Good morning. It’s Thursday. We’ll look at how an incident last week has revived the debate on banning carriage horses in the city. We’ll also get details on Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s plan to tackle fines and fees that small businesses say add to the pressures they face.
New York has 68 licensed horse-drawn carriages, and about 170 drivers and about 200 licensed horses that are a familiar fixture in Central Park.
One of the horses bolted into traffic near the park last week, pulling its empty carriage across Central Park South and into oncoming traffic on the Avenue of the Americas. My colleague Michael Levenson writes that video showed the carriage sideswiping a taxi before someone — apparently a bystander — grabbed the reins.
The incident rekindled the debate over whether carriage horses should be banned in New York. The closest the city has come to doing so was when a bill to “wind down the horse-drawn cab industry” was introduced in the City Council in 2024. It became known as Ryder’s Law for a horse that had collapsed on a street in Hell’s Kitchen two years earlier. But it never became law.
Destiny, the horse that broke free last week, was checked by a veterinarian and has returned to work in the park, according to Transport Workers Union Local 100, which represents carriage drivers and owners. The Police Department said that no one was injured when Destiny took off. Four or five vehicles were damaged.
Destiny was spooked
The episode “highlights the risks posed by horse-drawn carriages in an increasingly crowded Central Park,” said Betsy Smith, the president of the Central Park Conservancy, the nonprofit that manages the park. The transport union said that Destiny was apparently startled by an e-bike pulling a cargo trailer — a rig it says has no place in the park.
Ashley Byrne, speaking for the animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, said it was “shocking” that “this traumatized horse” had been put back to work so soon. “Carriages’ only business is coming from a dwindling handful of confused tourists who don’t realize they are complicit in working elderly, exhausted and lame horses to death,” she said.
The park conservancy, which had long avoided taking a position, waded into the debate last year amid concerns about risks to public health and safety. On Wednesday, Smith said that Destiny’s run into traffic “underscores the need for New York to join other major cities around the globe and ban horse carriages.”
In recent years, Barcelona, Montreal and Prague have limited horse-drawn carriage rides or prohibited them altogether, and the last horse-drawn carriage operator in Brussels switched to an electric-powered carriage, saying that he was tired of passers-by accusing him of animal cruelty.
Before the Ryder’s Law bill came to a vote in the City Council’s Committee on Health in November, the war of words escalated. John Samuelsen, the president of the Transport Workers Union, accused the conservancy of “desecrating the park’s storied history,” saying it had been laid out “specifically for horse-drawn carriages to roll through the sculpted landscape.” On Wednesday, the union said that the push to ban carriage horses was fueled by the real estate industry and the desire to build high-rises on the site of the horses’ stables.
Weather
There’s a slight chance of showers in the morning. Expect partly sunny conditions and temperatures around 29. Tonight will be partly cloudy with a low around 23.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Monday (Martin Luther King Jr. Day).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“This is a very rough situation.” — Joseph Sarachek, whose law firm has represented about 30 brands owed money by the company that owns Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman and filed for bankruptcy on Wednesday.
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Mamdani targets fees and fines for small businesses
Over the last 25 years, New York’s mayors have all moved to reduce fines and fees for small businesses. On Wednesday, Mayor Zohran Mamdani followed suit.
Mamdani signed an executive order directing seven city agencies to prepare an inventory of fines and fees for licenses, permits and inspections — and to submit ways to reduce and streamline them. Small businesses say that some 6,000 city rules and regulations make it difficult to operate.
Mamdani has focused on small businesses since the beginning of his campaign for City Hall. For one of his first viral videos, he interviewed halal cart owners, who talked about the soaring cost of permits, and used the term “halalflation.” On Wednesday, he acknowledged that “the plight of small businesses is not new.”
“Neither is the recognition of that plight,” he said at an unrelated news conference in Brooklyn. “What has been missing, however, is the action.”
What made this executive order different, said Andrew Rigie, the head of the New York City Hospitality Alliance, a trade association that represents restaurants and nightlife venues, was the indexing of all the fines and fees — and the focus from City Hall. The executive order gives agencies 90 days to present plans to eliminate initial fees where possible. The mayor also wants a report within a year on the feasibility of an amnesty program for fines on small businesses.
The two leaders of the Five Borough Jobs Campaign, which represents more than 30 business improvement districts, chambers of commerce and economic development organizations, called the executive order “an important first step in following through on his campaign promise to decrease fines and fees.”
But they said that “if this is truly about helping small businesses,” the mayor should give agencies “a clear year-over-year number that they must reduce fines by.”
METROPOLITAN diary
Driving stick
Dear Diary:
My girlfriend and I were living on the Upper West Side. She commuted to work as a department manager at Bloomingdale’s in New Jersey, driving my Buick Skyhawk with a stick shift.
She never quite mastered the manual transmission and burned through two clutches in six months. She had to be towed off the George Washington Bridge when the third one gave out.
“Buddy,” the tow-truck driver said when I came to pick her up, “either change your car or change your girlfriend.”
I sold the car. The girlfriend and I have now been married 46 years.
— Paul Tichauer
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
The post A Horse Bolts, Renewing Debate Over Central Park Carriages appeared first on New York Times.
