Year of the Horse
Romanch Mahajan, an eighteen-year-old from Pathankot, India, visited New York City with his family in June to celebrate his high-school graduation. A tall, ambitious kid who loved cars, playing guitar, and collecting Jordans, Romanch dreamed of expanding his father’s travel business. On the third day of their trip, the Mahajans went to Central Park and took a ride in a horse-drawn carriage.
The carriage—white, with tufted seats—was pulled by a seven-year-old horse named Samson, who had been working in the Park for just six weeks. The carriage paused at Cherry Hill, a plaza with a cast-iron fountain (originally a drinking spot for horses). The driver, Ertan Gokdepe, stepped out to take a photo of the family in their seats. Suddenly, Samson bolted. The Mahajans screamed for help, and as they rounded a corner Romanch’s mother was thrown to the ground. Shouting, “Mom!,” he lunged to save her and fell out. He landed on his head.
The horse ran south toward Tavern on the Green, where the carriage collided with another and toppled over, smashing to pieces. Hours later, Romanch was pronounced dead, from blunt-force trauma. Samson was retired, and Gokdepe was put on indefinite suspension. “We lost a gem,” Romanch’s shell-shocked father, Deepak, told me. “We were four, and we came back as three.”
The tragedy couldn’t have come at a worse time for the Park’s carriage industry, which has weathered a series of fiascoes. One hot day in August, 2022, a carriage horse named Ryder collapsed in Hell’s Kitchen, en route to his stable. As cops sprayed him with water, onlookers took videos, aghast at his emaciated ribs. Ryder was sent to a farm upstate, where, after a seizure, he was euthanized; a necropsy revealed that he’d had leukemia. His driver, Ian McKeever, was tried and acquitted for animal cruelty. At the time, a bill to ban carriage horses was before the City Council. After the incident, it was renamed Ryder’s Law.
The industry tightened its equine-first-aid protocol, but the disasters kept coming. In May, 2025, a runaway horse crashed into a fleet of parked pedicabs. That August, a mare named Lady died of an aortic rupture at an Eleventh Avenue intersection. Days later, the Central Park Conservancy, which had remained neutral on the issue of carriage horses, formally endorsed the ban, citing hazards to public safety, damage to the roadways from horseshoes, and sanitation problems (manure). Nevertheless, Ryder’s Law died in committee.
This past January, an elderly horse named Destiny, apparently spooked by an e-bike with a cargo trailer, darted into Sixth Avenue traffic. In May, a startled horse reared and knocked over a carriage. On June 9th, a horse named Deniz nibbled from a Japanese-yew bush, which is highly toxic to horses, and dramatically expired. But it was Romanch’s death, a week later—the only human fatality from a New York carriage accident in modern memory—that juiced the political momentum. The revived ban, now called Romanch’s Law, is headed for a vote this month and would phase out the carriages by June, 2028. It has twenty-nine co-sponsors and the support of the Council’s speaker, Julie Menin; Mayor Zohran Mamdani is likely to sign it. The Mahajans are suing the city for a hundred and five million dollars. (Their lawyer, Sagar Chadha, is a co-founder of Hindus for Zohran.) In July, a crowd gathered at Cherry Hill for a memorial. Deepak, calling from India, told the mourners that his son, a vegetarian, had “sacrificed his life for the animals.”
Carriage horses share Central Park with owls, blue jays, red-tailed hawks, mallards, red-eared sliders, chipmunks, Virginia opossums, raccoons (who make cameos at Shakespeare in the Park), a small and elusive community of coyotes, and more than two thousand Eastern gray squirrels. But they aren’t wildlife, and they aren’t on display, unlike the snow leopards, sea lions, and penguins at the Central Park Zoo. They are neither pets (dogs, cats) nor pests (rats, roaches), making them unique in the urban menagerie. They are workers.
