PROSPECT-LEFFERTS GARDENS — Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Lincoln Road house is back on the market.
The “Between the World and Me” author is selling the Prospect-Lefferts Gardens townhouse he briefly owned this spring before publicly foregoing the five-bedroom home due to safety concerns for his family after news of the sale broke.
Coates, who has been writing about black issues for years in The Atlantic magazine and elsewhere, said in a May 9 essay about the purchase and subsequent media coverage — by DNAinfo and others — that he didn’t feel comfortable with the attention to location of his intended home.
“You can’t really be a black writer in this country, take certain positions and not think about your personal safety,” he wrote.
Coates bought the house, located in the Prospect-Lefferts Gardens Historic District, for $2.1 million in April, building records show. It is now listed with Douglas Elliman for $2.395 million, according to a listing posted this week by the realty group.
The four-story house has “meticulously restored rich original details,” the listing says, including original moldings, banisters, woodwork, mantles, hardwood floors and pocket doors.
He said “within a day” of seeing reports about the house, he and his wife “knew that we could never live in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens.”
“If anything happened to either of us, if anything happened to our son, we’d never forgive ourselves,” he said.
