Court Street Funeral Home property sells for $4.55 million

Eye On Real Estate

April 16, 2014 By Lore Croghan Brooklyn Daily Eagle

The property on Court Street.

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From house of mourning to house of healing.

Developer Stuart Venner is turning a Cobble Hill funeral parlor location into a doctors’ office – and as a step forward in that plan, he just closed on the property purchase, city Finance Department records reveal.

The Brooklyn developer paid a combined $4.55 million for two rowhouses, 228 and 230 Court St., deeds recorded on April 8 indicate. The Court Street Funeral Home has been located there since 1946.

Also, to further Venner’s plan, on April 10, the city Buildings Department issued a “partial job” permit for converting the first-floor funeral chapel at 230 Court St. into a medical office and converting two-family units on the second and third floors to a one-family duplex.
Venner already has a medical group lined up as a tenant for the 1850s-vintage property, Eye on Real Estate previously reported. But the docs won’t be moving in until funeral parlor operator Dominic Cusimano, who sold the buildings to Venner, gets city Health Department approval to move his business.

“You can’t just pick up a funeral-home license and go,” Cusimano told Eye on Real Estate. He has given the city agency all the necessary paperwork, he said.

Cusimano plans to relocate the funeral parlor within Cobble Hill. His family has had a funeral home in the area since 1929.

He didn’t reveal the new location he has chosen or comment on the price his property fetched.

In January, the city Landmarks Preservation Commission okayed a rebuilding plan for 230 Court St. that will make it look much like a storefront that was there before the funeral parlor’s arrival in the 1940s – with a glass window wrapping around the Baltic Street corner of the building, framed in black-painted wood.

The property is located in the Cobble Hill Historic District.

Its new owner, Venner, didn’t respond to a request for comment. So our question went unanswered: Aren’t the doctor-tenants worried their patients will find it spooky to have medical exams where dead people’s bodies lay?
The place has been a funeral parlor for nearly seven decades. That’s not something neighborhood residents are going to forget in five minutes.

Dominic Cusimano plans to move his funeral home elsewhere in the neighborhood. Photo by Lore Croghan