ABC News is reporting today that an agreement has been reached in New York City to insure the continuation of the horse-drawn carriage tradition.
The article reports:
“We are pleased to have reached an agreement in concept on the future of New York’s horse carriage industry,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a joint statement with City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito and the Teamsters union, which represents the carriage drivers.
The horses currently live in private stables on Manhattan’s West Side, and animal rights advocates have been fighting to get the carriages banned entirely, calling it inhumane to keep horses in loud, car-clogged Manhattan. The Democratic mayor also pledged when he was sworn in two years ago to end the popular carriage rides through the park. But that was met with public and political opposition.
City officials Sunday said the deal would eventually reduce the number of licensed horses from about 180 to 95 when a permanent home is built for them in Central Park by Oct. 1, 2018. The agreement also limits the operation of horse-drawn carriages, with the exception of travel to and from their existing stables to Central Park beginning June 1.
I am thrilled that the horse-drawn carriages will still travel Central Park. But there is a major part of this story that the media isn’t telling.
From The American Spectator via rightwinggranny in January 2014:
The bad guy in this drama, according to the carriage drivers, is Steve Nislick, chief executive officer of a New Jersey-based real-estate development company, Edison Properties. The company “employs legions of lobbyists to influence city decisions on real estate and zoning in its favor,” journalist Michael Gross reported in 2009, pointing out that two of Edison’s businesses “have multiple locations in the same Far West Midtown neighborhood as the stables where the Central Park horses are housed.” An anti-carriage pamphlet Nislick circulated in 2008 made this interesting observation: “Currently, the stables consist of 64,000 square feet of valuable real estate on lots that could accomodate up to 150,000 square feet of development. These lots could be sold for new development.”
Notice that in this agreement the existing stables will no longer house the horses. Any bets on how long it will be before Edison Properties buys the existing stables, tears them down, and puts up a high-rise. It never really was about the horses, but somehow ABC News didn’t mention that.