Perhaps that’s why our relationship with them is so fraught. To those who want the horses liberated, they’re indentured servants, forced to haul tourists around in a Sisyphean loop. To others, horse-drawn carriages, like cobblestone streets, are charming throwbacks to New York’s past, enshrined onscreen in “Barefoot in the Park” (Jane Fonda and Robert Redford), “Sex and the City” (Carrie and Mr. Big), and “The Muppets Take Manhattan” (Kermit and Miss Piggy). If they disappeared, after more than a hundred and sixty years, what would we lose?
After Romanch’s death, a poll sponsored by the Conservancy found that sixty-eight per cent of New Yorkers favored a carriage ban. “There are always people who have a nostalgia for the clip-clopping, but the Park is way, way beyond that now,” Betsy Smith, the head of the Conservancy, told me. The pandemic, she explained, “supercharged” use of the Park, which now hosts forty million visitors a year. Carriages compete with joggers, bicyclists, whizzing e-bikes, and Alicia Keys-blasting pedicabs, all of which can startle a horse.
For a quirky municipal issue, the battle over carriage horses has had an outsized impact. This summer’s flurry of horrors is the latest chapter in decades of warfare, with millions of dollars spent, a mayoral election swayed, and opposing sides that are dug in and combative. In July, the City Council held a public hearing on Romanch’s Law that lasted nine hours. Among the speakers were the Mahajan family, animal-rights activists, the actor Edie Falco, the perpetual mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa, a drag clown, a woman who read a poem from the perspective of the horses (“Hey, man, take a look at what you’ve done / Beat us, ride us, so you could have fun”), and carriage drivers in top hats, including Christina Hansen—a shop steward for Transport Workers Union Local 100, which represents the drivers—who informed the Council, “Horses helped build this very building two hundred years ago.”
Weeks later, I met Hansen at Clinton Park Stables, on West Fifty-second Street, the largest of the industry’s three remaining stables, with ninety horses in residence. Built in the eighteen-eighties, it was once owned by George Washington Plunkitt, the Tammany Hall figure who coined the term “honest graft.” The carriages, festooned with Knicks decals and artificial flowers, are custom-built, mostly in Indiana. Up a ramp were two floors of horse stalls. “The animal-rights people say, ‘Oh, the poor horses are forced to walk up the steep, steep ramp!’ ” Hansen said. “In the wild, it’s called a hill.”
It was a steamy August day, so the horses were benched: they cannot work when the temperature is above eighty-nine or below nineteen degrees. They must be between five and twenty-seven years old, and each gets two annual vet checkups, plus five weeks of mandated vacation at pastures outside the city. They work nine-hour shifts, so most carriages have two or three rotating horses. Since the Second World War, there has been a fixed number of medallions—sixty-eight—which get sold (they’re roughly three hundred thousand dollars apiece) or inherited. There are around a hundred and eighty licensed carriage horses and about a hundred and fifty regular drivers; some own medallions, while others, like Hansen, are independent contractors who split their earnings with their employers. Hansen drives three horses: Sherman, Oreo, and Joker, who was on break in Pennsylvania.
On the second floor, horses were munching hay in their stalls, which are required to be at least sixty square feet, large enough for them to turn around and lie down. (Most carriage horses come from Amish country and are already trained to pull vehicles.) Hansen led me down a hallway, horse eyes staring blankly from either side, and up to the “manure room.” The manure is a source of compost for the Giorgi Mushroom Company, in southeast Pennsylvania. “If you have eaten mushrooms on the East Coast, you can thank a carriage horse,” Hansen said brightly.
Hansen had a long ponytail and the weariness of a battle-tested warrior. The daughter of a sociologist and a journalist, she was raised in Lexington, Kentucky. “I didn’t grow up having horses, but I grew up loving horses,” she said. She learned to ride when she was in grad school, at U.N.C.-Chapel Hill, where she studied French history. She considered writing a dissertation on horses and French national identity after the Revolution, but instead she followed her husband, an architectural historian, to Philadelphia, and answered an ad for carriage drivers. During her first week, in 2006, she was driving her horse Bud near Independence Hall when a woman in a car yelled, “Animal cruelty!” “It just stunned me,” Hansen recalled. “Who would ever look at this horse, happily walking down the street—Bud was a workaholic, he loved his job—and feel like there’s anything wrong with that?”
