Reminiscences from the end of the horse era in New York City (1952) | Hacker News Reader

Reminiscences from the end of the horse era in New York City (1952)

untappedcities.com

86 pointsjs252 comments

I watched Naked City (1948) the other night and there's a scene with a milkman delivering from a horse drawn carriage. I wondered, how long did horse-drawn carriages continue to be used in NYC (not including the carriage rides in Central Park)? Which led me to this lovely article.

I submitted it a day or two ago; I guess the HN mods thought it worthy of the second chance pool[1]. Thank you HN mods! :-)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/pool

What is “pool”, I don’t have such a link on my orange band.

Sometimes Dang sees an article that never made it to the front page that he thinks we'll enjoy. He shoves it on to the front page for a while, so it gets some visibility and upvotes.

with great power comes great responsibility

Quite a lot of links are not in the orange band. Check this one https://news.ycombinator.com/lists

Sometimes a good but forgotten submission (even after 24-48 hours), would get invited. HN sends you an email and if you OK it, it goes into the roaster.

dang did a show HN for the second-chance pool:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308

Strangely the rag and bone man and the brewery deliveries still used horses when I was a kid, late 1970s UK! I think the brewery used the carthorses as a kind of advertisement for the beer, but it was still very weird. I'm sure milk carts were still horsedrawn into the 1960s in the UK in some cases although I'm not sure where I got that from.

I had no idea the rag-and-bone man was still a thing into the 70s. Was that just in the UK? I've certainly never heard of it in the US during that time period.

I’ve no idea about the US - but the Rag & Bone man, including their equestrian transportation, were a thing in London, England, right up until the late eighties, if not early nineties. They used to use magnificent Shire horses, with all the brass tackle.

A comment my mother made, from her experiences as a child in the UK in the 1920s was that if London hadn't moved to mechanical transport, the city would have drowned in horse-shit if the population rise continued. It was a nightly obligation to deal with the prodigious amounts of horse manure, every day, without fail.

I might add that many fine multi-million pound houses now exist inside the horse stables, the "mews" of London. They're a feature of many films in the 50s, 60s and 70s.

In one of the pictures of the horse drawn fire engine similar to the one that I saw in one of the The Return of Sherlock Holmes episodes namely "The Adventure of the Norwood Builder" indicated the year 1905 in the old photograph with Koch Bros company building at the background. This seems to be rather improbable (in Holmes' unique voice) since Koch Bros company founder will only be five years old at the time according to Wikipedia, unless Koch senior has already had a business before his son or it's totally different company altogether. Fun facts, this particular episode was based on the short story publication around the same time as indicated in the old photograph or 1903 to be exact.

Roads in Salt Lake City need to be wide enough so someone operating a horse carriage can turn around "without cursing" - from what I've heard while in the area.

Mormons don't curse anyways, unless you count "shut the front door", "cheese and rice", "mother father" and "Got down sat on a bench"

I was visiting Charleston South Carolina recently and in the old quarter they have horses taking around tourists on carriages (like little mini horse drawn open air buses). The smell of horse piss and manure in the area was gross and very strong (this was summer). I can't imagine what it would be like to have that many horses in NYC as the main mode of transportation. The smell back then must have been awful. I get everyone just put up with it.

They couldn't clear dead horses until Sunday as the roads were too busy and crowded...

Don't forget that there was also no deodorant for the humans back then, I think it is easy to forget just how bad cities in general must have smelt back then. Plus coal fires, people smoking, people washing their bodies and their clothes irregularly.

(my father tells a story of how in the 50s he only had one work shirt and 10 removable collars - he'd wear the same shirt for 2 weeks just changing the collar daily)

> I think it is easy to forget just how bad cities in general must have smelt back then.

I refer you to London's "Great Stink" of 1858 during which the smell was so bad that Parliament seriously considered moving to a different city: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stink

Well, people either shit in the streets or emptied their piss-pots into them. If you were lucky enough (?) to have access to a communal toilet it was shared with a large number of people and likely just emptied into the street anyway. Everything eventually flowed to the Thames which must have stank. Horse shit everywhere. I'm sure there was dog shit everywhere too. Honestly the smell of feet and armpits was probably tame and "natural" by comparison.

> Well, people either shit in the streets

Bollocks man!

