Only the finest for N.Y.’s finest
The newest residences at Mercedes House, a ziggurat of luxury rentals on Manhattan’s Far West Side, provide tenants with creature comforts found nowhere else in the city.
Special flooring soothes legs weary from a long day’s work. Three-metre-high doors offer easy passage between spacious rooms. A high-tech ventilation system eliminates even the worst odours. Most crucially, there’s a state-of-the-art hayloft. “It’s definitely high-end accommodations,” said deputy inspector Barry Gelbman, commander of the New York Police Department’s mounted unit. “They’re some of the nicest stables I’ve ever seen.”
This summer, Gelbman will move the unit’s headquarters, a dozen of its horses and 20 officers into their new home on the ground floor of Mercedes House, which, since 2011, has been home to about 1,000 humans. After a decade, the mounted unit is leaving behind its stables at Pier 76, now a part of Hudson River Park.
While there are a handful of stable-centric subdivisions in places like Colorado, Montana and Florida, Mercedes House appears to be the only corral in the United States inside an apartment building.
Even in crowded Manhattan, it is an unusual arrangement.
“We’re essentially building a barn, which is usually an open-air structure, inside a much larger building,” said Sebastian Touzet, principal at WASA Studio A, the firm that designed the stables.
The maze of silver ducts snaking through the ceiling, along with a flotilla of fans, work not only to control any barnyard smells, dander and dust, but also to keep the horses, which are used to living outside, comfortable.
“These are animals, so what’s ideal for humans isn’t necessarily ideal for horses,” Touzet said.
But like humans, they still have to eat and bathe every day without causing a commotion.
That custom hayloft was designed to accommodate a week’s worth of food, to cut down on deliveries. A special trash bin was installed to deal with the manure. There’s even a small smithy for working on horseshoes.
The signature feature of the space is the corral, which is at the front of the stables. This allows passersby to spy the horses through small windows along the sidewalk.
“The community has welcomed us, so we want to try and return the favour,” Gelbman said.
That the mounted unit needs to shack up alongside hundreds of luxury apartments underscores just how expensive Manhattan land has become, as well as how tight city budgets are.
Public-private partnerships have grown common over the past decade, with public works, including schools, libraries and recreation centres, springing up inside private apartment towers.
The clatter of horseshoes on blacktop is already part of the ambience outside Mercedes House — the Central Park carriages have a stable nearby. But their hoof-falls could cease if Mayor Bill de Blasio has his way and shuts down the carriage industry.
De Blasio has taken no offence to mounted police, but some residents of Mercedes House find the practice to be unfortunate.