When I moved to this neighborhood (Windsor Terrace/Kensington, Brooklyn), a pleasant surprise was discovering this working stables nearby, just a few blocks from Prospect Park. It's neat seeing the horses clip-clopping through the Brooklyn streets on the way to Prospect Park. The wife and I even took a ride once. I rode on a big old horse named Tinkerbell.
Unfortunately, the stables are not long for this world. The Blankenship Family, who has owned the stables since the 1930s, had racked up a ton of back taxes and filed for bankruptcy last year. There had been a deal to turn the property over to the city parks department, which would maintain a stables on the site and presumably hire the Blakenships to operate it, but that deal has fallen apart and the property is going up for sale.
The adjacent property is up for development, probably for another expensive apartment builidng. Local officials have said that they would keep the property zoned to include a stable, but I'm skeptical that any real estate developer is going to build a big condo that includes a horse stable. There's a big apartment complex across the street, where apartments rent from $3000 to $5000+ a month. I always wondered about the people who pay $5000 for an apartment that overlooks a street that is always covered in horse shit. (That guy sitting on the bucket on the side of the building; one of his jobs is to walk the streets from the stables to the park once or twice a day, shoveling horse manure into a wheelbarrow.) It's the last horse stable serving Prospect Park. Maybe it will have (another) last-minute reprieve, but I doubt it.
Some history about the stables here.
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