The block of East 69th Street between Lexington and Third Avenues in the 1970s, left, and today. Credit From Left: Edmund V. Gillon/Museum of the City of New York; Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times

The legacies of the horse in New York include the stable street, where the well-to-do isolated their private stables to avoid the smells and noise, inflicting them instead on their lesser neighbors. Although the mansions they served are in most cases gone, a few of these stable streets survive, and one of the most significant is 69th Street, from Lexington to Third Avenues.

If there was a formal mechanism by which streets devoted to stables were established, it has yet to be discovered. It seems that mansion owners found a vulnerable spot, where the land was vacant, or the adjacent owners seemed powerless to oppose them.

Sometimes the mansioneer underestimated the reaction, as with John Jacob Astor, who proposed building a stable at Madison and 65th Street, next door to Temple B’Nai Jeshurun. But there the congregation made such a stink that even the Astor millions had to pull back.

In 1880, Heber Bishop, a banker, found no particular opposition when he bought a plot of land on the north side of 69th, just east of Lexington, a half-vacant block with a few middling brownstones. Bishop lived on Fifth near 70th Street, so this was an agreeable distance from his house, and he built a three-story stable at 147 East 69th.

As for the neighbors on the south side of the street, they were not likely to protest: That was the Foundling Asylum run by the Sisters of Charity, which accepted infants, no questions asked as to parentage. And the Sisters did not have clean hands equine-wise; they had already built a stable on the Third Avenue corner.

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Within just a few years, others followed Bishop, like John Sloane, a member of the department store family, who built 159 East 69th, and Adolph Kuttroff, a coal dealer, who built his little two-story stable at Nos. 153-157, now the Urasenke Chanoyu Center. Sloane lived on Fifth near 70th, Kuttroff at Madison and 69th. Both are rich red brick with brownstone and neat little touches, like the intricate ironwork on the circular windows.

The wealthy wanted their horses convenient to their Fifth Avenue mansions; now the stables have been turned into homes and artists studios, many with striking architectural details. Credit Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times

Another stable on the block, at 161 East 69th Street, was built in the 1880s for an unidentified owner and since remodeled. The New York Times carried an ad in 1891 for a “handsome, stylish pair bright bay carriage horses; 15 hands; can be driven double or single” to be seen at that address.


After 1900 automobile use grew phenomenally; the Bishop stable was remodeled into a garage in 1912. But it had been in use for automobiles before that: just in advance of the renovation, The New York Evening Telegram carried an ad for “an Isotta Fraschini Car with Rothschild limousine body for sale by private party; very reasonable” at that address. The new generation of purpose-built garages were not nearly as picturesque as those that housed animals. The first of these came in 1909, built at No. 167 by George Heye, the American Indian collector who established what is now the National Museum of the American Indian at the U.S. Custom House.

The 1910 census marks the end of the horse-drawn era. There were grooms, coachmen, a stable manager but also a few chauffeurs, like Gustav A. Swenson, 25, who arrived from Sweden in 1902 and lived in the Hoe family garage at No. 163. Although the stable hands ranged in age up to their 40s, none of the chauffeurs were more than 25.

In 1946, Arthur and Sidney Diamond began assembling stables on the block, for which they finally filed plans for a 12-story apartment house in 1961 although they did not build. By that time most garages had been converted to dwellings and studios, like Mark Rothko’s at No. 157, where he died by his own hand in 1970.

A walker in the city has to pause on 69th Street to puzzle out what gives it its unusual character. Yes, there are the stables themselves, a picturesque streetscape of Georgian-style cornices, Victorian red brick and Romanesque arches. And the big white brick Imperial House of the 1950s is set back on the south side of the block behind a leafy screen.

But there is still something else. Most of the stables have preserved their curb cuts, even ones that no longer keep vehicles. This presents drivers with a de facto no-parking strip, and the parking lane is usually half empty. Greeted by signs on the stables like “Don’t Even Think of Parking Here,” cars only make short stops, and so they have a transitory air.

This varies from most other side streets, and breaks the usual steel barrier of parked cars, which tightly girdle almost all other blocks in New York. Indeed, permission to store cars on the street was granted in the 1950s and early photographs show the open look, which was the character of New York before cars took over, and is another legacy of this stable street.

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