GIFT HORSE.(The Talk of the Town)

Georgina Bloomberg, the younger of the Mayor's two daughters, has shown little interest in emulating her father's political and professional career: since girlhood, she has been devoted to things equine, and on the weekends that her father spends appearing in outer-borough ceremonial parades, she can be found competing on the professional show-jumping circuit. But the Mayor's well-known commitment to philanthropy is one to which Georgina, who is twenty-three, is gravitating. She recently established a charitable venture called The Rider's Closet, through which she hopes to bring secondhand jodhpurs to the needy.

"My dad was redoing his house in Armonk, and I had a closet there filled with a lot of riding clothes I had grown out of," she explained the other day over a sushi lunch on the Upper West Side, not far from the Claremont Stables, where she volunteers once a week in a riding-for-the-disabled program. "It got me thinking about what people do with riding clothes if they stop riding."

A friend who participates in the intercollegiate riding program at N.Y.U. provided inspiration. (Bloomberg is enrolled at N.Y.U. She takes no classes in the spring, when the horsey set migrates to Wellington, Florida, where her father recently acquired a reported nine-million-dollar estate.) "My friend was talking about how expensive the riding clothes were," Bloomberg explained. "So I just started to think that there are all these people who have all these riding clothes they can't use anymore, and there are all these people who could use them, but no one knew how to connect the dots."

Bloomberg met with the head of the Intercollegiate Horse Show Association; as a consequence, the home she shares with her mother, in North Salem, New York, now serves as a drop-off depot for her friends' and colleagues' outgrown or otherwise redundant riding jackets and boots. "I delivered my first boxes of clothes yesterday," she announced with pride. (They went to a facility in New Canaan that supports the riding programs at Sarah Lawrence and Fairfield University.) "I was able to take them about thirty pairs of breeches, twenty shirts, four pairs of boots, and two halters." For the moment, Bloomberg is concentrating on outfitting riders in the Northeast, but she hopes to take the program national. "Even within the show-jumping world there are people who struggle to be able to afford riding clothes, and I ...