When summer comes we flee north where we can rest our head in the magnificent, bountiful bosom of the Hudson Valley. Look for we up top Silver Mountain ye shall find we sans pants, gardening.
Green Donut
There was a time when my bucolic Brooklyn garden plot was more than enough to sustain my sanity and recharge my psychic batteries but, like my Apple iPhone 4, it seems there is a limit to the number of discharge and charge cycles … I'm upgrading. I'm trading in the abusive nonstop roar that spews from the Park Slope Armory's roof top air handlers for the hypnotic night time serenades of the cricket and the tree frog.
New Brooklyn is a lot louder than "old" Brooklyn and by old I mean 20 years ago, damn it.
There is so much more peripheral noise now. Ambient noise pollution.
Flight Path
On privileged Sunday mornings in times of old, you could sit in your rear yard with its 30 foot setback and hear the individual sounds of neighbors fixing the big breakfast, the cast iron ringing, water running in the sink, soft voices conversing. Now its just an irritating mash of machine noises and old man growling sounds.
Down State IMBY
So we're back in the city and what is news?
Looked in our mailbox to find we're a million dollars richer! House prices on OUR block just broke the TWO MILLION DOLLAR mark. Ok, hating the noise a little less.
Yes, 375 Sweet Sixteen Street just closed for $2,080,000, deed recorded August 29th, 2014. Welcome to the neighborhood Mr. Thomas Lee. Yes current sellers purchased the house back in 2000 for $399,200. What a difference 14 years can make.
Of course we were excited for our block of two family brick and wood framers between 7th and 8th Avenues back in 2006 when 391 16th Street fetched $1,275,000, but that was during crazy bubble market frenzy times. Certainly buyers would come to their senses and demand a return to sanity. "Brownstones half off!"
Ka-Ching
In 2012 two more home sales reset the price point again for Sweet Sixteenth. 362 16th sold for $1,010,000 and 373 sold for $1,275,000. Both good bones fixer-uppers requiring a six figures amount of updating. Both converting from two to one families in the process.
Jump forward another twenty years into the future and I guess we will all be lamenting the day we should've, would've, could've stolen that house when it was only two million.
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| SOLD DURING THE FIRST OPEN HOUSE. |