177 Amity Street
177 Amity Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Cobble Hill, Brooklyn
BBL 3002920049 · BIN 3003086
- Year built
- 1910
- Type
- Cooperative
- Units
- 15
- Floors
- 4
- Landmark
- No
- Pets
- permitted without the corporation's consent - house rule 12 allows cats, dogs or birds so long as they do not interfere with the rights or convenience of other lessees; dogs must be carried or on a leash in public areas
Compiled by The Roebling Research Desk from the building’s offering plan, amendments, and related building documents (primary source dated 1989-03-03 (plan amendment); house rules undated). Reported and subject to confirmation. Board policies can change by amendment — confirm at the offer stage.
Fifteen apartments on a twenty-five-foot lot is the smallest scale at which a New York cooperative can function, and 177 Amity Street is a clean example of what that produces. The building is a four-story flats building on a single row-house-width parcel between Court and Clinton, carrying roughly 7,920 square feet of building area — which works out to about 528 square feet per apartment. These are small homes, and the honest framing is that this building is one of the least expensive ways into the Cobble Hill Historic District.
Its documentary record is thinner than its neighbors', and that is worth saying plainly. The Landmarks Preservation Commission's district record leaves the architect, style, developer and date fields undetermined for this building, and the 1969 designation report's survey of the north side of Amity Street moves from the 1900 apartment houses at Nos. 173 and 175 — described at length, naming Albert Parfitt and Henry Roth — directly to the 1872–73 Second Empire residence at No. 179, without pausing at No. 177. Department of Finance carries a 1910 date. That is what we can cite, and we do not fill the gap with attributions the Commission did not record.
What the building does have is a fully documented conversion. In 1988 and 1989, ES Associates with Jose Luis Ricon, Mercedes Ricon and Jose Abelleira — the same sponsor group that converted 175 Amity Street next door in the same season — offered the building to its tenants at $800 per share and to outsiders at $1,000, issuing 1,380 shares across fifteen apartments and setting a reserve fund of $34,640. Tenants who signed within the exclusive thirty-day window were offered $100 a month toward maintenance for three years, and the sponsor arranged 100 percent financing for qualified tenants in possession through a Brooklyn savings bank with no income requirement. It was a textbook late-1980s Brooklyn tenant conversion, and the paperwork survives.
The most consequential thing in that paperwork is a single amendment. Under a footnote in the original plan, the sponsor amended the offering so that the proprietary lessees of Apartments 2 and 3 would each exclusively use and maintain the cellar space directly beneath their apartment, combined with the apartment above — creating two duplex units with lower-level recreation rooms, each carrying 95 shares. The sponsor's work list for Apartment 2 is itemized down to the staircase to the lower level, four new windows, iron bars, sheetrocked ceiling, industrial carpet and electric baseboard heat. In a building of two-room apartments, those two units are a different product entirely, and any in-building comparable needs to account for it.
Architecture and unit composition
The building occupies a 2,500-square-foot lot — 25 feet by 100 — and rises four stories to roughly 7,920 square feet of building area, with a building depth of about 84 feet. In scale, cornice line and material it sits comfortably within the block's brick row-house context, which is presumably why the Commission included it in the district without describing it separately. Everything on the exterior — windows, cornice, façade — is under Landmarks jurisdiction.
The unit mix from the conversion Schedule A is predominantly two rooms and one bath, with a three-room apartment at the front carrying 110 shares and the two cellar-duplex apartments at 95 shares apiece; the remaining allocations cluster between roughly 80 and 95. That narrow band is meaningful. Unlike a converted school or a subdivided apartment house, this building's apartments are genuinely similar to one another, and the pricing spread inside it is driven far more by floor, exposure and renovation state than by size. The exceptions are Apartments 2 and 3, whose exclusive cellar rights convert a two-room apartment into a duplex with a finished lower level. Confirm the current condition and the lease language before assigning value: the right to use and maintain cellar space is a lease right, not a deeded one.
The 1988–89 electrical work is the other detail worth carrying into a tour. The conversion installed a new 400-amp three-phase service with separate metering per apartment and a two-pole 40-amp main breaker panel for each unit in the cellar — but the plan's addendum states that vacant apartments were rewired for air conditioning outlets while occupied apartments were not. Nearly forty years on, some apartments may still carry the legacy of that distinction. Check the panel and the circuits.
