Skyline Windows at 625 West 130th Street, formerly city Stable C.

NYT ad, January 18, 1909, lists Stable C as key location for recruiting snow clearers.

Early in the twentieth century, motor vehicles were still relatively new, so stables were indispensible for keeping wagon horses. The city's Department of Street Cleaning used this building at 625 West 130th Street as its Stable C facility. In 1906, a New York Times article reported the sale of some adjacent lots to this stable building, the property of "Ex-Senator George Washington Plunkitt apostle of 'honest graft.'" Plunkitt, born in 1842 to Irish immigrants living in Seneca Village, the African American settlement razed to create Central Park, had grown up to become one of the most formidable Tammany "bosses" of New York's west side. A Times obituary in 1926 recalled Plunkitt's catch phrase, "I seen my opportunities and took 'em," describing his success in "the purchase of land, supplies and materials in advance of public improvements which he learned about and their subsequent resale to the city or private purchasers when the improvements came along." Plunkitt's formula would have been well suited to the surrounding improvements that resulted from the opening of the city's first subway line in 1904. Today, Skyline Windows occupies a building that is itself a window on west side New York City's business and political history.

The M. Moran Weston seniors' residence on Convent Avenue at 131st Street occupies the old Knickerbocker Hospital building, which began in 1862 as the Manhattan Dispensary, a temporary Civil War tent facility for returning Union Army invalids. In 1885 the New York Times praised its rebirth as the fully equipped Manhattan Hospital, "the only general hospital north of Ninety-ninth street." In 1895 it became the J. Hood Wright Memorial Hospital, then Knickerbocker Hospital in 1913. The hospital assumed the city's largest ambulance district for many decades and was a forerunner in treatments for polio, gynecology and alcoholism. (United Hospital Fund.)

M. Moran Weston Terrace on Convent Avenue at 131st Street, formerly Knickerbocker Hospital.

This vernacular house at 425 West 126th (formerly 19 Lawrence) Street was probably built before the Civil War. In 1921 The Haarlem Villager cited the bohemian quaintness of such antebellum houses as reason to convert old Manhattanville into a "Latin Quarter" for artists and writers. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, much of Manhattanville's German immigrant population lived on this street, as did many of its middle-class African-Americans like Julius Bunn, president of the Manhattanville Colored Republican Society which incorporated in 1900.
(NYPL.)

A hidden cottage on West 126th Street (old Lawrence Street) evokes rural pre-Civil War days.

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