Hoof comes to shove: Horse lines moving to park
A carriage horse in one of the horses’ traditional hack lines on Central
Park South. Under the mayor’s plan, the hack lines will move inside
the park’s entrances, reportedly as soon as next week.
BY ALEJANDRA O’CONNELL-DOMENECH
The Central Park carriage horses
will no longer pick up passengers
outside of the park.
On Wed., Feb. 13, Manhattan Supreme
Court Justice Arthur Engoron ruled in favor
of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s push to ban
horse-drawn carriages from waiting for
passengers outside of the park.
Edita Birnkrant, executive director of
the animal-rights group New Yorkers for
Clean, Livable and Safe Streets, or NYCLASS,
hailed the decision.
“This is obviously a victory for the
horses and for the whole city,” she said.
While running for mayor in 2013, de
Blasio received hundreds of thousands of
dollars in campaign contributions from
NYCLASS and made a promise to ban
carriage horses on “Day One,” if elected.
The new rules, which were proposed
last August, grant the city’s Department
of Transportation authority over horsecarriage
pickup locations, also known
as “hack lines.” The city’s Department of
Health and the Department of Consumer
PHOTO BY TEQUILA MINSKY
Affairs are the agencies that actually regulate
horse-drawn carriages.
D.O.T. is now constructing three pickup
locations inside the park’s entrances
at Seventh and Sixth Aves. and Grand
Army Plaza near Fifth Ave.
But while animal-rights activists are
delighted by Engoron’s ruling, horse-carriage
drivers believe the new rules will
makes things worse for the 200 horses in
the city’s carriage industry.
According to the carriage drivers that
fought against the mayor’s idea in court,
relocating the horses would be detrimental
to the animals’ well-being.
A horse expert, Dr. Joseph Bertone,
professor of equine medicine at Western
University of Health Science, weighed in
with an affi davit fi led Feb. 4.
“They will be stressed by their new
surroundings, which will be magnifi ed
because every other nearby horse will
also be stressed,” Bertone maintained.
The drivers also claim that the new
hack lines are not long enough to comfortably
fi t 68 standing carriages — which,
they say, is imperative when business is
slow — and are not wide enough for two
A carriage horse trudges through traffic along Central Park South.
An exhibit from the case Stephen Malone et al v City of New York purports
to show how the carriage horses would queue between existing
curbs in the park, which would make it hard for the horses to get out
of the line, if for example, a horse needs to “clock out” at the end of
its nine-hour day. But animal-rights advocates say these areas are, in
fact, being renovated, so Malone’s argument is misleading and moot.
carriages to pass one another safely. The
proposed hack line at Seventh Ave. also
would force the horses to stand for long
periods of time at a downward incline,
they added.
Christina Hansen, the communications
liaison for Historic Horse-Drawn
Carriages of Central Park and one of the
horse-carriage drivers fi ghting the new
hack lines, described how this would be
a recipe for trouble.
“The physiology that horses use to
be able to sleep standing up and to rest
doesn’t work if they are pointed downhill,”
Hansen said.
“So, try telling that to D.O.T. when
they don’t meet with you,” she added.
Hansen claims that she and other carriages
drivers have already tried to meet
with D.O.T. three times to explain why
the new hack lines would be dangerous,
but to no avail.
And not just the horses would be hurt
by the new rules, but the passengers and
drivers would be, too, according to Hansen.
In court documents, carriage drivers
claimed the new hack-line locations
would make it diffi cult to pick up passengers
PHOTO BY TEQUILA MINSKY
with accessibility issues.
According to the court documents, the
drivers fear that, under the new setup,
they would get ticketed for working their
horses for more than nine hours a day
since the animals would have a harder
time leaving the standing line — or would
actually be stuck in line — when they are
supposed to be “clocking out.”
“Their agenda is not to help the horses,
it’s not to help our business, it’s not even
to deal with 59th St.,” said Hansen, referring
to D.O.T. and NYCLASS. “It’s being
done because they think nobody should
be taking any carriage rides at all.”
According to Birnkrant of NYCLASS,
however, the areas for the new hack lines
are being renovated to eliminate the conditions
cited above that the drivers are
complaining about, so those arguments
are basically moot.
She added that the new hack lines are
scheduled to be completed by Feb. 25,
which is also when the carriages would
start operating out of those locations.
D.O.T. has not responded to this paper’s
questions seeking to confi rm that timetable.
6 February 21 - March 6, 2019 MEX Schneps Media