Belvedere Stables
727 Washington Street | West Village | built 1893
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The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.
Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.
- 1890
Earlier on this site, two brick stores with tenements and rear frame houses are sold to Francis C. Lawrence Jr.
Before the present building, Nos. 727 and 729 Washington Street held two three-story brick stores with tenement apartments above and two small frame dwellings behind them. The Real Estate Record reported on November 29, 1890 that Francis C. Lawrence, Jr. bought the properties from Robert and Annie Pollock for $16,000. Lawrence cleared the lots a few years later to put up a stable.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1893
Francis C. Lawrence Jr. builds a five-story stable here, and W. H. Bennett opens the Belvedere Stables in it
Lawrence replaced the older buildings in 1893 with a five-story brick stable with two large arched carriage bays on the ground floor. In January 1894 W. H. Bennett leased it, using his horses as collateral, and began a livery business called the Belvedere Stables. It needed a sizable staff, and in 1899 the stable was advertising for a harness cleaner and groom.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1907
A drunken stable hand with a cleaver or meat hook wounds two co-workers and fights police inside the stable
On the night of April 21, 1907, Joseph Bennett, who had been drinking, argued with two men over the price of a rig they had hired and rushed at them with a heavy butcher's tool; papers disagreed on whether it was a cleaver or a hook. He then beat two fellow workers, Thomas Brennan and John Rogers, into unconsciousness. A crowd gathered at the doors, and police subdued him with nightsticks. Brennan suffered a fractured skull, and both men went to St. Vincent's Hospital.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1972
Irving Goldman's Gothic Color Company, scenic paint supplier to the Shubert theaters, works from the building
By the early 1970s the former stable housed Gothic Color Company, owned by Irving Goldman. A former errand boy for a paint supplier, he had won the backing of J. J. Shubert, who funded his start in the paint business with $5,000. The firm held the contracts to supply scenery paint for all the Shubert theaters, the Metropolitan Opera House and Radio City Music Hall, and Goldman was also the city's Commissioner of Cultural Affairs. In 1974 he became the target of a federal grand jury investigation over alleged tax evasion.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1992
Architect Steven Mensch rebuilds the chopped-down stable as a partial ruin around a courtyard
In 1936 new owner H. H. Bell Steel had cut off the top three floors and bricked up the loading dock. Steven Mensch and his wife, Pamela Newhouse, bought the building in 1989, and finished their redesign in 1992. He echoed the original arches in red brick and cut away parts of the beige facade to suggest a ruin, and set the new interior back to form a loggia. It held ground-floor offices and a triplex above.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 2021
Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield and Away co-founder Jen Rubio buy the townhouse for $27.27 million
After Steven Mensch's 1989-92 renovation the building passed through several owners, including fashion designer Richard Tyler, who bought it in 2000 for a showroom. It was rebuilt in 2009 as a single-family townhouse. In August 2021 Stewart Butterfield and Jen Rubio, co-founders of Slack and Away, acquired it for $27.27 million.
Source: villageview.nyc
Further reading
- The Much-Altered Belevedere Stables - 727-729 Washington StreetDaytonian in Manhattan
- Then & Now photos: 727-729 Washington StreetVillage Preservation: Greenwich Village Then & Now
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