The Hugh O'Neill & Co. Stables - 124-128 West 20th Street

The wedge-shaped stones within the course above the first floor reveals the size and location of the original doors and bays.

Born in Belfast, Ireland in 1844, Hugh O'Neill was brought to New York as a child in 1844.  Following the Civil War he opened a dry goods store near Union Square, but quickly had bigger plans.  In 1870 he began purchasing property on the west side of Sixth Avenue, between 20th and 21st Street.  Little by little he acquired the entire block front, which he filled in 1887 by his monstrous cast iron emporium, designed by Mortimer C. Merritt.  The Hugh O'Neill & Co.'s commercial palace set the tone for what would become known as the Ladies' Mile.

Around the corner, the 16th Precinct station house at No. 126 West 20th Street would not survive much longer.  Retailers pampered their well-heeled feminine customers with amenities like liveried doormen and stylish lounges.  And they did not expect these women to wrestle with hat boxes and packages on their way home.

The blocks near Sixth Avenue filled with the stables and warehouses of the emporiums.  By 1891 Hugh O'Neill & Co. had demolished the structures at Nos. 124 through 128 West 20th Street and replaced them with a three-story stable.  The no-nonsense brick structure had three large truck bays where horse-drawn drays came and went non-stop throughout the day.  Rough-cut brownstone trim and a row a brick corbels below the cornice borrowed from Romanesque Revival gave the structure a medieval flavor.

By now the O'Neill department store employed a staggering staff of 2,500.  The employees working in the stables included drivers, stable boys, grooms, packers, warehousemen, and others.  On November 7, 1891 an advertisement in The Sun hinted at the specific jobs performed here.  "Experienced Drivers and Harness Cleaners Wanted.  Apply at O'Neill's Stables."

When Hugh O'Neill died in 1902 retailers were rapidly abandoning the Ladies' Mile and moving northward.   The O'Neill operation was absorbed by the Adams Dry Goods store immediately to the north; but by the outbreak of World War I the business was closed.

On December 13, 1919 The Sun reported that "The old O'Neill stable property...has been sold.  The purchaser is W. K. Rankin, in the trucking business."  Rankin paid $100,000 for the building, nearly $1.4 million today.  Interestingly, he put the title in the name of his wife, Anna.

The following year the Rankin Trucking Co. hired architect George M. McCabe to do $15,000 in renovations.  The modifications, including new beams, columns and ramps adapted the building from a stables to what the Record & Guide now termed a garage.

Only two years later more improvements were made.  In July 1922 architect Louis A. Sheinart made $10,000 in renovations (about $143,000 today), installing a new elevator and concrete flooring, and a "fire-retardant" ceiling.

It appears that the Great Depression took its toll on the Ranking Trucking Co. and it was lost to the Greenwich Savings Bank in the mid 1930s.  The bank sold it in 1937 to the newly-formed 124 West Twentieth Reality Company.

Garage owners of the 20th century were understandably more interested in the functionality of their buildings than in their architectural personalities.  The ground floor of the old O'Neill stables suffered brutal alterations over the next few decades.  Today only a close inspection of the stonework, obscured by a thick coat of white paint, identifies the openings from which wagons loaded with packages once headed off to the brownstone homes of their female shoppers.

photographs by the author

The Hugh O'Neill Dry Goods Building - 655 Sixth Avenue

In the last quarter of the 19th century, the stretch of Sixth Avenue from 15th to 23rd Streets was an important shopping thoroughfare, lined with lavish emporiums.  Well-dressed women crowded the sidewalks, moving from one store to another, including the Hugh O'Neill drygoods store at 655 Sixth Avenue.

Designed by Mortimer C. Merritt in 1886 in a commercial take on Renaissance Revival.  It would be the only emporium on the district to have a cast iron building.  Rounded towers anchored the corners of the four-story, block-wide structure.  A novelty at the time, the Hugh O'Neill store was painted yellow. 

O'Neill was born in Belfast and his parents brought him to New York as a child in 1844.  After the Civil War he opened a dry goods store near Union Square where the carriage class had begun shopping in stores like Tiffany & Company.  But in 1870, the merchant set his sights on a move to Sixth Avenue and began buying up small buildings. 

The Sixth Avenue Elevated appeared around the time of O'Neill's new opening, adding incentive to the growth of the Ladies' Mile and, subsequently, the success for Hugh O'Neill.   Five years later, he had 2,500 employees and in 1895, using the talents of Merritt again, he raised the domed towers and added a fifth floor.  A triangular pediment above the central section announced the original completion date, 1887

O'Neill did not live to see the great mercantile houses leave Sixth Avenue and move north to 34th Street and beyond.  The multi-millionaire storekeeper died in 1902.

The Ladies' Mile rapidly declined.  By the 1920, all the great dry goods stores were gone.  The once lavish retail palaces became home to small industries.  Sometime before the middle of the 20th century the shiny domes of Hugh O'Neill disappeared.  And by the late 1970s, the Ladies' Mile was a eerily ghostly, a dingy stretch of mostly-empty buildings.

Historic preservation stepped in when the Ladies' Mile Historic District was established in 1989.  The once-grand emporiums began, one by one, breathing new life as they were restored and became home to modern stores . 

Hugh O'Neill's however, was not to become a store again.  In 2003 it was purchased for $37 million and recycled into luxury condominiums.  Two penthouse floors were added, invisible from street level, and the fanciful beehive domes were rebuilt.  Today the building gleams with its coat of crisp white paint.

A grand dame among the Ladies' Mile, the Hugh O'Neill store has new life.