Before the Vertical Campus

The future site of the Newman Vertical Campus was originally part of Rose Hill Farm, encompassing 25 blocks prior to the Revolutionary War, and was purchased in 1790 by General Horatio Gates. The area remained mostly undeveloped and was made up primarily of open fields. In the first part of the 19th century the Bull’s Head Market relocated into the neighborhood of the Free Academy and the area became known as Bull’s Head Village – the site of the city’s main cattle markets and slaughterhouses.

By the middle of the 19th century the site of the future Newman Vertical Campus had been developed. There were a number of stables and a coal yard on the block, as well as a number of businesses other than livestock, including a grocery, a boot and shoe store, an eating house, a variety store, and a barber shop. Among the residents of the block were a lawyer, a pianomaker, a stonecutter, a milliner, a steamboat inspector, an importer, a carpenter, a blacksmith, a driver, a coachman, a drover, a stable hand, and a horse dealer. (Miscellaneous archival site B files, pg 13, Baruch College Archives)

Fiss Doerr & Carroll Horse Co.

In the second half of the 19th century, the firm of Fiss Doerr & Carroll built two auction marts and a seven story stable and took over another stable on 24th Street. The first auction mart built in 1907 was unique, covering 13,000 square feet.

…with a limestone, Beaux-Arts façade and high, arched attic windows… The building… an exuberant mixture of Roman classicism and Beaux-Arts grandeur, enclosed a huge interior rink 65 feet by 197 feet, where animals for sale were exercised for crowds of up to 1000 people in a suspended gallery. The roof was supported by a steel arch with a suspended, coffered ceiling. It was perhaps the most unusual horse-related building ever built in Manhattan, and it certainly is the most unusual to survive. (Christopher Grey, “Who Holds the Reins on Fate of a 1907 Horse-Auction Mart?,” The New York Times, November 8, 1987, pg. R14).

In the New York Times article the author cited the Architects’ and Builders’ Magazine which stated that Horgan & Slattery, the designers had decided to abandon all former conventions in its design . The six story stable next door featured a roof paved with hard brick in order to bring the horses up to exercise them. At the time it was the highest horse-exercising space in New York City.

The company was the last great horse enterprise in New York City, proclaiming themselves to be the largest horse supplier in the world. The automobile would all but kill horse trading, but for a relatively brief period of time horses shared New York City with cars and trains. It was not uncommon for horses to be spooked by these new innovations. One such case happened in 1898 when horses belonging to some of the Rough Riders, back from the war in Cuba, were brought to 24th Street to be sold at auction. The New York Times article described what happened next:

A bunch of thirty-three of the horses stampeded in Twenty-Fourth Street about midnight. Some of them ran clear up to the Harlem river and they caused a great deal of excitement on the east side.

The horses took fright at the rattle of an “L” train on the Second Avenue division and broke away from the men who were driving them… Some of the horses would have rushed into the Harlem river had it not been for a fence which turned them toward the entrance of the new Harlem bridge. The horses were pretty nearly winded at this point and the police of the East One Hundred and Twenty-sixth Street Station captured seventeen and led them to the station. (“Rough Riders’ Horses Loose”, The New York Times, September 20, 1898, pg 3).

James D. Carroll, the proprietor of the horse business knew that it was only a matter of time before the demise of his business. After his death in 1912, his will stipulated that the business be liquidated, which happened almost immediately after his passing. For a time the main horse mart was still used for large auctions but the premiere attraction became the boxing fights staged by the Pioneer Sporting Club. The horse mart became a leading boxing venue in New York with its 3,500 seats rarely empty. In 1928 the site was sold to the R&T Garage Company, which installed two intermediate floors for parking and removed the balcony and ornate ceiling.

The smaller horse mart was bought by Kauffman Saddlery which moved there in 1920 from Division Street. Kauffman was already well established and had existed for almost half a century, but it was during its location on 24th Street that they became truly renowned, helping to make that street “the equine epicenter” of New York.

Among the many famous people to grace the store with their business was New York governor and presidential candidate Alfred Smith, who bought a pony for his grandson and then drove it in his limousine to Kauffman’s to be outfitted. (Leslie, Maitland “Kauffman Marks Century as Saddlery,” The New York Times, April 29, 1975, pg 70.)