One guidebook to New York City describes the house in Brooklyn Heights as follows: “Across the street is lovely #46, looking for all the world like a set from ‘Gone with the Wind.’”
The Greek Revival home in question, which appears as if it’s on the verge of collapse — its columns cloaked in peeling green paint — is wedged between two, hulking modernist townhouses and is the lone holdout of what was once a set of four colonnaded homes facing a parallel row across the street.
It was built in the 1840s, when there were still outhouses because homes did not have indoor plumbing, before the telephone and the electric bulb were invented and decades before construction began on the Brooklyn Bridge. Nearly two centuries later, the house was put up for sale this month by Brian Palmer and his sister, whose mother had lived there until shortly before her death last year at age 98.
Priced at just over $3.4 million, 46 Willow Place is listed for less than a third of what the house immediately to its left fetched in 2024 — $10.6 million. Its lower price reflects the rowhouse’s need for a complete overhaul. Inside, the linoleum is warped and bumpy, some of the light fixtures still have cloth wiring and the oven hasn’t been changed since the 1960s.
“My sister and I grew up there, hiding behind the pillars of the twin-story porch as guides stopped out front and told groups of tourists that the house was haunted,” Mr. Palmer, 61, wrote in an email. “Other passers-by would tell us that ours was their favorite house in the city and that we should never refurbish it to look like the flawless quartet of houses across the street.”
