9. Horse Drawn Carriages
For all the brouhaha surrounding horse drawn carriages in Mayor Bill de Blasio’s campaign, the transportation method is still here, serving mostly tourists in Central Park. One forgotten aspect of the history of horse drawn carriages can be seen on their license plates, which read “HORSE DRAWN CAB.” The horse and carriage industry received their medallions in 1935 under Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia in a large-scale regulation of transportation, but they’ve been licensed by the city since the 1850s. “Lots of cities have carriages, but nobody really has carriages like New York,” Christina Hansen of the Horse and Carriage Association of New York City said to us in 2014. “We’re basically cab drivers that didn’t motorize.” The horses live in various carriages along Manhattan’s West Side – you can see inside one of them here in our previous coverage.
