1) Bring with you the name of the owner and perhaps the tenants, and the address. BBLs are not necessary. For Brooklyn, head to 141 Livingston Street, 2nd floor. Manhattan is 111 Centre St. Check here for locations.

2) For Brooklyn, head to the second floor, “room 204” which is a right turn after you come out of the elevators. You’ll see a row of cashier windows and maybe a line of people. Walk past the line and go to the window all the way to the left. There sits the public terminal dedicated for record searches.

3) It an old DOS-prompt type system. F12 takes you to the menu. There are instructions above the computer. CMD 7 takes you to the search screen. Once you are there, enter CMD 8 and the name of the person or entity you are checking. There are two fields, “petitioner” and “respondent” as I recall. I would check both fields as the party you are checking may have initiated a case against another party or may be the defendant. It does not appear that you can search by address.

____________  ___________  ___

(Last, First, MI)

4) If you find a case, there isn’t much detail. You basically see a date, the names of the parties, and a code for what type of case it is. You can make a note of the case number to dig a bit deeper.