Steve Buscemi has officially parted ways with his home of nearly 30 years. The actor reportedly sold the three-story Park Slope brownstone he’d owned and lived in with his late wife Jo Andres since 1997. It was a $5 million off-market deal with a pair of family trusts, according to a deed pulled by Curbed, definitively closing a chapter for one of the neighborhood’s most recognizable faces, an increasingly rare strain of celebrity choosing the borough as their first and primary home.
And they did it right, with quiet, integrated lives in the neighborhood and around the city. The couple was already living a few blocks away on 9th Street when they purchased the Park Slope townhouse in the mid-90s, a time when the neighborhood was relatively, almost inconceivably, affordable. Buscemi, a Brooklyn native, and Andres, a filmmaker and performance artist who made waves in the downtown arts movement of the 80s, appeared to embed themselves in the neighborhood. They raised a kid there together.
The actor could also occasionally be found sauntering along the lawns and paths of Prospect Park (which he appears to know quite well), and has been a volunteer firefighter for decades, famously rejoining the fire department he worked for in the late-70s to lend a hand in the local response to 9/11. You might have even caught him handing out candy from his stoop on Halloween in a delightfully self-aware costume. From what we understand, that stoop was a consistent source of movie memorabilia and assorted oddities decommissioned by the actor, as well. So reliable, in fact, at one point, a local writing under the pen name Elliot Larkfield started a blog to document all of the cool, weird shit he’d spot on Buscemi’s steps while walking his dog, sometimes several times per week.
“What’s On Steve Buscemi’s Stoop” is, sadly, now defunct, but it appears the Larkfield made out with at least an old Big Lebowski hat and an Iowa Manchester Centennial tie, according to a report on how the neighbors were actually not terribly into the idea of a blogger raiding and posting the refuse of a local so frequently. “I have a dream of how this blog ends,” Larkfield said in 2011. “If Buscemi were to come out on his stoop and let me take a picture of him, I will post that and say ‘What is on Steve Buscemi’s Stoop today: Steve Buscemi.’ My work here is done.” It’s impossible to know now, but we hope that’s precisely how Larkfield’s final dispatch looked.
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