The holdout stable squeezed between white brick apartment houses on the Upper East Side

What kind of block was East 63rd Street between Second and Third Avenues in the first half of the 20th century?

Like so many other streets hemmed in by elevated trains and relatively close to the riverfront, it was a modest stretch of walk-up residences, stores, and stables—anchored on the Second Avenue end by the Clara de Hirsch Home for Working Girls, one of the city’s young women’s residences that offered room, board, and a sense of security for modest fees.

By the 1960s, however, this part of East 63rd Street had undergone a facelift.

Gone were most of the low-rise buildings, overtaken by a tide of almost identical tall postwar apartment houses. Their white glazed brick “was supposed to make them look like beacons of clean, shiny modernism in the midst of the dirty city,” wrote The New York Times in a 2011 article.

Nothing illustrates the changed face of the block like this lone holdout stable at 212 East 63rd Street, now hemmed in by white-brick giants.

Even the sides of the stable, which juts out from its neighbors, is covered in white brick. It’s a strange attempt to obscure its old-school style and construction.

How this stable managed to evade demolition is a mystery. Built in 1899 and once home to horses and the grooms who tended to them, it has the architectural hallmarks of the late Gilded Age: rounded, Romanesque ground-floor windows and doorway, and the ornamental arrangement of the bricks above them.

Tidy and well maintained, the stable’s backstory is missing (as is its chimney, though maybe it’s just out of view). It has long since transitioned into a residence.

This holdout serves as a reminder of an East 63rd Street with rougher edges, and while other buildings fell, it continues to grace the contemporary cityscape with its modest beauty and 19th century vibes.

[Third image: NYC Department of Records & Information Services]