Hansen became “a working-horse advocate,” she said. She started by arguing with people online, but it became clear that the main fight was in Central Park. Her new driver friends in New York had identified their enemy—a well-funded group called New Yorkers for Clean, Livable, and Safe Streets, or NYCLASS—and wanted to infiltrate a meeting. Since Hansen was from Philly and unknown to the activists, the drivers asked her to go undercover.
One night in 2011, she arrived at 520 Eighth Avenue and gave an alias. She was surprised to find that the location was the A.S.P.C.A.’s headquarters—an apparent conflict of interest, she thought, since the A.S.P.C.A.’s Humane Law Enforcement Division also policed the carriage industry. (The N.Y.P.D. took over animal-cruelty enforcement in 2014.) There, she got her first glimpse of Steve Nislick, a parking-garage mogul who is the key backer of NYCLASS. “He seemed like a rich guy who’s very confident that it’s just a matter of time until he got this done,” she said.
Soon, Hansen attended—and secretly recorded—a second meeting, where Nislick mouthed off about spinning politicians, including Christine Quinn, then the City Council’s speaker and a staunch backer of carriages. Hansen leaked the audio to the Post. In 2012, she moved to New York and started picking up shifts in Central Park. (“My carriage-versary is tomorrow,” she told me.) After another driver’s horse bolted in Columbus Circle, Hansen defended the industry to news crews. She is now the carriage drivers’ foremost champion.
Hansen had explanations for each of the recent mishaps. Ryder, the horse who collapsed in 2022, was gaunt because of undetected leukemia, not because he was underfed—but once the “angry mob” showed up, she said, “everyone and their brother” tweeted videos. Deniz, who was poisoned by Japanese yew, was the victim of whoever planted “murder bushes” along the carriage route. (Betsy Smith called it a “very common shrub.”) Hansen views Romanch’s death as a “freak, tragic accident” and insisted that his family was being “exploited.” Samson, the horse, bolted suddenly, giving credence to a theory that he was shocked by stray voltage underfoot—Hansen noted that Cherry Hill is often muddy, perhaps wetting underground cables, and that the Conservancy “refuses to fix it.” She also floated a conspiracy theory. “If you wanted to cause an accident,” she said, you could scare a horse with an ultrasonic dog whistle. Wasn’t the timing a little too convenient, with the ban before the City Council? “The foot soldiers are fanatics,” she said of the forces arrayed against her.
I suggested that this was an existential moment for her industry. “It’s an existential moment for human beings,” she replied. “Horses have been with us for six thousand years. Civilization as we know it is a partnership, and what you’re seeing is an attempt to sever this partnership.” She sighed. “I get yelled at by younger people, ‘Leave the horses alone!’ That’s like saying, ‘Leave your dog alone.’ They’re domesticated. They want to be with us.”
A few weeks later, I met Hansen’s bête noire, Edita Birnkrant, at the Ritz-Carlton on Central Park South. A self-possessed middle-aged woman with straight dark hair, Birnkrant is the executive director of NYCLASS and the carriage industry’s most tenacious antagonist. Because the drivers know her on sight, she tries to stay incognito; she had pulled a Woodstock Farm Sanctuary cap low.
The plan was to rove the Park and document infractions. As we headed out, she pointed to lines of waiting carriages. “No one is taking rides,” she said. “That’s part of a larger trend around the world, that horse-drawn carriages are an obsolete business model. San Antonio, Texas, even voted to ban carriages. Chicago, Philadelphia, Mumbai, Barcelona. New York City’s actually kind of an outlier.”
From a hilltop, we peered down at the Park’s West Drive, which was packed. “You can see how easy it is for frightening stimuli to spook a horse,” Birnkrant said. Horses are prey animals, she explained, and their instinct is to run. She spotted a carriage going at a brisk trot—“He should not be going that fast”—and filmed a video. Then she noticed a driver taking a picture of her. “They spotted me,” she said. Within minutes, I got a text from Hansen: “I’m sure Edita’s telling you all kinds of tales!”
