Citi Habitat’s Scott Kriger, the listing agent of 124 Dekalb Avenue in Fort Greene, gets a large number of calls regarding the property from curious passersby.
This is understandable. The building, catty-corner from Fort Greene Park and across the street from the Brooklyn Hospital Center, is a three-story converted firehouse. Its cavernous two-car garage, once home to screaming fire trucks, is caged behind grand wrought-iron gates that sit directly on the sidewalk.
But interest in the building goes beyond its grandiose structure. As its listing notes, it was once home to the production company of a “celebrated filmmaker.”
The production company is 40 Acres and a Mule, and the filmmaker is Spike Lee, whose movies include “Do the Right Thing,” “Summer of Sam” and “Malcolm X”.
“But I only show it to serious buyers,” Kriger said. “By appointment.”
The firehouse was originally constructed sometime before 1900, according to land records at the Brooklyn Historical Society. And at some point, likely in the 1940s, the basement was fortified as a bomb shelter. The fire station remained active until 1974, when it was disbanded as a result of budget cuts. In 1981, when its current owner discovered it, it had been vacant for years.
At the time, Jose Graniela had been renovating and selling loft spaces in Manhattan, and he was in the market for a roomy church or a carriage house with lots of space.
“I believe that space allows creativity, that it’s a natural extension,” he explained. “What I wanted was space to ply my trade, which was design and construction.”
When he heard about the firehouse, which was to be auctioned off by the city, he knew he’d found his next canvas. The competition at the auction, which Graniela described as full to capacity, was stiff. And so when 124 Dekalb Avenue came up, Graniela simply left his hand in the air.
The tactic worked, and for $115,000 —prices were a lot lower then in Fort Greene — Graniela walked out the owner of the firehouse. He’d never even seen the inside.
He ended up pleased with what he found. “Because it was a firehouse and a bomb shelter, the building was solid as a rock,” said Graniela.
He started his renovation by removing an old coal-burning fireplace, dismantling the bathroom stalls and getting rid of barrels of C-Rations (pre-cooked food kept in case of emergency) he discovered in the basement.
On the first floor, he used some of the massive garage space to build three rooms (Lee had his administrative offices there) and a hallway to set apart the steep steps that lead to the second and third floors. The garage now fits two cars neatly.
On the upper floors he replaced windows, built lofts and tiled floors, making sure to keep the original oak wood wherever he found it.
The second floor, an open space with 16-foot ceilings, had a kitchen in the front, which he renovated, and a raised platform in the back. In the center of the room, Graniela built a sleeping loft, which spans the width of the room and cuts the ceiling heights in half.
On the third, he created a series of spaces — bathroom, kitchen, living room, sleeping loft — which spill into one another. One can look down into the bathroom from the sleeping loft, see into the kitchen from the stairs up to the loft, and see into the living room from the entrance to the bathroom. No room is completely closed off from the rest. In the back is a terrace with a treetop view.
It took him four years to finish the renovation. And when he did, he went looking for a tenant.
“I rented it to Spike in 1985, before he was famous, before his first movie really came out, before he had national distribution or distribution at all,” Graniela said.
Lee started off renting just one room in 124 Dekalb Avenue, but over his 22 years there branched out into the rest of the floors. By the end he rented the entire building for around “$4,000 a floor” a month, Graniela said.
Now, all 5,800 square feet of 124 Dekalb’s livable space, not to mention 2,500 in the basement and 1,000 outdoors, is on sale for a whopping $5.89 million. That’s over $1,000 a square foot. (The price was cut from $6 million in late July.)
“I looked at all the surrounding listings for townhouses and small buildings, and there just really was nothing,” said Kriger about trying to find comparable listings. “It’s difficult to compare it to anything because it’s so unique.”
So how did they come up with their price?
“Real estate doubles every 10 years,” said Graniela. “I read it in a magazine.”
He reasoned that the building was worth $2 million in 1990, and that’s what he sold the property to Lee for (Lee sold it back to him within the year). And thus, $4 million in 2000 and $8 million in 2010.
“[Graniela] did an appraisal, which was pretty close [to $6 million], and there is a mystique and a notoriety of the people that came through there,” Kriger said.
Mystique or not, the property is pricey for the neighborhood. Brown Harris Stevens has a five-story brownstone with two simplexes and a duplex that faces Fort Greene Park for $2.95 million. And in nearby Clinton Hill, two carriage houses have been combined into one unit, on the market for $2.5 million.
Pricey, especially given some of the more dated design elements. There is etched glass in the kitchen on the second floor, glass bricks delineate space on the third floor, and the bathrooms have all black fixtures.
There have been no serious offers yet, but Kriger said people are responding.
In the three months the building has been on the market, he said he has shown it to doctors looking for office space, to a Broadway acting troupe seeking new headquarters, private schools, recording artists and filmmakers (in a stroke of inspiration, he listed it in Variety magazine) and to a few foreign buyers who are looking for a home — one with a little history.