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About New York

By Finding a New Home for Carriage Horses, Solving a Problem That Doesn’t Exist

A carriage horse on Central Park South on Monday. Mayor Bill de Blasio has put forward a bill that would restrict horse carriages to Central Park, but require the city to build stables.Credit...Bryan R. Smith for The New York Times

Friday is Day 751 of the Mayor Bill de Blasio era, and the City Council is prepared to take up a matter that he said would be dealt with on Day 1: driving the horse-carriage industry from the streets of Manhattan.

His promise to ban horse carriages has turned out to be not only unnecessary but also politically unwise; it has become his Guantánamo, a problem that never gets solved.

Now a bill offered to the Council by the mayor proposes to confine the horse carriages to Central Park, a feat he would accomplish by building stables at a cost to the public that no one has actually figured out, but that will certainly be in the many millions. Mr. de Blasio did not flinch when the figure $25 million was floated the other day. But it appears to be a $25 million solution in search of a problem.

Why horses that already live in clean, well-regulated stables in private buildings might now need $25 million worth of public housing more than the city’s 55,000 homeless people do is one part of the puzzle. How the mayor proposes to hand over public parkland to a private industry without a bidding process is another.

Right now, the hot dog carts in Central Park pay in the neighborhood of $50,000 a year for the right to sell franks at prime spots like the Mall. For a concession to sell food from carts in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, bidders paid the parks department around $300,000.

A thick stack of judicial opinions shows that mayors ignore precedents in this area at their peril. (The Bloomberg administration tried to give parkland in Queens to the Wilpon family for a shopping mall; the Giuliani administration tried to turn over land in the Bronx for a water filtration plant. Both proposals were shot down in court.)

The draft legislation appears, to the naked eye, to make no reference to any of the settled law on private use of the park.

It does have some antic elements: For instance, all the horses must have chips embedded in their bodies, and the carriages must be equipped with GPS devices. The anti-horse-carriage lobby has argued that when horses are abused or injured, the victims are quickly swapped out for doppelgängers, thus making it impossible to prove that any injury has taken place. (Veterinarians have praised the health and care of the carriage horses, which, given the economic value of the animals, makes sense.)

The mayor’s bill would reduce the number of horses to 95 from about 170 by 2018, when the new stable is supposed to be ready. The notion that a new stable — which as yet has no design and has not undergone any review by the five community boards with jurisdiction over Central Park, the Landmarks Preservation Commission or the Public Design Commission — will be built within two years belongs to an alternate universe.

To reduce the number of horses before the new stable is built, if it ever is, would be a way of suffocating the carriage industry. It is hard to see why it would be good public policy to shrink the trade before the new facilities are ready.

Why is a mayor with very serious ambitions about improving society, and the lot of the poor, going to such loopy lengths?

For those who have not been keeping track, Mr. de Blasio found religion on the horse-carriage issue during his 2013 primary campaign; about $1 million was paid by a wealthy real estate developer, using an animal rights group, to attack his opponent. The price of that support was Mr. de Blasio’s promise to ban the horses.

The private stables where the horses now live (except when they are away during their mandated five weeks of yearly vacation on farms) are on the Far West Side of Manhattan, where land used to be dead cheap. Now it is gold.

A stable on 38th Street near 11th Avenue, bought more than 40 years ago by Antonina Spina and her family, and another one on West 37th Street, bought in 1979 by Cornelius P. Byrne, are adjacent to buildings that are now being demolished for a new tower. The developer, Mr. Byrne said, is Joseph Chetrit, who led the purchase of the Sony Building on Madison Avenue for $1.1 billion with backing from “Middle Eastern sovereign funds.”

Ms. Spina, 77, is not impressed. “I don’t care about the real estate,” she said. “I like the horses.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 19 of the New York edition with the headline: Solving a Problem That Doesn’t Exist. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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