132 Joralemon Street
132 Joralemon Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn
BBL 3002640010 · BIN 3002533
- Year built
- 1879
- Type
- Cooperative
- Units
- 12
- Floors
- 4
- Landmark
- Designated
- Subletting
- Board approval required for every sublet per board resolution of June 15, 2000: one-year terms only, renewable annually with board approval, no sub-subleases, non-refundable application fee per subtenant, escalating fee of $10/share year one, $20/share year two, +$10/share each year thereafter, payable monthly as additional rent; vacancy suspends and two years of owner-occupancy or vacancy resets to base
- Pets
- House rules as filed contain no prohibition; they require only that animals be carried or leashed in public portions of the building
Compiled by The Roebling Research Desk from the building’s offering plan, amendments, and related building documents (primary source dated 2000 for sublet policy; 1985 for plan documents). Reported and subject to confirmation. Board policies can change by amendment — confirm at the offer stage.
132 Joralemon Street is a twelve-apartment cooperative in a mid-nineteenth-century Anglo-Italianate house on the Aitken Place block, where Brooklyn Heights runs out into Borough Hall and Downtown Brooklyn. It is the smallest kind of building the district trades — a converted row house with a garden, a walk-up stair, twelve share blocks and no staff — and it is the kind of purchase where the paperwork matters more than the amenity list, because there is no amenity list.
The conversion documents are unusually complete. 132 Joralemon Associates bought the building in May 1984 from the family that had held it since 1967 and offered a non-eviction plan on July 19, 1985, with an express bar on ever amending it into an eviction plan. Tenants in occupancy bought at $750 a share; outside purchasers paid $1,000. Nine of the twelve apartments were rent-stabilized at filing and three were vacant, and the offering came to $1,570,000 across 1,570 shares.
What makes the plan a period document is its financing. The sponsor took back a $275,000 purchase-money wraparound mortgage at 12 percent interest, stepping to 14.5 percent in May 1987, interest-only throughout, with the full principal ballooning on May 2, 1994 — and the plan warned in capital letters that if the co-op could not refinance, shareholders would owe $175.16 per share. Beneath that sat an underlying mortgage held personally by the woman who had sold the building. Twelve households in a Heights brownstone signed up for that in 1986, and the corporation refinanced through it. The City Register's record of the co-op's underlying debt since — modest six-figure balances rolled forward in 1999, 2004, 2009 and 2017 — is the evidence that they did.
The apartments are small, and the plan says so plainly. The share schedule runs 1.5- and 3.5-room units with a single bath, at 68 to 155 shares. Two apartments were already combinations by 1985; a 2019 DOB filing combined two more. This is a building of studios, one-bedrooms and a handful of larger floor-throughs, where the garden apartments and the combined lines carry the value.
Architecture and unit composition
The house is 25 feet wide and 84 feet deep on a 26-by-100-foot lot, about 8,700 square feet of building, with the apartment lines running from a garden level up through a fifth tier under the roof. The plan's allocation of the rear yard is the distinctive feature: it is expressly not a common area. Apartments 1A and 1B each hold exclusive use of half the garden — the line runs from the rear wall to the rear property line, split at the partition between the two units — and each is solely responsible for maintaining its half, subject to the corporation's access for structural repair and to emergency egress. Two apartments carry lofts. On the third and fourth floors, rooms shown on the original design plans as exterior bathrooms had their fixtures pulled and their common-hall doors sealed at conversion, with the space annexed to the adjoining apartments — a small archaeology of pre-plumbing row-house life folded into two floor plans.
Building operations
132 Joralemon Street Buyers Corp. has run the building since 1986 on the leanest possible model. The conversion budget carried no management fee and no service contracts at all: a part-time non-union superintendent at $50 a month, gas heat and hot water, public-area electricity, insurance, taxes and the mortgage, totalling $58,215.60 for the first year. By the late 2000s the corporation was paying a small annual management fee — $4,800 a year in the 2009 through 2012 statements — plus a janitorial contract, with the building's own laundry generating a line of income.
Financial statements in The Roebling Research Library run from 2001 through 2012 and show the profile clearly: maintenance income around $100,000 a year, operating expenses tracking close behind, real estate taxes and mortgage interest as the two dominant costs, and a cash position that has generally sat near $100,000. Capital work is episodic: a boiler and hot-water heater replacement in 2000, and a sidewalk shed and pipe scaffold in 2014 for exterior repairs. On an 1860s-to-1870s masonry front in a landmark district, the façade cycle is the recurring obligation, and twelve shareholders carry it.
Recent sales
Recent transfers at this building, sourced from NYC Department of Finance records. Apartment-level detail (line, condition, asking-price context) verified upon consultation request.
| Date | Unit | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Feb 27, 2026 | 5BC | $1,775,000 |
| Aug 11, 2025 | 3BC | $1,050,000 |
| Mar 7, 2018 | 2A | $610,000 |
| Aug 14, 2014 | 4C | $580,000 |
Sales sourced from NYC Department of Finance recorded transfers (BBL 3-00264-0010) and verified listing data. Apartment-level facts (line, condition, asking-price context) curated and cross-verified by The Roebling Team research desk. Not all transactions cross-verify with ACRIS records — sponsor and LLC purchases sometimes record at stipulated values rather than market price.
What to know if you’re buying
Twelve shareholders carry every capital item. Pull the current financials, the reserve balance, the FISP filing status and any assessment history, and read them as one document rather than four.
Confirm the share ledger and the combinations. Two apartments were already combined at conversion and a 2019 filing combined two more. Your attorney should verify the specific unit's shares and its approvals.
The sublet rules are strict and are the current rules. One-year terms, annual board approval, escalating per-share fees. If leasing flexibility matters to you, price it in.
Garden rights are deeded to two apartments. If you are buying 1A or 1B you get half the rear yard and the obligation to maintain it. If you are buying anything else, you do not have yard access.
What to know if you’re selling
The paperwork is your asset. A complete plan, proprietary lease, house rules, sublet policy and a decade of financial statements is more diligence material than most twelve-unit Heights co-ops can produce. Put it in the deal room on day one.
Sell the garden and the combinations. In a building of 1.5- and 3.5-room apartments, the garden units and the combined floor-throughs are the scarce product, and they should be marketed as such.
Lead with the location, honestly. This is the Borough Hall edge of the Heights: less Promenade, more transit. For a buyer who commutes, that is the trade they want.
Price against the district's brownstone-scale co-ops. The right comparables are the small converted houses, not the staffed prewar elevator buildings on Montague and Clinton.
Comparable buildings
If you're considering 132 Joralemon Street, also evaluate:
- 130 Clinton Street — the same block's larger prewar cooperative, at the corner
- 151 Joralemon Street — brownstone-scale co-op one block west on the same street
- 39 Remsen Street (The Alden) — 1878 walk-up co-op; the district's oldest apartment house
- 8 Old Fulton Street (Brooklyn City Railroad Company Building) — eleven-unit co-op in the district's oldest converted commercial stock
- 1 Grace Court — small co-op on the cul-de-sac two blocks west
- 142 Hicks Street — brownstone-scale co-op peer in the western Heights
- 200 Hicks Street — small prewar co-op of comparable unit count
- 76 Remsen Street — small-scale Remsen Street co-op peer
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