140 West 18th Street Stable

History and architecture

The stable building at 140 West 18th Street is one of nine remaining brick-fronted stables from an original row of thirteen erected in 1864-66. Designed in a round-arched utilitarian style related to the German Rundbogenstil, it still features a mix of Romanesque and Renaissance Revival details. No. 140 West 18th Street has an asymmetrical arcaded composition which focuses on a pair of bifurcated Renaissance arches at the second story.

Erected for merchant Henry Rice, the stable has had several notable owners, among them Catherine Lorillard Spencer, daughter of Peter A. Lorillard, one of the founders of the Lorillard Tobacco Company; her nephew Alfred R. Conkling, a prominent attorney and author; and merchant Malcolm Graham. As a component of one of the two uniformly designed mid-nineteenth-century private carriage house groups remaining in Manhattan, it is a rare survivor.

These stable rows reflect a period in the city's developmental history when private carriage houses began to be erected some blocks away from their owners' homes, on streets devoted almost exclusively to private stables and commercial liveries. An early manifestation of this trend, which became common practice during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the West 18th Street rcw was one of the most extensive of the period and contained unusually large and handsomely decorated stables.