NYC horse-trading expected to bag $6.7M
Neigh it isn’t so. One of the city’s last horse stables is ready to ride off into the sunset.
The longtime family owners of the Chateau Stables at 608 W. 48th St. are marketing the small property though Christoffer Brodhead of B6 Real Estate Advisors at an expected price of $6.7 million.
The two-story 5,000square-foot stable has been in the family of retiring owner Gloria McGill and daughter Anita Gerami for more than 50 years.
“I grew up in the stables,” said Gerami from their Pennsylvania farm. “It’s bittersweet.”
Over the years, their horse drawn carriages have hauled around celebrities and pulled hearses for funerals.
The horses and other animals were regulars on television, Broadway and Metropolitan Opera stages and can be seen in such movies as “Ben-Hur” “Moonstruck” and “Wall Street.”
On their first trip to America in 1964, the Beatles took a Central Park carriage ride with Gerami’s late-father, Buster, and then clopped onward to “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
Grace Kelly took riding lessons in Chateau’s rink, Yogi Berra used Chateau ponies in his Thanksgiving parties and, more recently, Robert De Niro biked over with his daughter for a long pony ride upp and down the block.
Years ago, President Trump bought carriages and fiberglass horses to display at one of his Atlantic City casinos, Gerami recalled.
The stable’s current renter will be out at the end of the year. Gerami says city regulations, fines, and costs for water, hay and manure removal have made it too onerous for just the two women to keep it operating. About a dozen carriages and horses can be housed there, she said. They once boarded a baby elephant.
Brodhead expects the stable to be attractive to other carriage drivers as well as to contractors priced out of Hudson Yards as well as more to wellto-do folks who want to stable their own horses and practice in the ground floor riding rink — or garage their pricey car collection and enjoy a “man cave” above. Another 7,500 square feet of air rights can be used on site or transferred.
While it’s still filled with hay, Brodhead says the stable will be sold vacant “and broom clean.”