Ta-Nehisi Coates Sells Prospect-Lefferts Gardens Brownstone

PROSPECT-LEFFERTS GARDENS, BROOKLYN — Acclaimed author, journalist, and a MacAurthur Foundation genius award winner Ta-Nehisi Coates has sold a Prospect-Lefferts Gardens brownstone he purchased last February at 207 Lincoln Road, city property records show. The news was previously reported by The New York Post.

Coates tried to keep the purchase private, but after word of the deal was published, he announced that he was no longer moving his family to the neighborhood.

"Within a day of seeing these articles, my wife and I knew that we could never live in Prospect-Lefferts Garden, that we could never go back home," Coates wrote in The Atlantic last May. "If anything happened to either of us, if anything happened to our son, we’d never forgive ourselves."

Coates wrote that the reporting on his home address "was premised on a kind of obliviousness, an inability to imagine how horrifying it would be to see all the details of your new life out there for the world to see."

The authored added that, "you can’t really be a black writer in this country, take certain positions, and not think about your personal safety."

He also waxed eloquent on his love for the neighborhood he had given up on, explaining how he lived there for a time when he and his wife were in their mid-20s.

"My partner—now my wife—loved our old Brooklyn neighborhood," he wrote. "We eventually had to leave after a dispute with our landlord, but we dreamed of moving back. We’d return to visit friends, and gentrification would always be Topic A. Prospect-Lefferts Garden was still black. But most of the young couples moving in were not. We didn’t have the money to move in back then, but that didn’t stop us from fantasizing. We imagined ourselves as aiding in the preservation of a black presence."

The sale of the home was finalized in January, according to city records.

Top image courtesy of Corcoran