Building operations
177 Amity St. Owners Corp. is about as small as a New York cooperative gets: fifteen apartments and 1,380 shares carrying the whole operating and capital burden of a century-old masonry building, with no commercial income and no scale to absorb a surprise. The conversion-era balance sheet gives the shape — an underlying mortgage of roughly $450,000, about $326.09 per share, and a reserve fund of $34,640 — and the question forty years later is what has replaced those figures.
Two operating items are specific to this building. The first is fuel: the plan documents number 2 fuel oil, at 5,766 gallons in 1988 against a three-year average near 5,144. Oil-to-gas conversion has been a standard capital project in small Brooklyn buildings since; ask whether it has happened here, when, and how it was funded. The second is the shared electrical infrastructure — a 400-amp three-phase service installed in 1988–89 now serving fifteen apartments with modern loads. Beyond those, the agenda is the usual one for a landmarked four-story masonry walk-up: façade and cornice under both Local Law 11 and Commission jurisdiction, roof, and windows. In a fifteen-unit building any one of those projects moves the maintenance visibly, which makes the reserve position and the underlying mortgage maturity the two most consequential numbers in the statements. Ask for the last three years of audited statements, the current assessment schedule and the board minutes. Management history and current agent details are maintained in The Roebling Research Library and confirmed with clients during diligence.
Recent sales
The retrade record
Lines that have traded more than once in the public record — the building’s appreciation arc, apartment by apartment.
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 3, 2021 | 10/11 | $992,250 |
| Dec 17, 2019 | 3 | $740,000 |
| Apr 10, 2018 | 1F | $615,000 |
| Aug 2, 2017 | 10/11 | $880,000 |
| Sep 4, 2012 | 2 | $530,000 |
| Aug 13, 2012 | 3 | $500,000 |
Sales sourced from NYC Department of Finance recorded transfers (BBL 3-00292-0049) 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
Find out whether you are buying Apartment 2 or 3. Those two apartments carry exclusive cellar rights and a finished lower level under the First Amendment to the offering plan. They are a different product from the rest of the building, and any comparable that mixes them in is wrong.
Ask about roof rights in writing. The house rules imply roof access is exclusive to certain apartments. On a landmarked four-story block, that is real value — and its absence should be priced too.
Check the electrical panel. The 1988–89 conversion rewired vacant apartments for air conditioning and did not rewire occupied ones. Confirm the circuits and capacity in the specific unit.
Ask whether the building still burns oil. The plan documents number 2 fuel oil at conversion. If the conversion to gas has not happened, it is a foreseeable capital project across fifteen shareholders.
Read the reserve and the underlying mortgage. Fifteen apartments carrying a landmarked century-old building have very little margin. The reserve balance and the mortgage maturity are the two numbers that determine whether the next project is a plan or an assessment.
What to know if you’re selling
Position it as the entry point. Cobble Hill Historic District, four stories, fifteen apartments, one block from Court Street. For a buyer who wants the neighborhood, this is one of the shortest paths into it — say so directly.
Lead with the pet rule. Cats, dogs and birds permitted without the corporation's consent is a genuine differentiator against stricter small cooperatives and materially widens the buyer pool.
Document the cellar or roof right if you have one. These are the two things that separate one apartment here from another. Put the lease language and the amendment in the package.
Prepare for a thin comparable set. With turnover this low, the pricing conversation will be conducted against other buildings. Come to it with the district's small-co-op data already assembled.
Anchor per room, and to the district. Cobble Hill's converted schools and churches are priced by area and describe a different product entirely.
Comparable buildings
If you're considering 177 Amity Street, also evaluate:
- 175 Amity Street — the 17-unit cooperative next door, in Albert Parfitt's 1900 apartment house, converted by the same sponsor group
- 214 Clinton Street — small Cobble Hill cooperative a block west; the closest peer on scale and tenure
- 174 Pacific Street — 28-unit cooperative in the former Public School No. 78, on the same block from the Pacific Street side
- 200 Congress Street — the largest cooperative in Cobble Hill; elevator, superintendent, laundry and garage
- 417 Hicks Street — the Tower Buildings group of the Cobble Hill Towers condominium; landmark model housing at the accessible end of the condo market
- 439 Hicks Street (Cobble Hill Towers) — the balance of Alfred Tredway White's model-housing complex
- 501 Hicks Street (Cobble Hill School Condominium) — converted school condominium with on-site parking
- 450 Clinton Street — 36-unit Carroll Gardens cooperative down the same corridor
- 301 Henry Street — cooperative on the Brooklyn Heights side of Atlantic Avenue
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