142 Hicks Street

Five stories over a cellar, 56 feet to the roof, on a mid-block lot with a six-story neighbor to the north at 136 Hicks and a three-story wood-frame house to the south at 146 Hicks. The east-west walls are bearing masonry, twelve inches thick at the exterior, with six- or eight-inch masonry at the public hall and party walls and framed partitions inside the apartments. The rear yard sits to the west, planted with mature trees and enclosed by fencing; the plan reserved its exclusive use to apartment 1B.

The floor plan is close to uniform. Three apartments occupy the first floor; four occupy each floor above, arranged as mirrored pairs about both the north-south and east-west axes. Each apartment as built carried one general living/bedroom, a bathroom, a kitchen, and a reception foyer. The C-line apartments on floors two through four take a larger foyer and an extra bedroom; the fifth-floor C apartment shares the layout without the extra room, and looks out over the flat roof of the rear extension. Apartments 5B and 5C carry lot-line windows over the roof of the wood-frame house to the south, and the D line takes two lot-line windows per floor into the open side court at 136 Hicks — light conditions worth confirming apartment by apartment, since lot-line windows are always contingent on what the neighbor does next.

Because the units are small and the plan repeats, renovation quality and combination history drive value inside the building far more than line position does. Exterior work, windows included, requires LPC approval under the district designation.

Heights Apt. Corp. has run the building since the mid-1980s. The model is the district's smallest workable one: an outside managing agent, part-time superintendence, outside contracts for the elevator and extermination, a cellar with tenant storage bins and building utilities, and a rear yard in private use. The house rules reflect a small self-administered building — occupants take refuse to the curb themselves, the roof is closed, and the carpeting rule is set at 75 percent rather than the usual 80, which for a masonry building with wood-framed floors is a sound noise-control decision rather than a formality.

The capital questions here are the ordinary ones for a 1950s-modernized masonry building of this age: façade and parapet cycles under FISP/Local Law 11, the roof and the retained-but-abandoned incinerator enclosure at the bulkhead, the elevator equipment above the 1958 shaft relocation, and the gas-fired heating and hot-water plant. The offering plan's engineering addendum recorded pointing needs at the elevator machine-room brickwork and cracking in the abandoned incinerator settling chamber as early as 1982; ask management what has been done since, and ask for the current reserve balance and assessment history.

Buy the apartment, not the average. With nineteen units on a repeating plan, the C line, the garden-right ground floor, and the renovated units are distinct products at distinct prices.

Check the lot-line windows. The D line looks into an open side court at 136 Hicks and the fifth-floor apartments look over a low neighbor to the south. Both are pleasant today and neither is a protected outlook.

Get the current policies in writing. Pets, flip tax, financing minimums, and any current sublet rules all postdate the 1983 plan documents. Management's current answers control.

Budget for a small building's capital math. Nineteen apartments carry the same façade, roof, elevator, and boiler as a building three times the size. Ask for the assessment history and reserve balance.

Confirm the 75 percent carpeting rule fits your renovation plan. It is enforceable, and in a wood-framed building it exists for a reason.

Lead with the commute and the block. One block to the Clark Street 2/3, two blocks to the Promenade, inside the historic district. That sentence sells the building.

Name what is unusual about the specific unit. The extra bedroom, the garden right, the corner exposure, the renovation. Buyers in this price band are comparing floor plans, not addresses.

Explain the 1958 rebuild rather than avoiding it. The alteration history and the 1958 certificate of occupancy are clean documentation, and they answer the question every attorney asks about a building with no original plans on file.

Price against the district's small elevator co-ops. The correct comparable set is other sub-50-unit elevator buildings in the historic district, not the full-service Montague corridor.

If you're considering 142 Hicks Street, also evaluate:

• 130 Hicks Street — the 1958 postwar co-op two doors north on the same block face
• 145 Hicks Street (The Mansion House) — the 1935 Colonial Revival co-op directly across Hicks Street; larger and full-service
• 115 Willow Street — Slee & Bryson's 1926 Gothic co-op one street west, converted by its own tenants
• 128 Willow Street — Slee & Bryson's 1925 co-op on the same interior block
• 135 Willow Street — the 1955 postwar co-op with garage, one street west
• 35 Clark Street — George F. Pelham's 1922 co-op at the top of the block
• 15 Clark Street — 1904 corner co-op near the former Hotel St. George
• 35 Pierrepont Street — Freehof's 1929 nine-story co-op at the block's southern cross street
• 151 Joralemon Street — comparable scale in the South Heights, as a walk-up