MUNICIPAL VELVET.(The Talk of the Town)(horse-drawn carriage driving)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 16-JAN-06

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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

What's black, brown, or white and guaranteed, by local law, an accommodation with a nine-foot-high ceiling, along with free access to a bucket of water and mineralized red salt? A carriage horse, of course, any one of the two hundred and four that are licensed to work (if the temperature is between twenty and ninety degrees) in New York City. This wasn't always so. In the late eighteen-hundreds, when the town counted some two hundred thousand steeds on its streets, it was common to encounter manure mixed with snow, or carcasses rotting in public view. And so the news, last week, of a grisly animal-car collision on Ninth Avenue, near the site of the old...

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