 in August.
Nichole R. Thompson-Adams, the broker on the listing and a longtime resident of Clinton Hill, whose son would call the abandoned residence “the spooky building” when they walked by, said the renovation and revival of the Graham Home for Old Ladies “seemed to restore a little bit of the soul of the neighborhood.”
Copyright © 2010 The New York Times Company. Reprinted with Permission.