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Horses of Babylon: The final battle in between horse and vehicle is taking place in Central Park.
From the December 2014 issue of Vehicle and Driver“We are as famous as the gondolas in Venice. That’s how iconic we are in this city.” So says Ian McKeever with his Irish brogue and the hyperbole that apparently affects all the horse-drawn-carriage drivers in New York City’s Central Park. “I’d say that 90 percent of the horses you see here, if they weren’t right here, they’d be dead.”
Issue is, New York’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, wants them gone. And the animal-rights activists who helped elect him final year have already created an option: a 6400-pound electric dreadnought styled to resemble brass-era motor carriages. Named the Horseless eCarriage, it’s intended to maintain all the 160-or-so existing carriage drivers—every a single a card-carrying Teamster—employed, while the 220-or-so geldings and mares presently in the tourist enterprise are retired to glistening glades exactly where they’ll uncover gentle contentment amongst self-actualized unicorns and technicolored rainbows. Or, conversely, if you believe the drivers, shipped to a rendering plant.
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Cars won the war against horses far more than 100 years ago, but here’s one lingering battle. It was a all-natural for a comparison test, although it would have to be performed in the middle of site visitors in one particular of the busiest cities on earth. Except that the private Central Park Conservancy that manages the place generally despises all automobiles and doesn’t want the eCarriage in the park, considerably less a car magazine testing one. And the leaders of the pro-horse Historic Horse-Drawn Carriages of Central Park NYC wanted absolutely nothing to do with us, either. Undeterred by the challenges and unwounded by these slights, we did it anyhow.
Exploring the governance of New York City is unpleasant. But to inform this story, we need to. Gotham politics are an intramural blood sport. Practically everybody involved is a Democrat, the rhetoric is over the prime, the newspapers blast lurid headlines, celebrities stir the pot on each sides, and real estate is often lurking at the core of every concern. All New Yorkers have an opinion, though only 24 % of eligible voters turned out for the last mayoral election.
New Yorkers for Clean, Livable and Protected Streets (NYCLASS) is the animal-rights group behind the eCarriage. Founded in 2008 by Steve Nislick, a 70-ish parking-garage mogul who lives near Central Park, the group has relentlessly portrayed the horse-drawn-carriage owners and drivers as cruel and abusive to the animals. It’s also been politically savvy in backing de Blasio. According to the New York Everyday News, Nislick contributed $ 174,000 for the 2013 Democratic main, like money for attack advertisements against putative front-runner Christine Quinn that a lot of think opened the door for de Blasio’s nomination. The mayor owes him and his horse-hugging cohorts.
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Thinking about Nislick’s real-estate acumen, the carriage drivers read into the NYCLASS campaign not an effort to save equines, but a cynically veiled attempt to make a deal for the ridiculously valuable land beneath the stables in which their horses are housed. “I’ve by no means been interested in these properties and do not want them now,” Nislick wrote on the NYCLASS site in January, further promising to not bid on any of the 4 stables, all situated in the swiftly gentrifying west-side neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen, need to they come up for sale.
Even though de Blasio has promised to get rid of the horse-drawn carriages, no such legislation has however produced it to the contentious 51-member city council. And the situation appears to be slipping down the mayor’s list of political priorities. NYCLASS, although, had the eCarriage prototype prepared for us to drive.
Continued…
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