Red Garage Door

For some reason I don't understand,
there are a number of small buildings with their own garages
on a street near to where I live.

Internet article from New York Times in 2008 talks about this:

MILLIONS of New Yorkers compress their lives into small spaces and yearn for things that their friends in the suburbs don’t think twice about: an extra bedroom, a patch of grass, a little distance between themselves and the neighbors.

Robert Caplin for The New York Times

SUBURBAN AMENITIES Enrico Cinzano’s town house with garage, above, is being offered at $18.75 million.

Circle the block five times looking for a place to park, and another wish can be added to the list: a private garage.
A recent check of real estate Web sites turned up about a dozen listings for town houses with private garage space in Manhattan and Brooklyn, ranging in price from $1.195 million, for a brownstone in Crown Heights, to $18.75 million for a restored carriage house in Greenwich Village. "I can’t imagine any greater luxury than a garage,” said Kirk Henckels, a Stribling & Associates broker. ”It’s not the square footage in Manhattan that counts. It’s the amenities.”
Town houses with existing garages and curb cuts on the sidewalk command a premium when the houses are resold. That is partly because getting approval from the city to create a new curb cut involves navigating a thicket of building regulations and approvals.
The Department of Buildings has approved only 54 new curb cuts in Manhattan so far in 2008, and only 57 curb cuts in all of 2007.
Jonathan Miller, chief executive of Miller Samuel Inc., the real estate research company, estimates that a garage adds about 5 percent to the price of a town house in Manhattan. Brokers say that in some neighborhoods, that number can reach 20 to 25 percent.
Enrico Cinzano, an heir to the Cinzano spirit and wine fortune, has owned his six-bedroom town house at 40 West 10th Street for 16 years and is offering it for sale at $18.75 million.
“In my experience, above and beyond the rarity of having the garage with a curb cut, the garage door affords privacy and security,” Mr. Cinzano said in an e-mail message.
His broker, Michael Pellegrino of Sotheby’s International Realty, said the garage added at least $1 million in value to the property.
The carriage houses that the wealthiest New Yorkers had at the turn of the last century were the forerunners of the town-house garage, which sprouted in the 1910s as cars became common for the very wealthy.