225 Park Place
225 Park Place, Brooklyn, NY 11238
Prospect Heights, Brooklyn
BBL 3011580061 · BIN 3028744
- Year built
- 1940
- Type
- Cooperative
- Units
- 60
- Floors
- 6
- Landmark
- Designated
- Financing
- 20 percent minimum down payment required for the purchase of an apartment, with discretion in the Board of Directors to grant a lower down payment prior to submission of the purchase application (House Rules, rule 23).
- Washer / dryer
- Not permitted. 'No washing machines or dryers are allowed in individual apartments' (House Rules, rule 28).
- Pets
- No general prohibition appears in the House Rules reviewed. Rule 12 requires animals to be carried or leashed in elevators and public portions of the building and prohibits feeding birds or animals from windowsills, roof, courtyards or the adjacent sidewalk. Weight/breed limits and the board's current position unverified.
Compiled by The Roebling Research Desk from the building’s offering plan, amendments, and related building documents (primary source dated House Rules revised March 2006; offering plan 1985 as filed). Reported and subject to confirmation. Board policies can change by amendment — confirm at the offer stage.
Almost everything inside the Prospect Heights Historic District is a row house, and almost everything was finished before 1910. The Landmarks Preservation Commission's own designation report puts the number of buildings in the district constructed between 1920 and 1940 at fewer than ten, and the number of six-story elevator apartment houses at four. 225 Park Place is one of those four, and it is the district's best-preserved example of the type — a wide, quietly formal Colonial Revival brick building that reads more like a Westchester garden apartment than like anything else on the block.
The attribution is the part that makes the building interesting to anyone who cares how New York got built. Benjamin Govern, a professional engineer, designed the building around 1940 and was simultaneously the president of 225 Park Place, Inc., the corporation that owned and developed it. He is credited with exactly this one building in the district's architect index. That kind of owner-designer arrangement was common enough in the outer-borough apartment trade and almost never documented; here it is, in the LPC's own research.
What Govern produced is worth looking at. The building's front is nine bays wide at the ground floor and twelve above, with recessed wings that pull the massing back from the street and give the courtyard-adjacent lines their light. Brick quoins run the corners. Brick sill courses band the second and sixth stories and a stringcourse caps the first. Triple windows at the top floor sit under stone or terra-cotta keystones, and plaques are set into the parapet. At the center is a genuinely formal doorway: fluted pilasters with paneled capitals, a paneled reveal, a leaded-glass transom and a fan pediment, framed by a brick archivolt with stone voussoirs and a fluted keystone. The LPC records the building as remarkably intact, with the usual caveats about replacement sash and painted stonework.
The building's arrival explains itself in transit history. The IRT extension under Eastern Parkway opened in August 1920, and the six-story elevator apartment house followed across Prospect Heights, in part for a mundane code reason: only the first two floors of a six-story building had to be fireproof, while a seventh floor required fireproofing throughout. Most of the resulting buildings went up on the Plaza and along Eastern Parkway, just outside what would eventually become the district line. 225 Park Place went up inside it, at the very end of the wave, on the eve of the war.
The cooperative conversion is a clean, well-documented 1985 file. Park Place Associates — a Brooklyn syndicate run by Jack Sternklar and Stanley Gallant out of 115 Court Street, whose portfolio at the time included Plaza Street, Eastern Parkway, Prospect Park West and Brooklyn Heights buildings — offered a non-eviction plan on April 30, 1985, accepted for filing a month later, at a total purchase price of $6,932,160 against 4,189 shares in 59 apartments. The same sponsor had offered 230 Park Place, across the street, four months earlier. Sellout was slow: as late as 1998 the sponsor still held 1,316 unsold shares across 18 apartments and was funding the maintenance on them out of the rents. The building carried J-51 abatements through the late 1990s and into the 2001/2002 tax year; both are long expired.
Architecture and unit composition
The building occupies a 13,646-square-foot lot with roughly 104 feet of frontage and about 115 feet of building depth, producing approximately 60,450 square feet of building area across six floors — a small, well-proportioned building by the standards of the Parkway apartment houses a few blocks south, and a much more intimate one. Sixty apartments in 60,000 square feet is a generous average, and the plans reflect it.
The recessed wings on the Park Place elevation are the organizing architectural move and the practical one. They break the front into a center block and two flanking sections, which means the building's lines divide into true street-facing apartments and apartments oriented toward the recesses and the rear. Light, quiet and outlook differ meaningfully between them, and that difference is priced.
The apartment stock is 1940 middle-class planning: entry foyers, defined rooms, and the kind of proportion that the immediate postwar decades stopped building. Four decades of cooperative ownership have brought combinations and reconfigurations, so the 1985 share allocation is an imperfect guide to what any given apartment is today. Assess the specific apartment — rooms, exposure, floor, and the quality and permitting of its renovation — rather than reasoning from share count.
