39 Remsen Street (The Alden)
39 Remsen Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn
BBL 3002470009 · BIN 3002022
- Year built
- 1877
- Type
- Cooperative
- Units
- 15
- Floors
- 4
- Landmark
- Designated
- Pets
- Not stated in the house rules as filed
- Financing
- By-laws Section 8 as filed (1980) barred individual purchasers from financing more than 80% of purchase price
- Subletting
- Consent by board resolution, written majority of directors, or 66-2/3% of shares; proprietary lease as filed permitted sublet without consent for up to two years
Compiled by The Roebling Research Desk from the building’s offering plan, amendments, and related building documents (primary source dated 1980 plan as filed). Reported and subject to confirmation. Board policies can change by amendment — confirm at the offer stage.
39 Remsen Street is the oldest purpose-built apartment house in Brooklyn Heights and one of the oldest in New York City. It went up under a building application filed in 1877 and was almost certainly finished in 1878 — six years before the Dakota, five before the Brooklyn Bridge opened at the foot of the neighborhood. Edwin Packard, a merchant who became the first president of the Franklin Trust Company, built it as a speculation on a street that until then held nothing but single-family brownstones, and named it the Alden after the Mayflower colonist he claimed as an ancestor. George L. Morse, who lived around the corner on Montague Street and would later design Packard's own bank building, drew it.
What Packard built was a French flat: a full-floor apartment for people who would previously have taken a whole house, aimed at the carriage trade rather than the tenement market filling the rest of the city in the same decade. Eight apartments originally, two to a floor, front to back — parlor on Remsen Street, bedrooms in the middle, dining room and kitchen at the rear — with double flooring separated by felt for sound, a central light court, servants' stairs and a roof promenade. An 1896 Brooklyn Eagle advertisement sold it as "fine apts. in most select neighborhood, only a few minutes from Wall Street," with rentals "far cheaper than similar accommodations on the other side of the river." The pitch has not materially changed in 130 years.
The apartment count is the building's central complication. Eight original flats became thirteen when the certificate of occupancy was amended in 1947; the present arrangement dates to 1956. By 1980 the certificate recorded eighteen legal apartments plus a cellar doctor's office, and DOF today records fifteen — so the share ledger, not the public record, is authoritative on any specific unit. The 1965 report that created the Brooklyn Heights Historic District worried openly about "the advent of apartment houses" eroding a community of individual residences; 39 Remsen began that process ninety years earlier and is now protected by it.
The cooperative has a double history. Brownstoner records that tenants formed the Remsen Realty Company and bought the building in 1920, among the earliest cooperative experiments in the Heights. Whatever became of that arrangement, today's corporation dates to 1980, when 39 Remsen Company offered a plan at $864,000 across 172 shares and deeded the property to Remsen Owners Corp. that September.
Architecture and unit composition
The building is 50 feet wide and roughly 80 feet deep on a 50-by-100-foot lot, set back ten feet from Remsen Street behind a cellar areaway, with a ten-foot rear yard and an interior light court about 11 by 15 feet. Construction is Class 3 non-fireproof — perimeter masonry 16 to 20 inches thick at the base, interior iron columns built into the bearing walls, wood floor framing, party wall shared with 43 Remsen.
Ceiling heights are the reason people buy here: the 1979 condition report measured 11 feet 2 inches on the first floor, 10 feet 11 inches on the second and 10 feet 9 inches on the third and fourth, with kitchenettes and baths dropped below. The 1980 share schedule ran two-, three- and four-room apartments at 8, 9 and 12 shares — the correct frame for pricing here. Front apartments retain the recessed window shutters the Heights brownstones share. A 2000 DOB filing to demolish obsolete stair and dumbwaiter enclosures at apartment 4B indexes how much original service infrastructure survived into living memory.
Building operations
Remsen Owners Corp. has run the building since 1980 as a small, self-directed cooperative. Financial statements in The Roebling Research Library run from 2000 forward and show a plain profile: gas heat, a modest superintendent line, real estate taxes as the largest single expense, and an underlying mortgage in the high six figures refinanced in 2005 at a prepayment cost of roughly $41,000. Maintenance income ran between $155,000 and $190,000 across those years against expenses in the same band — what a fifteen-apartment walk-up looks like on paper.
Before closing, the sponsor installed a new gas heating plant, intercom and entrance door, upgraded electrical service, and carpeted and painted the halls on floors two through four; the co-op's own history records a major overhaul in 1990 and further work in 2000. DOB records show sidewalk sheds and scaffolding in 2009 and again in 2015 — two façade cycles on an 1878 masonry wall, and the recurring capital item to underwrite here.
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 |
|---|---|---|
| May 5, 2026 | 2D | $815,000 |
| Aug 8, 2023 | 2C | $1,040,000 |
| Sep 6, 2022 | 1EF | $780,000 |
| Aug 18, 2021 | 3D | $800,000 |
| Mar 27, 2019 | 3C | $1,215,000 |
| Nov 23, 2016 | 3C | $925,000 |
Sales sourced from NYC Department of Finance recorded transfers (BBL 3-00247-0009) 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
Verify the apartment count and the share ledger. Eighteen in the plan, fifteen at DOF, 12/15/16 across DOB filings. Your attorney should confirm the unit's shares, its status on the certificate of occupancy, and any combination approvals.
This is a walk-up. Four floors, no elevator, part-time superintendent. Price and underwrite it against the district's small walk-up co-ops, not against the elevator buildings on Montague or Clinton.
Read the façade file. An 1878 non-fireproof masonry building with two shed-and-scaffold cycles since 2009 carries a recurring capital obligation. Pull FISP filings, the reserve balance and assessment history.
Ask for policy in writing. The two-year no-consent sublet allowance and the 80 percent financing cap are 1980 documents; management's current answers control.
What to know if you’re selling
Lead with the Alden. The oldest purpose-built apartment house in Brooklyn Heights, by George L. Morse, built by the first president of the Franklin Trust Company — a provenance line no competing walk-up listing in the district can copy, and documented rather than asserted.
Sell the ceilings and the plan. Ten feet nine to eleven feet two, front-to-back layouts, original shutters. Where every apartment differs, condition and light set the spread.
Be straight about the walk-up and the age. Heights buyers price both immediately; disclosure with the capital record in hand beats positioning around it.
Price against the small-building set. The right comparables are the district's brownstone-scale and walk-up co-ops, not the staffed prewar elevator buildings.
Comparable buildings
If you're considering 39 Remsen Street, also evaluate:
- 2 Montague Terrace — same block, Promenade-facing prewar co-op
- 10 Montague Terrace — small co-op peer around the corner on the Terrace
- 62 Montague Street — prewar co-op on the same block, at the retail end
- 60 Remsen Street — the Remsen Street corridor's larger prewar elevator co-op
- 68 Remsen Street — prewar co-op peer two blocks east
- 8 Old Fulton Street (Brooklyn City Railroad Company Building) — the district's other very early conversion, at the same boutique scale
- 151 Joralemon Street — brownstone-scale co-op alternative one block south
- 1 Grace Court — small co-op on the quiet cul-de-sac two blocks south
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 The Alden?
Request a private building brief with the relevant comparable sales, current and off-market availability, and an apartment-specific view of value.
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A Private Pricing Opinion — what your apartment at The Alden 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.