RUDIMENTS, pt 980
('goodbye old paint,' part one)
Hard to believe that when
I got to NYC there were
still horses, but there were.
It was just about the era of
wind-down for all that, but
there were enough cart-guys
and old-time vendors, of
food and snacks that they
were still around. They
needed care and feeding,
wipe-downs, rest, and
quarters to stay in. There
were still some guys around
to shoe and care for their
feet too (taking a beating
on those nasty streets). I'd
get some daywork here and
there, around those parts,
west 17th and 18th mostly.
Sweeping. Shoveling, and
unhitching, from the carts.
Mostly it was stuff you
seldom heard about any
longer; the world having
passed on all that. Nobody
cared any longer about it.
The pretzel carts, chestnut
carts, they all needed attention
too. Little charcoal burners
and the like. The pretzels got
re-used for sale-display, until
they were gone. Could be 2
days, could be 4. The older
they got, just closer to the
heat they went. The idea
was that the 'strollers' who
bought them, enticed by all
the scent and scenery and
the atmospherics conjured up,
and the quaintness of the scene,
didn't really much care what
they tasted like. Offers of
mustard always went too.
Back then the whole wrap-up
was like 35 cents. I never
much cared, I just got a real
hoot out of the horses and
wagons as they came and
went along their routes. The
guys were crazy! Back then
they were still white and
American - lots of old and
grizzled guys, and then, later,
Scotch and Irish got around too.
Normally they had a lock on
the horse and carriage rides,
not the food ones. That was
a whole other racket - around
Central Park, through the paths,
pointing out the sites and buildings.
Everything had a story, and I never
heard so much made-up crap.
The people from Iowa and
Arizona, they ate all that up;
forget the pretzels. Now a lot of
that is double-decker, open buses,
with some microphoned geek
telling stories of his or her own.
They get stuck in traffic, up above
the crowd walking by, and you
can often hear a lot of the crap
that's spewed. All kinds of stories.
-
Anyhow, back in the time I'm
talking about it was quiet and it
was horses. I saw, alter, too, a
few years on, in Pennsylvania,
how a lot of that was like farmer
stuff too, and I hadn't a clue :
oats and horses, tending those
big bags of feed, watering, taking
away the horseshit. Cows were
much the same, except of cows
got filthy no one much cared.
Field cows have a tendency
to lie down in their own messes,
and often enough you'd see farm
cows coming in from pasture,
for milking, with dried up patches
of their own cow-plops on them.
By contrast, for those NYC horses,
part of the gimmick was to keep
them looking nice, shiny even,
so as to delight those same strollers
from Iowa and Arizona and Jersey
who would just buy stuff because
they thought it was all part of
the experience. In its own way
it was all a dirty racket, but I
soon found that in New York
most everything was. Even the
stocks and bonds guys, downtown,
they were 'shysters.' You're not
supposed to say stuff like that
anymore, but that's only because
we live in a dishonest age and
no one can belly up any longer
to the truth. The bad truth is I
was brought up with my mother
using, truthfully using, the word
Shyster often, and I make no
excuses for it. It mostly meant
when Hy Goldberg or Sammy
Slime would come around to
Inman Avenue trying to sell,
or misrepresent his sale of, storm
windows, installment plan savings
clubs, or book clubs, or meat and
freezer plans for each household.
We got lots of that, at first, when
the houses were new. There were
guys twice a week peddling some
crap door to door, and she most
often just called them shysters.
Satisfied me, and I apologize
for nothing.
-
Here's some cool horse stuff:
Between the end of the nineteenth
century and the end of the 1920's,
to just choose a random era, therw
were like 130,000 horses in
Manhattan alone, and tens of
thousands or in Brooklyn and
Queens. Horses hailed most of
the city traffic and fright, all
of it, probably. (Some study
had it that 8,000 horse-drawn
vehicles passed the corner of
Broadway and Pine on a typical
day (lower Manhattan, that is).
'The animals supported a vast
network of trades - including
blacksmith shops, wheelwrights,
and saddle makers. With the
introduction of the 'horsecar' in
the 1830's, horses had even
helped expand the footprint
of the city. Essentially a carriage
on wheels, the horsepower might
not seem like much but the minimal
friction of steel on steel enabled
a fourfold increase in a horse's
pulling power. This allowed
operators to carry a larger
payload per animal and thus
charge lower fares. With the
increased ridership, companies
expanded their systems. Because
the lines required a costly up-front
investment in track, routes were
'sticky' and not easily changed.To
real estate developers, this was a
bankable asset. Wherever the
horsecar lines went, houses
followed, driving residential
development outward from the
city center along corridor served
by the new mode of transit.'
-
I'd never before given much thought
to any of that - who would, really,
having come from a slick-suburbia
wherein George Jetson and all his
conveniences certainly had a rocket
ship precedence over horse manure
and tedious animal-care. A very
curious thing about my stepping
into NYC was that, in a way, I'd
also stepped back in time. Not just
horses, but the entire scene was a
relatively very dated atmosphere.
Postcard like, sometimes, and at
other times classically bleak, like
Dickens.
-
The aromas were often thick too.
The olefactory aspect was like
being, I'd say, in an 'Ole factory.'
The urban horse, back to that,
produced an avalanche of waste
You think cars and pollution were
bad? The average horse produced
50 pounds of manure, per animal,
every day (7 tons a year). One horse!
New York's horses, in those same
years before 1925, produced 1.8
billion pounds of horseshit annually.
(the reference here is 20 battleships.
(?), in weight. As fertilizer local
farmers carted some of it off. But
it was heavy, consisting mostly
of water, and difficult to move
in quantity. As farms were forced
farther and farther out because of
the spread of the city it came to a
point when stables had real problems
giving the stuff away. it clogged
and 'littered' the streets, which
were a mess anyway. Pigs often
roamed freely, as garbage scavengers.
They brought another problem, of
stench and waste too. By the turn
of 1900, NYC faced a real problem;
plus the growing masses (of people)
needed massive amounts of unsoiled
water. Thus the Croton Reservoir and
other systems of water distribution
took on serious municipal roles.
Horse manure was a steady, and
a constant, aspect of city life:
It poled up in yards, empty street
lots, and and corners. Dead horses
sometimes remained where they'd
fallen, for days. Blocks were bathed
in barnyard stench, attracting rats
and biblical clouds of flies. As
mentioned, horses sicked and died,
in large numbers each year - most
especially in years of epidemics
and deadly contagions, like the 1872
Great Epizootic, an outbreak of
equine influenza that ground all
transportation to a halt, and
sickened and killed horses all
through the northeastern states.
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(Part Two follows)...
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