Horse Car’s Last Days

In the days before the last of New York’s horse-drawn trolleys disappeared from the streets, a photographer snapped one on Broadway, near 17th Street, alongside the newfangled thing that had made it obsolete, a “modern electric car.”

Horse cars like this one, considered an “antiquated vehicle” in 1917, traveled on the Bleecker St. & Fulton Ferry Line for quite a while before the operators chose to abandon the franchise. Several notables rode it one final time, but even The Times seemed to endorse the move to a more gilded transportation age, considering the trolleys “dirty old cars, with their faithful horses and husky drivers.”

By the time this photo appeared in The Times Magazine a few months later, the rails were likely torn up and new jobs would have been found for the employees – “and the horses – ah! who knows what will becomes of those faithful beasts?”