Horse Talk.(The Talk of the Town)

Horses once abounded in New York, with a hundred and twenty thousand of them still in residence in 1908, when a reporter called them "an economic burden, an affront to cleanliness, and a terrible tax upon human life." Their numbers declined precipitously thereafter, trailing off into art and sentimentality--who doesn't remember the Steichen photograph of a misty, soft-edged Flatiron Building, with the silhouetted horse cab and plug-hatted cabbie in the foreground? Horsepresence took another hit last month, when the ancient Claremont Riding Academy, on West Eighty-ninth Street, closed its doors, reducing our equines to that redolent line of tourist-pullers on Central Park South. A few older city types (this writer among them) can remember cloppier times. The appearance of flower venders, with their brilliantly hued horse-drawn wagons of blooms, was once a certain sign that another city spring was at hand. Taken along to the theatre by your parents, and in among the dressed-up, perfumed, and excited hordes in the West Forties before curtain time, you were watched over by godlike city mounties, unmoving atop their enormous steeds. (At school, ambivalently, you heard that these same Cossacks sometimes dealt less sweetly with political demonstrators in Union Square. Want to lift the embargo on Spain? Want to free the Scottsboro Boys? Bring along a handful of marbles to drop on the pavement: police horses hate marbles.)

Back to the stage: When the musical "Annie Two" opened, in 1989, the dog playing Sandy several times missed a bark cue in the second act: a vital bit of business in the plot. Quizzed urgently by the director and producers, Sandy's handler said that the one thing that always made his thespian mutt bark was the sudden sight of a horse. At the next performance--and then at every performance thereafter--an assistant stage manager donned a full-sized horse head and stepped into sight in the wings on cue, producing the arf. Back to cops: When the mounted-police stable in the Squadron A Armory, on East ...