The Baychester section of the Bronx is home to Co-op City, the sprawling Pelham Bay Park, and a number of horses with a penchant for roaming free.

In the past week, police have been called on two separate days to rein in horses wandering near the Hutchinson River Parkway.

The neighborhood is home to at least four stables, and officials have been targeting two stables where some horses are kept in makeshift trailers at which conditions are considered unsanitary.

The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals posted a legal notice at a small stable on Pelham Bay Park Road, where horses have recently escaped. The notices require the owners of the stables, who identified themselves as Chief Black Horse and Junior, to mend the fences and secure the barn where the horses are kept.

“Loose horses cause substantial danger to vehicular traffic, pedestrians, and themselves,” a spokesman for the ASPCA, Joseph Pentangelo, said. “They can easily be life-threatening.”

In addition to horses running wild, Baychester residents complain about the state of the stables, which some call a community “eyesore.”

The stables at 1680 Pelham Parkway have been boarding horses since a Baychester resident, Lee Evans, 62, moved to the area from North Carolina about 15 years ago. He has housed his own horses there for about 10 years, paying a rental fee to the owner of the stables, Buster Morango.

With boarded-up planks patching the walls of the about 30 stables and a fenced-in sand corral strewn with garbage, the stables appear more like a junkyard than a sanctuary for animals. Horses that aren’t completely enclosed in stables peer their heads out of small windows.

A neighbor of the stables, 38-year-old John Ambale, said that the horses rarely leave their small confines, except when they escape to defecate along the Pelham Parkway or in the parking lot of the offices adjacent to the stables.

The ASPCA has issued a total of six summonses since 2002 to the owner of the stables, who goes by two different last names, Morango and Trembley, for keeping horses in unsanitary conditions. A horse owner, Arlene Greaves, was arrested on four counts of animal cruelty in 2003, and her horses were taken into custody by the ASCPA. In 2005, Ms. Greaves was arrested for keeping her dog in an old truck body at the stables, and for resisting arrest.

The district manager of Community Board 11, John Fratta, said the board has contacted city agencies in an attempt to have the “eyesore for the community” removed. Lester Marks, a spokesman for John Vacca, the City Council member who represents the district, said the property has already been condemned and the council member is waiting for an eviction from the city.

In a phone interview, Mr. Morango said he was suing everyone who kept their horses at his stables in an effort to get them off his land. However, Mr. Evans, a competitive roper who keeps his horse, Early Riser, at the stable, said Mr. Morango had not mentioned the lawsuit.

In 2000, a stable in the Mill Basin section of Brooklyn that operated similarly to the Pelham Parkway stables, renting out space to private clients, burned to the ground. Twenty-two horses were killed in the blaze.

There are about 10 commercial stables in the city that are licensed to offer activities such as pony rides and carrot feeding. However, it is unknown how many private stables there are throughout the five boroughs. Unlike dog owners, who are required to register their animals and show proof of vaccinations, there are fewer restrictions on private horse owners, Mr. Pentangelo said.