New York at the turn of the 20th Century was a city powered by horses, and a city where horses were an integral part of the urban fabric. In 1900, New York was home to 131,000 horses -- 486 per square mile. However, while equines were a facet of life for the city’s residents, the average New Yorker was not a horseman. Privately owned horses were a technology that was often out of reach for the city’s working class. The average cost of a single horse in New York State at the turn of the 20th Century was roughly 12 percent of the yearly income of a construction laborer in New York City. The majority of the city’s horses were employed to haul cargo and deliver goods.

For decades, New Yorkers had been able to hire hacks -- the precursors to modern taxi cabs -- to travel around the city. The fares for hacks, however, were too high to make them a reliable source of daily transportation for the working man. New York City hack fares in 1853 started at 75 cents and topped out at five dollars, depending on the distance travelled, the number of passengers, and the length of time the driver was engaged. Poorer New Yorkers thus needed to rely on horse-powered mass transit.

The first ubiquitous form of horse-drawn mass transit was the omnibus. The omnibus was descended from the intercity stagecoaches that criss-crossed the young Republic, and many intracity omnibuses in antebellum America were run by the same companies that operated stagecoach routes. New York’s first omnibus line debuted in 1827, and by 1833 the city had licensed 80 vehicles. Like stagecoaches, omnibuses operated on fixed routes, but to adapt to the needs of urban transportation, omnibuses made stops whenever a potential passenger managed to flag a driver down. The omnibus was also far cheaper than an intercity stagecoach. The first fares in New York cost 12 cents. Early fares may have been significantly cheaper than stagecoach fares, but they were still too expensive to make the omnibus the "daily driver" for many unskilled workers. Despite the lack of broad financial accessibility, the omnibus system was quite successful. By 1853, New York had licensed 683 omnibuses, and the different omnibus companies all together averaged 13,420 trips daily.

The omnibus reached the height of its popularity only to be displaced by another form of horse-powered intracity mass transit: the streetcar. The first streetcar in New York City began operations in 1832. However, streetcars would not proliferate until the middle of the 19th Century as grooved tracks set into the street replaced the older, disruptive style of track that sat directly on top of the pavement. The low-friction rails allowed streetcars to travel at twice the speed of omnibuses: a whopping six to eight miles per hour. As they grew and displaced omnibuses, even small streetcar companies needed to employ hundreds of horses to meet the demand of rapidly growing ridership. With fares as low as a nickel, streetcars put mass transit in reach of more New Yorkers than ever before. In 1859, New York’s Third Avenue Railroad employed 570 horses for 12 omnibuses, 71 streetcars, and 6 miles of track. By 1890, New York City -- excluding Brooklyn -- had 12,000 streetcar horses.

The New Yorker at the turn of the 20th Century, however, was living in an exciting time of modernization. The horse drawn streetcar was being replaced by the electric streetcar. By 1888, engineer Frank Sprague’s inventions and improvements had solved the problem of supplying electric traction to streetcars. The initial costs of electrification were high, but the operation of an electric streetcar was cheaper than the operation of a horse-powered streetcar.

The Panic of 1893 provided the perfect opportunity for streetcar infrastructure to be modernized. Small streetcar lines collapsed and were consolidated into larger companies. Large companies had both the resources and the need to electrify. Newly centralized transit networks required centralized power solutions, and horsepower is an inherently decentralized option. In 1890, only 10 to 30 percent of streetcar lines nationwide had been electrified, but by 1902, 97 percent of streetcar lines nationwide had been electrified. The economic crisis and the subsequent obsolescence of horse powered transit diminished the value of horses, but did not diminish their number. The market for older, lower quality horses had been crushed; the average value of a horse in America in 1897 was 31.51 dollars, less than half of its average value ten years prior. However, the horse was still the preferred source of draft by teamsters for hauling goods in the city. 300,000 horses were needed per year across America’s cities to keep urban life humming along, and by 1910 the urban horse in America had reached its zenith. 7.5 million horses were employed in cities nationwide.

As American cities matured and became more clearly delineated from rural areas, the urban horse came under pressure from social and technological progressives. The campaigners that had been working to prevent animal cruelty since the 1860s were joined by campaigners promoting urban sanitation, and the horse was one of the city’s biggest polluters. In 1900, horses in New York would generate up to 12 tons of manure per square mile per day. Not only did manure spread disease and attract nuisance animals, physical hygiene, in the minds of the 19th and early 20th Century progressive activist, was directly linked to social hygiene. A clean city was an orderly city. Technological progressives, those early adopters of the bicycle and automobile, were quick to push cars on the urban middle class, claiming that the automobile was more efficient, more sanitary, and much safer than horse-drawn transit. The rhetoric surrounding horses began to shift as the 20th Century began. Where the horse was once man’s faithful and tireless companion in the toils of work, he became a dangerous, dumb brute. And the teamsters who drove horses were seen as little better. The number of urban horses was cleaved in half between 1910 and 1920 as automobiles became the preferred form of transportation. And as the culture of American cities shifted to accommodate the idea of the personal car, the urban horse and the urban horseman faded rapidly from the forefront of urban life.

Sources

Greene, Ann Norton. Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America

McShane, Clay, and Joel A. Tarr. The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century

“Rates of Fare for Hackney Coaches and Carriages.” New York Times. July 26, 1865.

United States Bureau of Labor. July 1900 : Bulletin of the United States Bureau of Labor. No. 29, Volume V.

United States Department of the Interior. Agriculture Part I: Farms, Live Stock, and Animal Products

United States Department of Agriculture. Twenty-Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Animal Industry for the Year 1910