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

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 American Horse Exchange, felt strangely out of time, as if the neat and virtual New York of the Bloomberg era had reverted, for a moment, to the brutish, bricks-and-mortar one of Boss Tweed.

In order to drive a horse-drawn carriage, one must complete a home-study course given by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Last week, an aspiring coachwoman scoured the city's official Web site, finding no sign of equine driver's ed. She called the D.O.H.M.H., veterinary division, to ask about registering for the course. The world of the urban horse-drawn carriage, it turns out, is an almost completely seamless anachronism. "You just come here in person, and we take care of it," the person who answered said. "You'll need a money order in the amount of twenty-five dollars."

The applicant set out for Room 1522 of 220 Church Street, where she was handed two booklets: "Rules of the Road" and "Horse Drawn Carriage Operator's Course Training Manual," which featured the silhouette of a buggy and top-hatted driver on its cover and a quaint Old Farmer's Almanac-ish font. Applicants were to come back on the seventeenth to watch an educational video. The morning after, there would be a written test, and later that day, for those who had passed, the "practical." Another registrant, a Nigerian physician who had never been on a horse, was alarmed to discover that the afternoon exam involved actual horsedriving. He tried to reassure himself. "It is easy--all you do is direct the animal," he said. "Plus, there is money in it."

Prospective drivers had two weeks to acquaint themselves with the full-page diagram "Parts of a Horse," not to mention more advanced topics: "Deworming ...