Born to to a Jewish father from the Bronx and a Baptist mother from Gulfport, Mississippi, Amy Sherman-Palladino is best known for creating Gilmore Girls, a show about Connecticut WASPS with “snappy,” exaggerated speech patterns that were, by turns, mildly amusing and borderline unbearable.
Subsequently, Ms. Sherman-Palladino collaborated with her husband the Family Guy producer Daniel Palladino on Bunheads, a comedy about a ballet school that drew on her experience as a dancer and lasted only one season—a weak showing after Gilmore Girls‘ seven-year run. It is not, of course, always best to “write what you know,” so perhaps the couple should steer clear of Brooklyn settings for the foreseeable future given that they have just acquired a $1.4 million townhouse at 22 Warren Place, according to city records.
Built by the philanthropist Alfred Tredway White in 1878 as workers’ cottages, the Warren Place Mews houses line a gardened path between Baltic and Warren Streets, in Cobble Hill. Impossibly quaint, they are diminutive redbrick affairs, 34 in all, which can require creative feng shui—the Palladinos’ two-bedroom contains just over 1,000 square feet. Still, Brownstoner recently named the unit best in the bunch, citing a “wealth of original detail, mostly original layout, and a very nicely updated kitchen.” Further indoor niceties—three original fireplace mantels, hardwood floors, tree-lined third-floor views—are complemented by a private backyard patio. For some, “a toilet in an upstairs closet with a tiny sink just outside,” which Brownstoner seemed to find cute, might have provided an opening for low-ball offers, but the couple paid full-fare for the quirky home, which was listed by Ellen Gottlieb at Brooklyn Bridge Realty. It was last on the market way back in 1977.
According to a brief history of the Warren Place cottages obtained by The Observer, the social contract in the Mews is more Gilmore Girls than Family Guy. Established in 1947, the Warren Place Association, which is responsible for maintaining the grounds the single-family homes share, aims to “preserve the mutual comfort and convenience of its members and suitable sanitary arrangements for their comfort and health-to provide generally for the care, protection and maintenance of the property and to promote good-will and preserve harmonious relations between its members.” We cannot say whether the Utopian ideals the Association’s charter appears to imply have taken root on Warren Place, but it does sound to us like Mr. Palladino will be expected to handle a snow shovel in the not-too-distant future.
More than a few Brooklynites have been accused of armchair socialism, but at the Mews, it seems, residents occasionally get out of their seats and into the streets—their street, at least. This is still Brooklyn, after all, where there can be no ideology more sacred than local.