Her cover blown, Birnkrant wandered closer. Days before Romanch’s death, she had spoken outside City Hall, warning that someone was going to get killed. “It’s like the Greek Cassandra myth,” she told me. “You’re cursed. You know these terrible things are going to happen. You keep warning and warning, and you’re ignored.”
Birnkrant saw hazards everywhere: a little girl petting an unattended horse’s nose, a horse with a bandaged ankle. “We see examples of badly cracked hooves, horses with leg problems,” she said, snapping a photo. She locked eyes with a horse wearing a red feather headdress, like a Vegas showgirl. “It often feels like their spirits are broken,” she said. “They have this metal bit in ten hours a day. And then they’re forced back into these warehouse cells, with no pasture. Everything that would make life worth living for a horse is taken away.”
Birnkrant grew up in Queens, the child of a single mother. Like Hansen, she couldn’t afford horses, but she loved animals, especially cats. She was raised Catholic and was drawn to St. Francis of Assisi. She later got interested in the Indian concept of ahimsa, or nonviolence. After graduating from Queens College, she worked in publishing, but the book industry “didn’t spark joy, let’s just say.” In 2004, she joined the nonprofit Friends of Animals and advocated for the protection of wild horses out West. But she grew concerned about the horses trudging to work right outside her office, on Columbus Circle.
She started protesting in the Park and became a prolific giver of sound bites. (February, 2008: “Valentine’s Day is one of the busiest days for carriage rides, but there’s nothing romantic about animal abuse.”) One carriage driver called her the C-word. The drivers complained that the activists harassed them and their customers. Birnkrant left Friends of Animals in 2016; its president, Priscilla Feral, told me that Birnkrant had resigned, adding, “I felt she needed to be better managed.” That year, Hansen submitted to law enforcement a video of Birnkrant and another advocate chasing her carriage, yelling at her passengers, “You can get your money back!” A court later issued a restraining order preventing Birnkrant and others from “aggressively accosting” passengers within nine feet. She joined NYCLASS in 2017.
Nowadays, she seldom protests. The Park is too “volatile,” she said; lobbying is more effective. She passed a statue of Simón Bolívar astride his steed. At Grand Army Plaza, a carriage driver called out, “I finally meet you in person.”
“Hi,” Birnkrant responded, unfazed. “How do you know me?”
“The whole industry knows you,” he said. They shared a laugh.
Birnkrant has cultivated a small army of “eyes and ears” who send her videos of injured-looking horses or negligent drivers. One of her informants, a pedicab driver named Helen David, pulled up, wearing braids and a “Work Hard Pray Hard” T-shirt. Carriage and pedicab drivers are often bitter competitors. David, a Namibian immigrant who has driven a pedicab for twenty-three years, suspects that the carriage drivers have retaliated for her collaboration with NYCLASS by cutting her bike cables and leaving her bad reviews online.
We hopped in David’s cab, and she cycled us north. Near Bethesda Fountain, Birnkrant pointed to some stopped carriages. “They’re not supposed to solicit here,” she said. She grimaced: “You smell the horse urine.” We passed the curb where Romanch fell. “Political gridlock has made it impossible to move forward,” Birnkrant said. “It’s tragic that it took a human death.” But she was hopeful: “2026, in the lunar calendar, is the Year of the Horse.”
New York City is still dotted with vestiges of its horsy past: hitching posts, boot scrapers, carriage houses. (Taylor Swift lived in one that sold for eleven and a half million dollars.) Dutch settlers brought horses to New Amsterdam on ships in 1625, to haul wagons and power sawmills. The city’s first recorded hack license was issued in 1692, to a tavern owner named John Clapp. Horses fought on both sides of the Revolution. In 1776, George Washington commanded on horseback during the Battle of Brooklyn.