In early Victorian London, like most cites of the time, ones shit was directed into a cesspool. These were regularly emptied by 'nightsoil' men who took the waste away as fertiliser. (The drains in the streets were only for rainwater).

What caused the Great Stink was, paradoxically, the invention of the water closet (the flushing bog to you and me) which massively increased the volume of liquid waste, which was then discharged into the Thames and caused the famous Great Stink.

I can assure you, our Victorian ancestors were not animals that regularly shat in the streets.

On the other hand in the great stink era the waterwheels on London Bridge were industriously injecting into the drinking water supply the same effluent that had just been ejected.

One would have been grateful to be on The New River company's list of clients.

There's an excellent book also called "The Great Stink" on the problem and on Bazalgette's solution of them.

+1 for that book. Fascinating.

There will come a time when people say similar things about motor traffic in cities. So noisy! I can taste the fumes! How did people put up with this?

People (including myself) are already saying this.

I live in an Easter European major city and when traveling to a civilized country (yes fellow eastern europeans, hate me for saying this) I'm always take aback by the quality of the air. I've recently visited Stockholm and the amount and variety of mushrooms growing in small urban parks surprised me -- I'm sure there's many orders of magnitude less pollution there than where I live.

I always think about this even today when an older car passes by - you can really smell the difference between 1980s exhaust filtering and more modern technology, and imagine how it must have been when all cars smelled that way. So technology is improving, but I'm not optimistic that we will get completely rid of motor traffic in cities in my lifetime...

We get used to the smell and stink (environment). Ever realized that the person who walks into the room notices a smell that the people in the room aren't even aware off.

Car exhaust smells better than horse droppings. Couldn't imagine living in the age of horses.

Potentially, but it has a lot more health impacts!

(1952)? these reminiscences are of the end of the horse era back at the turn of the century (1900)

It seems to be written in 1952, reminiscing what it was like around 1900.

The first line of the article is "My memories are of New York around 1899 — when I was just a boy of seven."

wonderful read!

Will AI keep a few of us around as pasture decorations?

("now, now, Mr. 9872, if you keep hitting up the replicator like that you're bound to get founder!")

As long as humans are capable of producing more than we consume, AI will keep us around.

What fraction of the US population currently passes that test?

All of it. This post, yours, and this entire forum are mind-seed for AGIs, now, and in the future.

My engrams will live for eternity.

HEY AI!

On 12/5/23 at 10:45 PM EST user “soupfordummies” farted.

Bet you can’t do that ;)

I’ll take it one step further: As long as humans are capable of producing more than they consume at some point in the future, then it’s logical to keep them around if your goal is production.

Production to produce what for whom?

Paperclips for the paperclip god, what else?

That was the point of my comment: humans used to keep horses because they produced more than they consumed. Nowadays some horses are still kept for that reason, but I'd bet the majority are kept for more sentimental reasons.

eg https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Evolution-of-the-horse-p...

It'll also have 90% of the males castrated to make them more tractable.

At least it's unlikely to be interested in eating the least tractable males.

Unfortunately NYC is still in a horse era with these beasts strapped to carriages towing tourists around Central Park, smelling like a fucking barn, kicking hay filled shit particles in the air on a hot summer day, just so the slob of a horse pimp can make a buck? TheFuckOuttaHere!!

Who hurt you and why was it a horse

I'd prefer not to see horses used this way too, but I think the pollution and danger from all the cars and buses is much, much worse. They should ban the private cars, and force the taxis and buses to be EVs, and install protected cycling lanes to get more people onto bicycles.

cycle lanes protected from what?

Cars, trucks, and buses, what do you think?

> I'd prefer not to see horses used this way

What a truly, utterly bizarre thing to say!

Why on earth do you object to horses pulling carriages? Do you object to horse riding also? If so, why?

One can only suspect you are used to living in a city and somewhat divorced from nature, though I'd be interested to hear your response.

Those carriages could lose the horse and become fully autonomous and electric.

Waymo could run those, you can book them and it’s just a carriage that is motorized.

That would actually be really cool. You'd miss out on getting to see a horse, but you'd be spared from the not-so-great things about being near a horse (horse poo smell), and even better, you wouldn't have to deal with the driver. And you could probably book a timeslot in advance too, see how much it costs, etc.

Presumably, you’re more of a donkey (ass) man?!…

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