Holding on has its benefits, and then some

When Mildred Furiya moved to a 19th-century town house on State Street in Brooklyn from a cramped walkup in Greenwich Village in 1967, a boarding house known for prostitution stood across a barren street, groups of unemployed men hung out on the corner and the Brooklyn House of Detention was a defining presence a block away. Standing in the garden — which functioned as a garbage dump for the apartment building next door — her husband, George, was almost hit in the head by a plaster Madonna statue someone had thrown from a window.

The jail, on hiatus from housing inmates, still looms over State Street, but Mrs. Furiya’s block, between Smith and Hoyt Streets, is much changed.

Sunlight filters through the trees, the unemployed men are long gone and the boarding house prostitutes have given way to middle-class and affluent families. The apartment building that once abutted Mrs. Furiya’s Italianate brownstone, which was declared a city landmark in 1973, is now a parking lot slated for nine new town houses, siblings to a row of 14 down the block that were among the first to sell for more than $2 million in Downtown Brooklyn.

And now Mrs. Furiya, 89, says the time has come for her to sell as well. Mr. Furiya died in 1994, her daughters have homes of their own, and she would like to live more simply: an apartment in the neighborhood or on the Upper East Side, perhaps, a place where she could walk around at night. She has also grown accustomed to being near the subway she rides to the classes in Sanskrit that help keep her mind agile and her outlook on life positive. 

Source: NYTimes.com