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 vendors, 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 2” 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 Ninety-fourth Street, was closed, in 1966, a woman (it was my wife) alighting from a Madison Avenue bus at twilight was almost knocked flat by a riderless police horse, stirrups flying, which came wildly past her on its way home to its old barn. A minute later, a cab pulled up and an embarrassed policeman in jodhpurs got out, shaking his head, retrieved his animal, and trotted off toward their new stable, way across town.
Something’s sad about horses, and not just Barbaro. Who ever expected that they would be not just less frequent on the Central Park bridle path but gone for good? I walk my dog, Harry, on the path every day, and now it turns out that the end of horseback riding in New York is my fault, along with global warming. The recent proliferation of dogs and joggers and baby strollers on the broad, stony old bridle path had led to the dwindling numbers of Claremont customers. Some days you never saw a horse at all. A week before the shutdown, Harry and I were close to the giant plane tree on the northeast bend near Ninety-seventh Street when a clockwise equestrienne came walking toward us on a gray horse. She wore jodhpurs, black boots, a black top, and a black helmet, set straight on her head. She sat up tall, her spine strong, her heels tilted back, her hands at rest with the reins, her crop held at an angle. She looked straight ahead. Everything exactly right.
Harry, a smooth fox terrier, watched the horse and horsewoman with his usual extreme interest, giving this horse the attention it deserved. Here it came, five yards away, picking up its stonelike, clomping feet. Huge black holes for nostrils, legs knobbed like furniture, ears aloft, and the curved, satiny, massive rear end lifting and putting down the great package with springy ease. The nearer eye, straight above us, took us in and rolled away. The smell of the great animal—nothing else is like it—arrived and then went by. I don’t always know what my dog is thinking but this time I did: Holy shit!
Talk, May, 2007