A walk down memory lane with the owner of 75 81st St.

Eye On Real Estate: Bay Ridge house built in the 1920s is for sale

June 7, 2017 By Lore Croghan Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Welcome to Antoinette Fleming's Bay Ridge house, which is for sale. The address is 75 81st St. Eagle photos by Lore Croghan

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Take a walk with us down memory lane — which in this case is 81st Street in Bay Ridge.

Long-time residents of the block between Narrows Avenue and Colonial Road surely recall that the stately red-brick house at 75 81st St. wasn’t made of brick back in the first half of the 1980s.

Instead, it had a bland beige stucco façade.

Then, in 1985, John and Antoinette Fleming bought the big single-family home, and the beige stucco’s days were numbered.

“I fell in love with the inside of the house,” Antoinette Fleming told the Brooklyn Eagle the other day.

“The layout was wonderful. We didn’t change it,” she said.

But the stucco was not so wonderful. So she and her late husband had a red-brick facade put on the house. Insulation was added between the stucco and the brick.

Fleming is now selling the lovely single-family home, which made us want to hear her reminiscences about her years of home ownership.

It took nearly two years of construction to put 75 81st St., which had been built in the mid-1920s, into good shape.

New Pella windows were installed. The kitchen and some of the bathrooms were rebuilt.

“We lived with a lot of dust for a while,” Fleming said.

After all that work, the house was wonderfully energy-efficient.

Two patios plus a mother-in-law suite

John Fleming, who was an attorney, was from Bay Ridge. Antoinette Fleming was born in Calabria in southern Italy. She lived there until she was 13, then emigrated from Italy to Brooklyn with her family.

At the time of their 81st Street home purchase, the couple owned and lived in a house on 82nd Street in Bay Ridge. They decided to move because they wanted a bigger yard for their daughter, who was a little kid at the time.

Now their daughter is a grown-up and has moved out of the house on 81st Street.

“It’s too big for me now,” said Antoinette Fleming, who lives there with her little dog Emma.

Fleming is thinking about relocating to Cocoa Beach, Florida, to be near her brothers.

She hired Melissa Leifer and Jerry Gemignani of Keller Williams’ Tribeca office as her listing agents.

The 4,562-square-foot, three-story house sits on an elevated 60-by-109-foot lot.

There are six bedrooms — plus a seventh one in a mother-in-law suite in the basement.

A heated garage that’s attached to the house has room for two cars plus a lawnmower and other equipment. There are two patios plus a grassy, tree-lined backyard that’s big enough to build a swimming pool.

The asking price for 75 81st St. is $3.8 million.

A broker party attended by 22 real-estate agents

It’s a gracious and spacious house. Leifer and Gemignani have been marketing it since the beginning of March.

They hosted a party at the house for people from other brokerage firms. They had a good turnout, Gemignani said — 22 real-estate agents attended.

Numerous house-hunters who have looked at 75 81st St. grew up within a five-block radius of it, said Leifer.

They all told her, “I love this street.”

Other people who have visited the house live in Dyker Heights, Prospect Heights, Park Slope, Lower Manhattan and Midtown, Gemignani said.

The agents have had multiple offers for the house, and are negotiating with two different buyer candidates, Gemignani said.

“If you have a family and want a house for less than $4 million, there aren’t a lot of options in Manhattan or Brownstone Brooklyn — and you won’t get a garage,” he said.