Metro

B’klyn woman stands to make 11,744% profit on brownstone

She’s turning brownstone into gold in Brooklyn.

An 89-year-old Brooklyn woman stands to make a startling 11,744-percent profit on a Boerum Hill brownstone she and her family paid $16,000 for in 1967.

Mildred Furiya, who is listing her 19th Century townhouse at 299 State Street for sale at $1.895 million, said the neighborhood now is a lot different from the gritty area she and family moved into 44 years ago.

When Furiya, her late husband George and their two daughters left their cramped Greenwich Village walkup for the spacious four-story townhouse, the block was a hangout for vagrants and a boarding house across the street was home to a group of prostitutes.

Now it’s full of upscale families with young professionals with children.

“We came because this is where we wanted to be, and we knew it would some day be a fantastic location,” Furiya said yesterday. “We were the first generation to come in and buy.

“I guess it took people who didn’t grow up in Brooklyn to see its true value and potential,” she said. “We knew it would evolve.”

Real estate broker Ross Brown of Citi Habitats, who is handing the sale, said the profit Furiya stands to make is “very rare.”

“It’s not everyone who buys at the right time in the 1960s and sells nearly 45 years later.”

The neighborhood has benefited from several factors, including a rezoning of Downtown Brooklyn that spurred new development and a revival of the Cultural District anchored by the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

The same block now includes a row of 14 new townhouses that were among the first in the area to sell for more than $2 million.

Furiya said her house became a “creative” project for her husband, an electrical engineer who studied architecture.

The family did plenty of the work on the home, including turning a garbage-strewn backyard into a magnificent garden covered with grey stone walkways, bamboo, an apple tree and other plantings.

Furiya said her backyard terrace overlooking the garden is what she is going to miss most.

“I love to sit there quietly away from the troubles of the day, especially at sunset or even in the dark,” she said. “There were no trees in the yard when we arrived.

“Now I look back at how the trees have grown – and I even have a new 23-story condo in my view now.”

She hasn’t yet decided where she move, but with the proceeds from her house she’ll clearly have lots of choices.