One constraint shapes renovation planning here more than most buyers expect. The house rules prohibit washers and dryers in individual apartments, which removes a line item that buyers coming from condominium inventory usually assume. And because the building sits inside a designated historic district, window replacement and any façade or entrance work require a Landmarks permit in addition to board approval and Department of Buildings sign-off. Build both facts into your plans.
Building operations
225 Park Owners Corp. has run the building since the 1986-era closings, and the surviving financial record in The Roebling Research Library runs from the mid-1990s forward — long enough to read maintenance trajectory, reserve practice and capital spending as a trend rather than a snapshot. That record also documents a feature of the conversion era worth understanding: the sponsor and the managing agent shared common ownership through the 1990s, and sponsor-held shares represented roughly a third of the building's maintenance income. Neither condition describes the building today, but both explain a great deal about the co-op's early financial shape.
The building's J-51 history is closed. Two abatements ran through the 1999/2000 and 2001/2002 tax years respectively; the corporation has paid full taxes since. Pull the current assessment and per-share tax allocation rather than reasoning from the conversion documents.
For a 1940 masonry building of this size, the recurring capital items to review are the FISP/LL11 façade cycle — with the added step of Landmarks review — elevator modernization, roof and parapet, and the heating plant. The financial statements record building renovations, elevator work, roof and waterproofing, fire-escape and plumbing capitalizations across the 1990s; ask for the recent equivalents. The auditors have historically noted that the corporation's governing documents do not require accumulation of funds for future major repairs and that no reserve study has been performed — a common disclosure in co-ops of this size and one that makes the reserve balance and assessment history the more important numbers. Confirm the current managing agent, staffing and reserve position with management.
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Mar 9, 2026 | 1B | $750,000 |
| Oct 6, 2025 | 2GH | $1,500,000 |
| Mar 12, 2025 | 2A | $1,035,000 |
| Oct 17, 2024 | 6GF | $1,450,000 |
| Oct 1, 2024 | 4D | $1,175,000 |
| Aug 8, 2024 | 2J | $933,000 |
Sales sourced from NYC Department of Finance recorded transfers (BBL 3-01158-0061) 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
Twenty percent down is the stated rule. It is written into the house rules, with board discretion to go lower. Establish where the board actually sits before you structure your financing.
No washer/dryer in the apartment. This is a house rule, not a plumbing constraint, and it surprises buyers coming from condominium inventory.
Landmarks review applies to the exterior. Windows, entrance, ironwork and façade work all require an LPC permit on top of board approval. Budget the timeline.
Ask about the flip tax in writing. The conversion-era contract form contemplates one; nothing in the file settles what the board charges today. It is a material number on your exit.
Read the reserve and assessment history, not just the maintenance. A sixty-unit building spreads capital cost across sixty shareholders. The financial statements are where that risk is visible.
What to know if you’re selling
Name the architect. Benjamin Govern designed the building and ran the company that built it — a documented LPC finding, and a story almost no competing listing in Prospect Heights can tell.
Photograph the entrance. The fan pediment, leaded-glass transom and fluted pilasters are the building's signature, and the LPC's own description of the façade as remarkably intact is a credential worth quoting.
Say that it is one of four. Four six-story elevator apartment houses inside the entire Prospect Heights Historic District. That is scarcity a buyer can verify.
Prepare the board package early, house rules included. The 20 percent down requirement, the washer/dryer prohibition and the alteration rules will all surface in diligence. Sellers who present them up front keep them from becoming price adjustments.
Position against the district's prewar elevator co-ops. Contemporary condominium pricing will not support your ask and an appraiser will not accept it.
Comparable buildings
If you're considering 225 Park Place, also evaluate:
- 230 Park Place — the Art Deco elevator co-op directly across Park Place, converted by the same sponsor; the closest direct peer in every respect
- 125 Eastern Parkway (The Theodore Roosevelt) — small prewar co-op on Eastern Parkway; a comparable scale
- 50 Plaza Street East — the boutique Plaza Street prewar cooperative; the closest peer by unit count
- 41 Eastern Parkway — prewar co-op at the Grand Army Plaza end of the Parkway
- 175 Eastern Parkway — 1920s Parkway co-op near the Brooklyn Museum
- 135 Eastern Parkway (Turner Towers) — the scale alternative, for buyers who want the neighborhood's largest prewar rooms
- 225 Lincoln Place — Park Slope prewar co-op of comparable size inside that neighborhood's historic district
- 220 Berkeley Place — Park Slope elevator co-op; the landmarked-context comparison across Flatbush Avenue
- 44 Butler Place (Butler Plaza) — the small Prospect Heights condominium alternative, for buyers weighing tenure
The full playbook — what goes in the package, how boards read your financials, the interview, and the timeline — plus sample cover, reference, and personal letters you can adapt.
Considering a move at 225 Park Place?
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A Private Pricing Opinion — what your apartment at 225 Park Place would likely sell for today, what it costs to sell, and what you’d walk away with — reviewed personally against condition, exposures, renovation quality, and the competition actually on the market.