If Mayor de Blasio insists on destroying a world-renowned tourist attraction that provides livelihoods for a few hundred workers, the least he can do is act openly and through the law.
That doesn’t appear to have been the case Thursday, when an NYPD officer told horse-and-carriage drivers at Central Park they couldn’t operate because of weather conditions — namely, icy roads. About 30 horses were sent back to the stables.
What makes the order so fishy is that the only living creatures in New York that were affected by this danger were . . . horses. In other words, it didn’t apply to children who made their way to schools, apartment dwellers who walked their dogs, tourists bused to their destinations and so forth.
One driver, Christina Hansen, says she saw virtually no ice or snow anywhere on the roads. Later, the order itself was rescinded, and the horses were led back out.
Which makes us wonder: Is this what the mayor meant when he vowed to “aggressively move to make horse carriages no longer a part of the landscape”?
A bill to do just that is percolating in the City Council. If passed into law, it would be tragic. But it would at least be lawful.
That seems to be more than could be said of Thursday’s police action. Hansen says one cop said he assumed the order to shut her down was political. Perhaps it is part of an effort to harass drivers into quitting.
Mayoral spokesman Phil Walzak says such an accusation is “untrue and baseless.” We don’t know who’s right. What we do know is that there is an active, well-financed ideological campaign against the carriage drivers, based on portraying them, against the evidence, as animal abusers.
In short, it strikes us that the real abuse here is not of horses. It’s of working folks making an honest living.