You Can Experience New York City in the Horse Age

Horse and rider on New York’s Upper West Side.

(CARLA DAVIDSON)

Pretty soon now They—the oft-mentioned They—are going to invent a time-travel machine, and if you and I take a trip back to brownstone-era late-Gilded Age New York, the first thing we’ll exclaim to one another upon arrival is, “Look at all those horses!”

Of course we’ll note the gentlemen’s buttoned-up and uniformly dark clothing, and the ladies’ trailing skirts and fruit-tray hats, and all those high poles bearing telegraph and telephone and electric wires, but what can they be in visual impact compared with the uncountable bays, blacks, browns, chestnuts, roans, and grays carrying riders or pulling every kind of vehicle from smart trap to great passenger-filled lumbering omnibus?

Let’s take a look, during our time travel, at 175 West 89th Street, just east of Amsterdam Avenue, in New York City, where 135 horses hang their hats. This is the Claremont stables, just completed in 1892. Latest design. Scored cement flooring in place of old-style wood. Tubes to transmit equine liquid waste direct to the sewer. Ventilation pathways up to the gabled roof of the five-story Romanesque Revival structure. The rich have carriage houses for their horses; and there are drays that haul cabs, beer, ice, coal, and deliveries from the Ladies Mile department stores; and the police and militia cavalry detachments have mounts. But horses-for-hire places like the Claremont own the vast majority of the city’s steeds.

No other nineteenth-century location counted Manhattan’s 100,000 horses, but every American municipality had a plenitude of livery stables. You could find them every few blocks, sometimes two on a block. The business was humdrum, routine, as attended by drama as the filling out of forms and handing over of keys at Avis or Hertz. The product rented out was part of the normal street scene, just as were the “White Wings,” the garbage men with carts, brooms, and shovels who attended to what the product left on those cobbled streets.

Now let us depart the world of President Benjamin Harrison and hop the time-travel machine back to 2005. We observe some changes. The automobile, its first appearance in Manhattan still years in the future in 1892, and the flip-flop, and midriff-baring jeans are all wild variances from what we beheld on our trip. But stay! Not all the past is gone. Of Manhattan’s 750 livery stables, 749 have become parking garages, lofts, stores, or restaurants, or have been demolished, and they are as forgotten as the ruins of lost Tyre. The Claremont remains.

And it is unchanged. Unchanged. The metal wall rings for holding a horse while the groom tacks him up, the stall bars, the beaded-board tongue-in-groove stall dividers, the extremely steep ramp almost like a staircase up from ground level, the Dickens-factory-like carriage elevator, the high crane for dispatching manure to the street—why, Victoria might still be on her throne, so unaltered are they. Outside, the building is just as it was in ancient photos, save for metal plaques saying that this is a National Park Service-designated historic site, the country’s only stable marked as such, and a New York City landmark.

And out come, from 6:30 a.m. every day of the year, weather permitting, riders, headed toward Central Park. They hang a right on 89th Street and another onto Amsterdam Avenue, amid double-parked Fed Ex vans, honking cabs, great white garbage trucks, and massive two-section buses, and they walk among the late for work who cross against the light, and the jugglers of Chinese take out who yell on cell phones, past boom boxes and bikes. This is the Upper West Side, famously the abode of folk unlikely to be called unassertive but some of whom might need guidance to tell which is the front end of a horse and which the rear.

The riders turn right on 90th Street, past the construction site and the school. A mom with a stroller smiles, as does her child, and save for the occasional urchin offering a derisive comment, the ancient affinity of humankind with these animals—And God took a handful of southerly wind, blew His breath over it, and created the horse, goes the Bedouin saying—can be seen in the pedestrians’ gentled faces. Something of that has lasted, even here.

Back in the Claremont’s first-floor riding ring, instructors offer dressage and jumping lessons. The riders on Central Park’s four miles of bridal path post to the trot or sit for a canter. The family of the owner, Paul Novograd, has been here for 60 years. He judges riders’ Central Park capacity by instinct. Indicate that you wanna horse that goes fast, he won’t put you up. Once, a guy came in, passed the verbal test, took from a suitcase a glittering plastic medieval armor outfit, donned it, mounted up, went to where his pals had brought his unknowing girlfriend, doffed his plumed helmet, got down on the grass on one knee, and asked her hand in marriage. Could she refuse her knight-at-arms? Please. The pals uncorked the bubbly.

Yes, even by Claremont standards the chevalier was unusual. But is Claremont itself usual, in the heart of the great city? There’s a dent in a wall where perhaps a horse unleashed a kick around the time General Pershing took the Allied Expeditionary Force to France, in 1917, or maybe even before. These mares and geldings—for the law still states that no stallions are allowed on Manhattan streets—with their age-old sound of clip-clop and their attendant aromas of hay and feed and manure, unchanged all these long years: They are living ghosts.

Reservations are required at Claremont Riding Academy, 175 West 89th Street, New York, NY 10024, and the price is $50 per hour. For more information see http://www.centralparknyc.org/activities/sports/horseback, or call the stables at 212-724-5100.

—Gene Smith is a contributing editor at American Heritage. His books include When the Cheering Stopped: The Last Years of Woodrow Wilson, Lee and Grand: A Dual Biography, and Until the Last Trumpet Sounds: The Life of General of the Armies John J. Pershing