Horses fuelled the nineteenth-century city, lugging coal, bricks, ice, apples, beer kegs, mutton legs, and streetcars full of commuters. Equine-driven mass transit allowed the metropolis to stretch and sprawl. In 1823, there was a multi-carriage accident in Woodhaven, which Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr, the authors of “The Horse in the City,” call “possibly New York’s earliest traffic jam.” By 1866, the city had nearly a thousand horse-drawn cabs. Undertakers preferred black horses; breweries went for Clydesdales. The city bustled with saddlemakers, carriage painters, wheelwrights.
Horsepower helped build Central Park, which opened in 1858, crisscrossed with winding carriage roads and bridle paths. Carriage rides for tourists started in 1863, for twenty-five cents apiece. As Christina Hansen likes to say, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux “designed Central Park to be seen from the back of a carriage.” Owning a carriage was a status symbol for the city’s gentry, who promenaded through the Park in stately black broughams.
Not everyone saw horses as living machines. In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln appointed Henry Bergh to a diplomatic post in St. Petersburg, Russia, where he saw a peasant whipping his horse and had an epiphany. Back in New York, he founded the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. (Its seal, showing an angel brandishing a sword as a wagoner beats his horse, is affixed to Bergh’s mausoleum, in Green-Wood Cemetery.) Bergh became a celebrity crusader, blocking commuter trolleys when the horses looked overworked—and then dragging the drivers to court.
In 1872, an equine influenza swept North America—the Great Epizootic—and New York ground to a halt. Thirty-six horses died per day on the streets of Manhattan. Avenues, piled with carcasses, went silent. The crisis laid bare the city’s dependence on horse labor, pushing industrialists to adopt steam engines, which were cheaper and faster and couldn’t get sick.
There were a hundred and thirty thousand horses working in Manhattan in 1900; by 1931, an official horse census counted less than eighty-five hundred. A correspondent for this magazine wrote, in 1927, “We heard a gentleman at the Horse Show the other evening say to his small son, ‘Heigho, a horse and carriage, lad, observe it well. It is a fancy that has passed.’ ” Horses continued transporting milk, laundry, and hotel baggage, but carriages became quaint outliers. “Not counting the Plaza coachmen, there are only about thirty horse-drawn carriages on the streets of Manhattan today,” The New Yorker tallied in 1943. Collisions between taxis and hansom cabs made news—tidy metaphors for the clashing of eras. The A.S.P.C.A. maintained a smattering of watering troughs, which New Yorkers would use to rinse stolen fish or as makeshift ashtrays.
By the sixties, the carriage industry was catching up to the hippie era. In 1966, the Times reported that “two pretty girls,” aged nineteen and twenty, were now driving carriages. By 1971, long-haired youngsters in purple pants and suède vests were embracing the profession as an alternative to straight jobs.
In the eighties, the carriage horse began to morph from nostalgia object to political football. During a heat wave in 1982, four horses died in three weeks. “Surely there are less sadistic ways to get around town,” one animal lover wrote to the Times. In 1985, a carriage was struck by a stretch limousine: Boss Tweed’s New York meets Donald Trump’s. Four years later, the City Council overrode a veto from Mayor Ed Koch to pass a bill banning carriages from rush-hour traffic and limiting horses’ shifts, as drivers grumbled that the rules would force them out of business. “They are taking away my life,” one said. “I will have to sell my horse to the butcher and burn my carriage.”
The issue got more contentious in 1992, when the Council passed a bill relaxing those restrictions. One councilman accused opponents of the measure of anti-Irish bias, because many of the carriage drivers were Irish immigrants. Mayor David Dinkins, a former A.S.P.C.A. board member, vetoed the bill at a tumultuous hearing that included testimony from Alec Baldwin, who had got into animal rights through his then girlfriend, Kim Basinger. On his way out, Baldwin quarrelled with a carriage driver and called him a “faggot.” (Baldwin says that the other guy said it first.) Years later, Jack Donaghy, the character he played on “30 Rock,” described carriages as “rolling torture wagons for nature’s most dignified creature.” Baldwin told me,“If the carriage horses were gone, count to three and no one’s going to miss them. Some slavering, tired, old, overheated horse pulling your cart? I don’t get the attraction there.”
