You Can Rent Norman Mailer’s Brooklyn Heights Apartment

At a time when the legacies of plenty of acclaimed writers are being revisited in the wake of their actions, Norman Mailer still stands out more than most. Much of that has to do with the matter of him stabbing his wife Adele Morales in 1960 — though that’s far from the only action Mailer took that seems especially horrific now. The debates over Mailer’s legacy came even more to the foreground in 2022, when publisher Penguin Random House opted to pass on publishing a posthumous collection of his writing.

Still, Mailer’s life and work remain the subjects of frequent debate. And now, a slightly different aspect of that legacy has returned to the spotlight, which is to say, Norman Mailer’s approach to real estate. Curbed’s Adriane Quinlan reports that Mailer’s onetime home on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade is now available for rent, for the low monthly price of $13,000.

As Quinlan writes, Mailer initially purchased the entire brownstone but sold off the lower floors, keeping the top for himself as a way to blend his desire to write with a view with his efforts to counterbalance vertigo. The current owner of the space is keeping the writing studio to themselves but renting out the top of the the building. Quinlan also pointed out that an earlier attempt to rent the apartment — this time for $8,500 — found a number of willing takers, which led to the increase in price this time out.

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The listing for Mailer’s old apartment notes its many amenities — it has two bedrooms, two half baths and one full bathroom — along with the building’s landmarked status. And, if the photographs accompanying it are any indication, the views are indeed pretty stunning. Whether that’s enough to counterbalance the uglier aspects of Mailer’s own history remain to be seen — but there certainly seem to be interested parties in occupying the space.