Rockin’!

It was one of those apartment deals that seemed too good to be true. And there was indeed a snag.

Washington, DC, native Hamilton Leithauser, frontman of the Walkmen, moved to Manhattan in 2001 and found a two-bedroom right off Central Park West for $1,700 a month.

“The guy was illegally subletting to me,” Leithauser says of the apartment where he lived for eight years. “It was all city-subsidized housing, and he was making just a huge profit off of me. He was paying the city just $300 a month or something, and then he stopped paying the city because he’s just an idiot, so the sheriff starting writing letters to him.”

This led to a four-year court battle during which Leithauser and his wife, Anna Stumpf (a producer/video editor who’s working on her first feature-length film), lived rent-free.

“I was there for much longer than I would have liked to be, but it was like winning the lottery,” Leithauser says.

When the building was converted to luxury rentals and the rent nearly tripled, the couple decided it was time to move to Brooklyn.

“I guess we just sort of knew this area because we’d come over and hang with our friends,” Leithauser says. “This is called Clinton Hill, but when I told our accountant when we were doing our taxes — she’s from here originally — she said, ‘That’s Bedford-Stuyvesant.’ So I think it might be like some Realtor dug it up and, you know, tried to cutesify the area or something.”

After renting a floor-through apartment in a brownstone for a year, Leithauser and Stumpf, both now 34, found a two-bedroom, 1,065-square-foot condo just off the G-train Classon stop in June 2010.

“I’m glad we didn’t buy right away because over that year we were renting, the prices really dropped,” Leithauser says.

Then a new-construction building in the neighborhood hit the market, and the couple decided it was time to buy.

“We were the first people in the building,” Leithauser says.

The apartment, which was in the $600,000 range, features two terraces and a private, fenced roof deck. They use the small front terrace to grow geraniums and the larger back terrace for relaxing in two Adirondack chairs, but their private roof-deck space — with a barbecue grill and a dining table — is where most of the outdoor living takes place.

“It’s nice to sit out here when it’s warm,” Leithauser says.

From Leithauser’s roof, the neighborhood’s many brownstones and expansive projects can be seen.

“Biggie Smalls is from right over there on St. James Place, 226 St. James,” Leithauser says, pointing off in the distance. “We used to live five doors down from him. I listened to his music a lot. I like him.”

Leithauser’s eclectic tastes are reflected in his extensive record collection — “I have a really big Johnny Cash collection, actually” — which he plays on his eBay-purchased McIntosh stereo. Long a go-to for audiophiles and recommended by his engineer Kevin McMahon, the system easily fills up the open living room/kitchen/dining area with Biggie, Cash, jazz and ’60s reggae.

“It’s great because you get so tired listening to your own stuff,” Leithauser says of the music he discovers through Pandora. “I like this Cuban pianist Ernesto Lecuona at the moment.”

The open living space is filled with plants, two large couches, an oriental rug and several comfy chairs that give off a welcoming vibe perfect for listening to music.

Leithauser’s own sound with the Walkmen (formed in 2000) has become more pronounced in recent years with the band’s “You & Me” (2008) and “Lisbon” (2010) albums.

Leithauser’s deep croon feels like it’s from another era, and the band (using acoustic instruments like an upright piano and extensive horn section) create songs that feel like they’ve been around forever but have just been discovered.

Their new album, “Heaven,” which was released Tuesday, hits a slightly more mainstream chord with an extremely catchy, radio-ready title track, but there are off-beat gems (including retro ballad “No One Ever Sleeps” and “The Witch,” which closes out the album with a blaze of big-band sound) tucked inside.

While they weren’t originally scheduled to play New York again until the fall, the band just announced a special show at the Bowery Ballroom on June 6, which will be filmed for a La Blogotheque live stream on Spotify. The Walkmen have a studio in Greenpoint where Leithauser tries to work at least three times a week when not on tour.

“I try to keep regular working-day hours,” he says. “I get more stuff done in the morning than anytime else.”

This is especially true since the couple had their 1-year-old daughter, Georgiana, and Leithauser became less of a night owl.

“Since we’ve had the baby, I get so little time to play that piano,” he says of the 1896 upright Steinway that sits against the living room’s back wall.

The other walls in the room are filled with etchings by his artist father, Mark, that warmly evoke rural landscapes.

And while Leithauser and Stumpf — high-school sweethearts in the DC area who broke up when they were teenagers and got back together in New York about six years ago — live in a decidedly urban area, everything from the ease of parking to the slower pace of living makes the neighborhood feel “completely different from Manhattan.”

But the area is no doubt changing. Consider the nearby restaurant that serves $16 wood-oven pizzas, $26 steaks and the $20 “Speedy Romeo chicken parm.”

“There was this really hurting corner when we moved into the neighborhood,” Leithauser says. “It was really ugly; they had a U-Haul truck rental and a horrible building. Then somebody leased the corner space, gutted it, put a lot of effort into it and slapped a big sign on it that says ‘Speedy Romeo.’ I wish it wasn’t named that, but it’s great.”

Hamilton Leithauser’s

FAVORITE THINGS

* The Steinway piano

* His father Mark Leithauser’s etchings

* His Peter Milton etchings

* The geraniums

* The Adirondack chairs

* His chess board

* The McIntosh stereo

* His record collection

* His SodaStream seltzer maker