When Rudolph Giuliani became mayor, in 1994, he signed a compromise that pleased neither side but, to the relief of exasperated Council members, put the saga to rest—for a while. (Giuliani was more focussed on banning pet ferrets, which he called “little weasels.”) The issue reared up again in 2006, when a carriage horse named Spotty ran through six blocks of traffic before crashing into a station wagon on Ninth Avenue. Three people were hospitalized, and Spotty, who broke a leg, was euthanized. Mayor Michael Bloomberg was a staunch defender of the carriages, once summarizing his views thusly: “In our society, we have, from caveman times, used animals as part of our economy. We eat them.” But activists rallied at City Hall, this time calling for the industry to be not regulated but eliminated. In 2007, for the first time, a Council member proposed an outright ban.
Among the New Yorkers moved by the Spotty incident was Steve Nislick, then the chief executive of the real-estate firm Edison Properties. He and his wife, Linda Marcus, live at 25 Central Park West. (Years ago, they nurtured a family of peregrine falcons on their penthouse terrace, until the condo board objected. Nislick said, “We had Robert Kennedy, Jr.”—a lifelong falconer—“write a letter on our behalf.”) Marcus would walk their dog past the carriage horses. “It just looked like they weren’t healthy at all,” she told me. A friend invited her to a vigil for Spotty, and the couple soon got to know Elizabeth Forel, the founder of the Coalition to Ban Horse-Drawn Carriages. “We saw it as an opportunity to do something,” Nislick recalled. The next year, he started NYCLASS.
I met Nislick and Marcus one day at Bayboro Equestrian, a hundred-acre facility in Branchville, New Jersey. At the stable—a McMansion compared with the carriage horses’ West Side tenement—they introduced me to Chance, a twenty-three-year-old black draft horse they acquired in 2010. Chance had been a carriage horse but developed a hoof ailment called laminitis. Nislick hired a private investigator to buy her, because he didn’t think the owner would sell to him under his own name. He put Chance through rehab and rode her for eleven years. “She would have gone to slaughter,” Nislick said.
Nislick is eighty-two, with a woolly voice and a bald head that he hid under a “BAN HORSE CARRIAGES” cap. He had been an avid rider, and has a list of injuries to prove it: broken elbow, broken shoulder (twice), broken ribs (ten), broken leg. He told me that he was attracted to the “mystique” of horses. “They’re dangerous and they’re sweet,” he said. He isn’t opposed to horses working. (The horses of the N.Y.P.D.’s Mounted Unit, for instance, are “under saddle and much better kept.”) But he became convinced that carriage horses live under “abominable” conditions, and he was determined to free them.
Nislick grew up in South Orange, New Jersey, and joined his cousins’ parking business in 1973. By the time he retired, as C.E.O., in 2012, he’d built up a parking empire and developed Manhattan Mini Storage, famous for its politically provocative billboards (“YOUR CLOSET SPACE IS SHRINKING AS FAST AS HER RIGHT TO CHOOSE”), which was sold, in 2021, for more than three billion dollars. The carriage industry has long suspected Nislick of having an agenda to develop the real estate occupied by the West Side stables, a charge he denies. “If the property was given to me for free, I wouldn’t take it,” he told me.
Early in Nislick’s anti-carriage crusade, one activist suggested replacing carriages with antique-looking electric cars. Nislick thought it was a brilliant idea and drew up a business plan. He even built a prototype—an electric-powered version of a 1905 Rolls-Royce—and drove it around the Park. (The carriage drivers, Christina Hansen told me, nicknamed it the Frankentank.) But the Conservancy was trying to subtract cars, not add them, and the idea fell flat. Nislick’s wealth made him a convenient bogeyman for the drivers, who cast themselves as working-class underdogs. (Drivers make around sixty or seventy thousand dollars per year, including tips.) But his businessman’s swagger also irked veteran activists, who were appalled when an early NYCLASS fund-raiser served a meat entrée.
