Leah McCann Smith | Writer & Editor

Nooked between the long-standing Cadman Congressional Church and Vanderbilt Avenue is a large, aged yellow house. The house’s skin lays bare the tells of time—traditional Italian-style carvings, worn siding, chipped pale yellow paint, and black shutters with white trim above the foggy windows that hadn’t been replaced in who knows how long. The house’s black, rusted iron gate wrapping the block’s corner is just another indicator that this house somehow avoided the modern development era—at some point, the gate provided a literal and figurative divide between the busy street outside and the house’s entryway.

For four years, I passed the house every day, walking by it to and from my way to the train. And every day I wondered. I wondered what that house was, and how it came to be; I just wanted to know its story, even if I were only allowed the synopsis. Something called me to it, aside from its ability to stand out among a sleuth of Brooklyn brownstones, coffee shops that offered any type of soy or vegan whatever you could possibly imagine, and renovated four- to five-story “luxury” apartment buildings, elevator possibly included.

Why had this house gone untouched all these years? Who lived in it, if anyone at all, and why had I never, in all that time, witnessed a human presence anywhere near it or in it? Who owned it? I asked myself these questions every day for almost four years, head churning on the way to my office job on Wall Street, two trains, one transfer, and a 10-minute walk away from my own Brooklyn apartment.