A Quarter-Century Ago, She Landed a Brooklyn Unicorn

For 25 years, Kiera Coffee has lived in an apartment that she originally couldn’t afford.

“I loved it immediately,” she said. “You know when you walk in a place and that happens? My whole body sighed with relief.”

Part of it was the nature of the space — all the light pouring through the seven tall windows that reached up to the 12-foot ceilings — but it was also the warmth of the landlord, Silla Pierre.

She was there when Ms. Coffee arrived with a real estate agent at the brownstone in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, in the spring of 1996. Ms. Pierre, a native of Trinidad who was 70 at the time, stood in front of the house, which she’d owned since 1975, surrounded by the garden she kept at the entrance. Ms. Pierre lived in the garden apartment, provided the parlor floor to her extended family and rented the top three floors, each as single units.

It was the apartment above the parlor floor that was available — where Ms. Coffee, who was 27, felt so at peace — but then the agent told her the rent.

“You set these limits on what you can afford, and real estate agents don’t listen to you at all,” she said, laughing. “When the agent told me how much this place was, I was crestfallen.” She had to walk away.

But the next day she got a call from Ms. Pierre, asking how much she could afford. “I told her $900 was the top of my budget,” said Ms. Coffee, who works as a freelance prop stylist and writer. “She said to me, ‘I’ll meet you where you’re at.’”

Just as she was coming to terms with not getting the apartment, the place was suddenly hers. “I never asked Silla,” she said, “but I think one of the reasons she came down on the rent for me is because her apartment is open most of the time and she needed someone she could trust.”

$2,100 | Prospect Heights, Brooklyn

Kiera Coffee, 52

Occupation: Prop stylist and writer
Memorable gig: Ms. Coffee, who writes about design, worked on a story about incarcerated women decorating their prison cells. “I ended up doing a writing workshop with some of the women I met,” she said.
Favorite time in New York: After nearly three decades in Brooklyn, watching the borough become more crowded, Ms. Coffee relishes a walk on a holiday weekend when others have fled the city. “I say to myself, ‘Oh, this is what it used to be like,’” she said. “I miss the quiet.”

Ms. Coffee, who grew up in the Bronx and is the granddaughter of Polish immigrants, started building on the trust that Ms. Pierre had established with everyone who shared the brownstone — not just the Pierre family, but the two other tenants living above, who also paid below-market rent. They helped each other in the small ways that make life in New York easier, with daily tasks like managing alternate-side parking and package deliveries. And they all benefited from Ms. Pierre’s decision to pack as much community into her building as she could, rather than trying to extract the maximum capital out of it.

Today, the same three tenants still live in the building. Why would they leave? They found a Brooklyn unicorn: comfortable digs on a tree-lined street, with thoughtful neighbors and a generous landlord.

The brownstone is well maintained, with ornamental wood finishes preserved throughout and new windows installed on every floor. The rent has gone up incrementally over the years, but Ms. Coffee knows that what she currently pays — $2,100 a month — remains well below the market rate. Instead, Ms. Pierre kept everyone in the building for decades, maintaining respectful boundaries and sharing intimate moments.

Over time, Ms. Coffee learned to tell her fellow tenants apart by the weight of their footsteps in the hallway, and she remembers the night when one of them lost his wife and sat on the stairs, weeping while he waited for the ambulance. Once, when Ms. Coffee became particularly ill, her neighbors noticed that she was looking gaunt and checked in on her. Ms. Pierre let her hold tag sales on the stoop, and everyone in the building has been patient when she has to store large props for her styling work in the hallway.

At one point, Ms. Coffee took note of Ms. Pierre’s abiding faith in luck and included a lottery ticket with the January rent. “She liked it so much,” Ms. Coffee said, that “I kept it going for a while.” One January when Ms. Coffee didn’t include a lottery ticket, Ms. Pierre returned the favor and took over the tradition. “Every year, still,” she said. “I’ve received a lottery ticket in my mail slot every January.”

Two of Ms. Pierre’s grandsons live in the building. One of them, Jason Pierre, 47, is a teacher in the South Bronx, at Mott Hall Charter School. “The building is family,” he said. “Thanksgiving, Christmas, birthdays — everyone comes down and gets a plate. It’s family. Everybody knows everybody. Most of the time when I run into Kiera, I’m on the stoop. I’m out there reading or having friends over.”

The stoop is where Ms. Coffee, now 52, got to know Mr. Pierre as a teenager. She remembers the early days of going out at 2 a.m. to ask him and his friends to quiet down. They usually obliged.

“Now, when I think back on those times,” she said, “I realize I was only thinking about my situation and I wasn’t thinking about their situation. Here’s this gated, delineated area where Silla’s grandkids are totally safe. They’re free to be there, and no one’s going to bother them. I’m sure she’d prefer them to do that — noisy or not — than go somewhere else.”

Now Ms. Coffee is a stoop regular. “We’ve watched each other change — a lot,” she said. “We see each other every day, so you just don’t notice the passage of time.”

In June, Ms. Coffee heard Stevie Wonder blasting from the downstairs windows as the family celebrated Ms. Pierre’s 95th birthday. A few weeks after that, on July 25, she heard an ambulance around 10 p.m. She was used to ambulances barreling down nearby Carlton Street, but this one turned onto her street and stopped. Ms. Coffee went to the window and saw emergency personnel approaching Ms. Pierre’s apartment. Ms. Pierre had been ill for a few days and now her heart had stopped.

“I couldn’t leave the window,” Ms. Coffee said. “I had to watch. I saw her come out, on a stretcher. Apparently they revived her nine times, and she just kept coming back.”

But when Ms. Pierre arrived at the hospital, her heart stopped again and wouldn’t restart.

“It was as if this incredible quiet descended on the building,” Ms. Coffee said. “There was a hole. Everyone was quiet.”

She expected that Ms. Pierre’s family would immediately gather to mourn and celebrate their matriarch. “I thought there’d be tons of relatives coming over, but that wasn’t the case. It was super still, almost eerily quiet. Silla was in the building every minute for the past two years. She only left for the doctor, and even that didn’t happen often, because she hated going to the doctor,” Ms. Coffee said. “She was always in the house — you just knew she was there. And now she wasn’t.”

A couple of weeks after Ms. Pierre’s passing, a postal worker stopped Ms. Coffee on the street, recognizing her as a tenant. He wanted to talk about her old landlord. “I said, ‘Oh, you knew Silla.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, she used to cook for me.’ This kind of conversation on the block, I’m telling you, it’s been happening repeatedly. She was a big presence and she left this big hole.”

In the past few weeks, Ms. Coffee said, things have been “tiptoeing back to normalcy,” but the family is still sorting through what to do with the building. “Nothing’s going to happen for a while,” she said. “I don’t think they’ve changed a thing in her room. They’re just not there yet.”

For now, the brownstone remains a home for everyone that Silla Pierre brought together.

“My grandmother was very understanding,” Mr. Pierre said. “Her mantra was, ‘Everybody’s got to live.’ We had a lot of discussion over the years, where we would tell her, ‘Look, the building needs to be repaired, we have to match the market rent-wise.’ And she would always say, ‘No, everybody has to live, everybody has to survive.’”

He added: “There was no stopping her. She was a strong-willed West Indian woman. She cared about people and made sure everybody was always taken care of.”

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