As Nislick was cannonballing into the cause, the politics were getting knotty. In 2007, a city audit of the carriage industry found substandard conditions. Three years later, Bloomberg and Christine Quinn, the City Council’s speaker, enacted reforms. When Quinn called the measures a “huge step forward,” she was heckled by animal-rights activists, who were now dead set on a ban. The activists’ tactics could be alienating. In 2011, protesters stormed the American Girl store on Fifth Avenue, which had been planning carriage rides for customers. (“Nice notion there, terrify little girls to make a political point,” a Times editorial clucked.) That fall, the A.S.P.C.A. concluded that a carriage horse who had died was “likely suffering from pain” from stomach ulcers. Days later, the organization’s lead equine veterinarian claimed that her supervisors had pressured her into playing up the horse’s mistreatment.
Non-Baldwin celebrities joined the fray, with Lea Michele, Pink, and Gloria Steinem advocating for a ban. On the other side was the Irish actor Liam Neeson, who argued in a Times op-ed, “Horses have been pulling from the beginning of time. It is what they have been bred to do.” During Pride weekend in 2012, a carriage driver called a group of female activists handing out leaflets a “dyke convention,” and the lesbian tennis player Martina Navratilova sent a letter to Quinn (who is also gay) blasting the drivers’ “aggressive homophobia.”
As the 2013 mayoral election neared, Nislick identified Quinn, who was assumed to be Bloomberg’s heir apparent, as his main obstacle. NYCLASS staged “Anybody but Quinn” protests, trailing her from event to event. Nislick and his allies poured more than a million dollars into a PAC called New York City Is Not for Sale, which ran an attack ad featuring a smoke-filled room and a voice-over portraying Quinn as a shady dealmaker. The commercial did not mention horses. Quinn’s favorability plummeted. Mike Morey, the Quinn campaign’s communications director, told me, “Do I think it was a factor? Certainly. Do I think it was the factor? I don’t know. But I certainly think it helped drive up her negatives.” Nislick was blunter. “We knocked off Chris Quinn like that,” he said, snapping his fingers.
The beneficiary turned out to be Bill de Blasio, the once obscure public advocate, who surged from behind to win the mayorship. As a councilman, de Blasio hadn’t always supported a carriage ban, but he told me that his eyes were opened when an activist approached him on the City Hall steps. “He made this impassioned argument that it was a fundamentally inhumane thing to have horses in the middle of midtown traffic,” de Blasio recalled. NYCLASS didn’t endorse him in the primary—it just targeted Quinn—but Morey called NYCLASS “a front group for big donors for Bill de Blasio.” The F.B.I. reportedly investigated the ad blitz; Nislick says that the agency never contacted him, but NYCLASS did pay a fine for violating campaign-finance laws in its support of two Council members that cycle. He and de Blasio were an odd match: the parking tycoon and the Park Slope progressive vowing to bridge the city’s class divide. As de Blasio took office, he promised to end the carriage industry on Day One, warning, “It’s over.”
It wasn’t. By the time a proposal was in front of the City Council, eleven months into de Blasio’s term, the Teamsters (which represented the carriage drivers before the Transport Workers Union) had organized against it. “We absolutely underestimated the opposition,” de Blasio told me. “We tinkered too much, when what we needed to do was just be fast and aggressive.” In 2015, he introduced an alternative plan that would shrink the industry and place the horses in a stable within the Park, but the Teamsters sank it at the last minute, humiliating the Mayor. Even de Blasio’s aides got sick of the issue, which the Times called “his Guantánamo, a problem that never gets solved.” Nislick, who’d been donating to the Mayor’s nonprofit, grew frustrated. After eight years in office, de Blasio managed to push through only minor reforms (like moving the hack line from Central Park South to inside the Park). “I was just miffed—why is this so hard?” de Blasio told me. “It almost felt surreal.” At the end of our conversation, he deadpanned, “Thank you for this therapy session.”
