A Remarkably Untouched Park Slope Queen Anne With a Balcony

In Park Slope, on 9th Street just past Eighth Avenue, the crowds flowing out of Prospect Park sometimes stop to gawk at a row of oddly whimsical townhouses. They’re four stories tall with brick façades and small gated gardens, but they have almost nothing else in common. Some have squared-off, stepped-up gables, others rise into pointy peaks, and others are capped with mansard roofs and teensy dormer windows. Cast iron that frames windows and cornices has been pressed into scrolled ferns and sunbursts and animal heads. Some have stripes of rough stone, others have rows of dentil molding. Three addresses on the row have a particularly enviable feature: a wide arch that curves over a third-floor balcony, forming a shady nook that looks ideal for watching the neighborhood. At number 470, that perch is regularly used for holiday décor. “I’m overdue to put up our giant blow-up Halloween pumpkin,” says Michael, who bought the house in 2002 with his wife, Dale. (The couple asked that I use first names.)

In the 1990s, Michael and Dale lived nearby in a co-op and fell for the row. “It was love at first sight,” Michael says, describing the house (the same went for meeting his wife, he added). Michael worked in finance but had studied history and architecture. Dale loved antiques — a hobby she would later turn into a job as a dealer, on top of a career in dance and performance. When No. 470 went on the market, they ventured inside. “The good news was that the house had mostly only served a single family and had not been touched in over 60 years,” says Michael. “The bad news was that the house had not been touched in over 60 years.”

The couple bought from Adele and Frank Tucker, siblings who had been there since before World War II. They sold the house along with whatever was in their cellar, where a century of families had stored boxes and tools, thermometers and an old tube radio. “One of the funniest discoveries was a barrel full of lump coal,” says Michael. But the couple didn’t buy for the archaeological finds, which also showed up behind fireplace flues. (“It was like a treasure hunt,” per Michael.) The row of homes in the Queen Anne style had emerged in an era when architects were starting to be seen as artists and were lauded for putting designs together like collagists, plucking chimneys from a medieval village and arches from a Roman coliseum. Their interiors are just as effusive with parquet floors and millwork and stained glass. Paul Murphy, the Compass agent with the listing, who specializes in Brooklyn brownstones, has sold about 150 of them, including a smattering of Queen Annes. “But I’ve never sold one that’s this intact,” he says, pointing out restored Lincrusta wallpaper and a lovely newel post. “Those normally get banged up, but there were well-to-do people living here, and they clearly took care of the house.” The entry hall, with its honey-colored staircase, opens on the lefthand side to a parlor with marigold-colored wallpaper that echoes a golden parquet floor, bordered in a knotted inlay of chocolate-colored wood. Walk through a sitting area to the back, now used as a kitchen, where the fireplace with its blue tile and delicate spindly mantelpiece may be original, but the kitchen cabinetry isn’t — though you might assume it came from elsewhere in the house, given the stained glass in the cabinets, whose wood was selected to match. (The couple credits a genius millworker.)

Murphy commissioned the historian Suzanne Spellen to do an independent report, and she found 470 was one of the “rare houses to escape subdivision” in the area. Spellen found the Tuckers living there since at least 1940, when the brother and sister showed up as kids on the census. Before them came a builder, George F. Driscoll, who stayed there with his family for around 30 years — holding grand parties, like a 15th wedding anniversary with a musical performance and a social register’s worth of guests that made the paper. Before they arrived, a recession that hit New York around the same time the building went up might explain why the first owner left quickly and the second went into foreclosure. The country recovered, but many of the houses that hadn’t been divided then were broken up during the Great Depression. Not 470, which had only been tweaked slightly — the ground floor, where the kitchen and washroom would have been, at some point became a separate apartment.

Michael and Dale started on that floor first, then lived there as they oversaw a restoration of the triplex upstairs that took years and involved everything from replacing the roof to repointing the brick façade to filling the home with antiques they collected from the stores on Atlantic Avenue. Dale oversaw the construction personally. The couple joked that her journal of the work opens every entry with “I think I’m going to have a nervous breakdown.” The new kitchen leads to a sunny deck off the back. On the top floor, the couple created a dance studio and exercise room. And the overhaul required all-new electric wiring and plumbing. But the biggest lift was the restoration of the wood throughout the house — a job that started by stripping every inch, then adding coats of shellac. It was a labor of love or insanity, said Michael: “It would have been tempting — and far cheaper — to paint over.”

Related