15 Cranberry Street

A brick Federal house of 1829, now four stories, twenty-five feet wide on a lot seventy-five feet deep, with a footprint about forty feet deep and open yard behind. The stoop's removal moved the front door to grade and turned the old basement into a living floor — the same transformation that shaped most of the Heights' converted houses, and the reason the street wall on this stretch of Cranberry reads lower and flatter than an intact Federal row would.

Ten apartments in a house of this size average roughly 565 square feet, which places the stock squarely in studio, junior-one and one-bedroom territory with perhaps a larger home at the garden or top level. In a building this old there is no meaningful line structure: ceiling heights change floor to floor, window openings differ between the original three stories and the added fourth, and the state of the original joinery, plaster and stair varies by apartment and by who renovated when. Exposures run south to Cranberry Street and north to the rear yard and the block's interior gardens.

The whole exterior is regulated fabric. On a house the Commission itself has flagged for lost original details, any restoration proposal — stoop, ironwork, window sash, cornice — will be reviewed against that record, and Landmarks approval should be sequenced ahead of, not after, any alteration budget.

15 Cranberry Apartment Corp. has run the house since 1984 on the smallest model available: no elevator on record, no staff on record, and — per the current HPD multiple-dwelling registration — no outside managing-agent firm, with an officer and shareholder of the corporation serving as registered agent. Ten shareholders governing themselves is a common and workable arrangement at this scale in Brooklyn Heights, and it keeps the maintenance base low. It also means the quality of the books, the reserve discipline and the capital planning are functions of who happens to sit on the board, so the audited financial statements and the assessment history carry more diagnostic weight here than they would at a professionally managed building.

The public financing record is a useful proxy for that discipline. Small facilities appear in 1985, 1987 and 1999, then larger consolidations with New York Community Bank in 2002 and again in June 2014 at approximately $2 million. Ask what the 2014 proceeds funded and what has been drawn since.

For an 1829 brick house with a later top story, the capital list is specific: façade and parapet work under FISP/LL11 with Landmarks review attached, the junction between the original masonry and the added fourth floor, roof and flashing, party walls, and the age of the risers and heating plant. Across ten apartments any one of those is an assessment rather than a rounding error.

Ask what the corporation has done to the building since 2014. A roughly $2 million consolidation in June 2014 is the largest single event in the public financing record. What it paid for, and what has happened to the façade and roof since, is the core of your diligence.

Self-management cuts both ways. Low maintenance and direct answers on one side; variable reserve practice and no professional agent on the other. Read the audited statements and the assessment history before you read the maintenance figure.

Confirm the walk-up. No elevator is recorded. On four stories with the entry at grade, the top floor is a genuine consideration for resale as well as for daily life.

The house is overbuilt for its zoning. About 3.03 FAR against a 2.43 residential maximum. Harmless in itself, but have the number in hand before a lender's appraiser raises it.

Get every policy in writing. No offering plan for this building sits in our library. Pets, sublets, financing minimums and any flip tax come from the board's current documents.

Lead with 1829. A construction date shared with the district's most famous Federal survivor, an owner-developer named in the LPC's own file, and a matched neighbor at No. 13 — this is a listing that can make a documented historical claim, which most Heights apartment listings cannot.

Be candid about the fourth story. The Commission records it, so a buyer's counsel will find it. Presented properly it is an asset: the added floor is why the building has ten homes instead of seven.

Price against the Fruit Streets' small houses. The right comparable set is the district's converted row-house cooperatives north of Clark Street, not the elevator buildings. The monthly differential is the argument.

Document the apartment. Where every home is different, floor plans, honest measurements, light studies and a clean Landmarks alteration file do more than any building-level positioning.

If you're considering 15 Cranberry Street, also evaluate:

• 20 Henry Street — cooperative at the north end of the district; the closest peer for the Fruit Streets buyer who wants scale instead of age
• 115 Willow Street — small prewar cooperative on the district's other premium residential street, two blocks south
• 128 Willow Street — Slee & Bryson's 1925 boutique cooperative; the north-Heights purpose-built alternative
• 54 Orange Street — Fruit Streets cooperative one block south, near Plymouth Church
• 72 Orange Street — moderate-scale Fruit Streets cooperative peer
• 59 Pineapple Street — Slee & Bryson's 1926 elevator cooperative two blocks south; the service-model contrast
• 87 Columbia Heights — cooperative on the bluff at the end of this block
• 155 Hicks Street — 1830 house cooperative in the central Heights; the closest match in age and operating model
• 149 Willow Street — small cooperative on the Willow Street row; the same converted-house register