By the time of the 2025 mayoral election, thanks to steady lobbying and high-profile incidents, the politics had shifted such that NYCLASS didn’t need to meddle. All the major candidates—Eric Adams, Zohran Mamdani, Andrew Cuomo, Curtis Sliwa—favored a ban.
One sunny Saturday, the Park was bustling with tourists, most of them indifferent to the idling carriage horses. Near Fifth Avenue, twin sisters, visiting from Missouri for their fifty-first birthday, felt torn. “In the hot months, I don’t like them out here,” one said.
“In Missouri, we have a lot of Amish people who still use horse and buggy,” the other said. “They’re sharing the road with vehicles, and accidents happen.” A driver offered them a discounted ride, but they passed.
Penny and Hannah Widmer, a mother and daughter, were finishing a carriage ride with their two dogs. Hannah, a model and an equestrian, was in from Wisconsin for a photo shoot. “We’re fond of horses,” her mother said. “I don’t feel like it’s abusive or anything, as long as they take good care of them.”
“It’s like anything,” Hannah added. “There are some good people and some bad people.”
Inside the Park, I met Ahmet Bilici, who’s been driving a carriage for twenty-three years. He wore a top hat incongruously paired with cargo shorts and was feeding his bay horse, Chocolate, a bucket of oats. Where previous generations were predominantly Irish or Italian, Bilici, like many drivers these days, is from Turkey. He was raised on a farm in Hatay and got his veterinary degree in Istanbul. He came to New York in 2001 (“American Dream, you know?”), but his vet license wasn’t recognized here, so he worked in a supermarket before becoming a carriage driver. “This is top attraction in the world, Central Park horse carriage,” he said. “Like the World Trade Center, Statue of Liberty.”
Initially, he drove for hire, but he saved up his earnings and, in 2016, purchased his own medallion for around half a million dollars. (He bought Chocolate, a retired racehorse, the next year.) He hoped to pass the medallion down to his two sons and, someday, to his grandchildren. That’s why the proposed ban so angered him. Although Romanch’s Law includes career retraining (M.T.A. jobs, sightseeing-bus-tour positions), Bilici wondered how the city could possibly repay his life savings and the generational wealth he’d envisioned. “The city, they give us license,” he said. “So city is supposed to protect us.” If the bill passes, he half joked, “maybe I’m going to jump down the Empire State Building.” Or sue.
Bilici blamed the Conservancy for setting the drivers up to fail. Chocolate was tied to a flimsy mesh fence. Why hadn’t the Park installed hitching posts? (Activists say that posts can cause panicked horses to break their necks.) He worried that the horses could wind up at a glue factory. (The bill would rehome them at sanctuaries, but the drivers are skeptical.) He insisted that Chocolate—“my buddy”—had it pretty good. “How many people have a minimum five weeks’ vacation a year?” he said. “I have no vacation.”
I asked for a ride ($72.22 for twenty minutes, $28.89 for each additional ten) and hopped onto the carriage’s plush lavender seat. As we clip-clopped north, Bilici railed against the surrounding chaos: pedicabs stealing his customers, e-scooters and bicycles darting too close. “I’m so tired,” he said. A bicyclist sped by, shouting, “Free the horses!” Bilici retorted, “His life better than your life, bro!” To the drivers’ opponents, the carriage horses are two-thousand-pound hazards, wild creatures enslaved in an urban nightmare. To Bilici, they’re the Park’s original settlers, now embattled by unfettered traffic and deep-pocketed lobbyists.
From the shaded seat, I tried to teleport back to Edith Wharton’s time, imagining myself as a fashionable gentleman flaunting my brougham. But I kept getting snapped back to the present by the jangle of traffic and Bilici’s grievances and a guy playing the Super Mario theme on a melodica. It was clear that carriage horses, and the romance they promised, were getting edged out of the Park, but whose fault is that? If the ban goes through, for better or worse, Central Park will be one step closer to everywhere else in New York City: a place where once there were horses. ♦