This West Side tenement seems to be precariously perched on the past

You can see it from the Henry Hudson Parkway: the back of an ordinary seven-story tenement built on a primitive stone foundation that’s almost as tall as the tenement itself. The foundation is made from the kind of uneven stones that form the walls of colonial-era houses. It’s built into the cliff, which is part of the natural topography of this stretch of Upper Manhattan. But it seems a lot more primitive that the tenement on top of it. The tenement and its foundation look like a mismatch. Was that stone foundation part of much earlier structure? One clue might have to do with the three small, slender windows that span the foundation. Perhaps this was the basement of an older building? The circa-1927 tenement is officially at 80 Haven Avenue, a slender residential street that winds its way from Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center around 168th Street to 181st Street just before Castle Village. Could that primitive stone foundation date back to the days of when the Paterno Castle…