BKLYN’s fascinating fixer-uppers: Old-fashioned houses in Homecrest and Lefferts Manor

Eye On Real Estate

September 16, 2015 By Lore Croghan Brooklyn Daily Eagle

This is picturesque 1703 Ave. T in Homecrest.

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In manicured, marvelous Brooklyn, fixer-upper buildings really stand out.

Some are splendid despite their disrepair. The messiness adds to their allure. Some are just a mess.

The Coignet Building, a sweet little landmark surrounded by a big Gowanus Whole Foods, is the most famous of the fixer-uppers we’ve been obsessing about lately. Here are two fixer-upper houses we can’t take our Eye off of:

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1703 Ave. T

The paint is peeling and some windows are broken. Yet this old-fashioned Homecrest house is so picturesque.

The wheat-colored clapboard and shingle house at 1703 Ave. T stands tall on a fenced-in lawn on the corner of E. 17th Street. Stained-glass panels serve as decoration on porch windows.

Though it needs TLC, it has great charm and is the prettiest home on the block.

Nouri Ftiha and his wife Hassibeh Baghdadi bought the house in 2011 for $815,000 from 1703 Enterprises LLC, Finance Department records indicate. Property investor Victor Qubrusi was a member of the selling LLC.

Alin Qubrusi had purchased the house for $985,000 in 2007 and transferred its ownership to the LLC in 2010, Finance Department records show.

115 Fenimore St.

The weedy jungle in the front yard of 115 Fenimore St. adds an air of mystery to this historically important Lefferts Manor house.

It’s a surprising sight on this lovely landmarked block of the historic neighborhood.

The red Colonial Revival-style freestanding house has a ruined beauty to it, with its boarded-up windows and burn marks on one corner of it.

A commenter on a Brownstoner.com posting about the house said it was damaged by a fire in 2010. There’s a 2012 complaint in Buildings Department records that the house is “vacant, open and unguarded.”

According to the city Landmarks Preservation Commission’s 1979 designation report about the Prospect Lefferts Gardens Historic District, 115 Fenimore St. and next-door neighbor 107 Fenimore St. were built in 1896. They are the two oldest houses in the landmarked neighborhood.

Now-decrepit 115 Fenimore belongs to the estate of Sandra Jeffers, who died on May 6, 2006, according to a November 2014 interlocutory judgment by Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Leon Ruchelsman.

The judgment ordered that a “purported deed” recorded in the Office of the City Register on May 15, 2006 that had transferred ownership of the house to Cecil Jeffers and Hakim Edwards be vacated and cancelled and deemed null and void.

The judgment ordered that the title of the house revert to Sandra Jeffers’ estate.

And it stayed the Kings County sheriff from taking any action against the house to enforce a judgment in favor of Home Heating Oil Corp. A sheriff’s sale of the house had been planned.