I consider myself – perhaps foolishly –  to be  savvy, but the horse carriage story has surprised me from the beginning. It is about much more than horses, it is a mirror of our world, an onion that peels and peels. It is about  human arrogance and ignorance,  the imperfect nature of politics, the destructive power of new media. It is also the story of the new and growing danger animals face,  not just from their abusers but from the people who profess to love them. The horses are caught in the great human disconnection from the animal world, in a sense they are already gone from our world, even before they can be banished by the legions of the righteous marching in their name.

So here I was, shocked once again on my first carriage ride to learn that the carriage horses very clearly belong in Central Park, much more than the unknowing creatures who walk on two feet. They are not, as we are told again and again,   intruding into the Central Park of cars, trucks and buses. They were always here, the park was built for them, they are so natural and at home in it, they fit so naturally into it. The intruders are us foolish human beings and our greed and destructive creations, we are the ones  ravaging and invading the the animal’s world, one could make such a better case for banning us than them.

My ride was an awakening thing, a spiritual thing, a pure connection to the natural world and to the world of these horses, in some ways the most important animals in human history. Riding in my carriage horse,  I came to a new understanding of history and the intention of the visionary minds who built Central Park. They were the kinds of idealistic and creative minds that seem to have vanished from our public life today.

It is so easy to forget about  the ride In Central Park in all the swirl of arguments, accusations, charges and counter-charges, political maneuvering and anguish, we forget that it is really all about “The Ride.” Few people in cities want to do the things tourists do, it always seems so superficial. In a sense, this is why the horses are in so much trouble – only tourists see them and get to know them. Nobody who knows horses think work is cruel for them, nobody who has ever seen a stable believes they are treated inhumanely. But nobody in New York does know them, they are for the tourists. I have been seeing the horses lined up outside of Central Park for most of my life, walking by them, avoiding them. But I guess I never really saw them before.

The ride, the point of the carriage horse experience, has been  lost in all of the modern-day media clutter and website shrapnel. The carriage horses have been in Central Park from the moment it was opened in 1853, and people have been riding in carriages pulled by them just as long.

I have been writing about them for weeks (I’m not sure the New York Post and I have ever been so much on the same page before), but I have never ridden in a carriage until last week. Why?, I wondered, since I seem to care deeply about their fate.

I think it’s a cultural thing, to be honest, a class thing, a snob thing. I wonder why people who profess to love animals so much are so eager to ban these animals from their city, and my writer’s nose picks up a whiff of elitism in this bitter argument, because it’s in me too, or was. I always saw the carriage horses as a tourist thing, a bit of a tacky thing, something people from Kansas do, and Japanese tourists with their big video cams do, not things authors and city-wise people do. The horses and the carriages and stables are not owned by Manhattan swells, by the trendy and media savvy, they are owned by the old working-class families of New York, the men and women who follow the work of their fathers and grandfathers, they might be firemen, police officers, construction workers. They don’t know how to talk the talk, they have none of the fancy sheen that covers the trend-sitters in Manhattan in Brooklyn, they look like working people in their jeans and overalls, they don’t eat Asian Fusion, they don’t know how to put up nasty websites to make their case, their are bewildered by accusations that are unproven and can never be answered.

They seem to me people who play by the rules, they seem bewildered when the rules are suddenly changed or ignored, as is happening to them now. They are not cool, they don’t have reporters over to dinner parties, or quite grasp how politics and media converge these days, they don’t Tweet their case, they don’t shout or demonstrate, at least not yet. Riding a carriage horse was, for me, just like hopping on one of those loud and garish double – decker buses that tell people what the Hudson River is and when the Statue of Liberty was built. I realized a few weeks ago that I could not write authentically about these horses if I did not meet some of the people who own and ride them, go and see them in their now notorious stables (these stables are to horses what well-run day care centers are to kids, they are about as controversial as a Caesar Salad.)

I was happy to take this ride, excited about it, like a little kid perhaps. Being near a big horse does that to people whose hearts are still beating. A carriage ride is not an argument or controversy, it is a personal experience, between the rider, the driver and the horse – and the park, this beautiful park unlike any other. People have been riding on or behind horses for thousands of years, it is a part of all of us, I suspect.  I loved the purity and simplicity of the ride.  I have never seen New York or the power and imagination of man so closely entwined before, side by side, one providing the backdrop for another. There is no perspective of the city quite like the one from the back of a carriage  horse. I will not leave it for the tourists again.

So last week, I met my friend and carriage driver Christina Hansen at the West Side Livery Stables and rode to Central Park on a carriage pulled by King.  Maria and I took a ride for $90 dollars. I was grateful to have my stereotypes busted wide open, to get pulled off my high  horse,  pardon the fun.

The ride was  different than I expected, just as everything about this “controversy” is different than I expected. I had been in the park a hundred times, but never seen it from that gentle height, or passed through it so slowly. I never understood that the horses were not intruding on the cars and trucks, the park was built for them. Riding along slowly in the open air, the magnificent skyscrapers of New York were our backdrops, our silent guides, they accompanied us almost every step of the way. I had never seen them this way, at this speed, from this vantage point. They seemed like a wonder of the world, especially set against the rocks and terraced landscapes and trees and statuary of the park. New York seemed grand and quiet, the graceful buildings rising up into the mist, I felt as if I were on a sheep suddenly coming into  beautiful harbor.

I had certainly never come close to grasping the beauty, planning and brilliance of the park itself. In a way you can’t really get a sense of it walking through the tunnels and down the paths. The park is a shining jewel of a public works project, a brilliant inspiration with its curves, landscapes, trees and bushes, horse fountains and carriage turn-a-rounds. It was good to hear Christina describe it so lovingly and well. In our time, there are no great works being built, hardly any animals. On a carriage ride, I was reconnected to both.

Even in winter, the ground covered with snow, I could almost smell the gardens, I cold feel the arches of the big trees, cathedral like and so beautiful. What a curious world, I thought, in which a city would not fight to the death for these horses to be forever pulling these carriages on the paths and and bridges built just for them. How arrogant to tell them we belong here and they don’t Riding in the carriage I was, for the first time, connected to the city’s past, to the horses great role in the building and planning of the park.

I could see from the first that the politicians of New York and the people who call themselves animal rights activists know nothing about horses, that is evident to every horse and animal lover in the country, so many of whom are following this painful story outside the peculiar bubble of New York itself. I did not imagine that the politicians in New York also know little of this great, the place where  the horses work. The city has forgotten the ride, the point of all this, the reason the horses are here. It is just to make money, they will say, as if the ride itself has no meaning or value. How striking that a movement that purports to believe in animal rights would take away the most fundamental right of these horses, to be in this place built for them.

The ride does have value, I was glad to pay for it. The sound of the horses clopping along was mesmerizing – I nearly retched at the thought of seeing this park in an eco-friendly electric vintage car, the clip-clop replaced by the whine of an electric battery, the car intruding on the historic horse paths. Who, I wonder, will come to ride in them?

This, I thought, is a city where romance is dying, where magic is being banished, where imagination shrinks and individuality is pushed aside. I was transfixed by the roads and curves, by Belvedere Castle, by the brown towers of Central Park West, by the horse fountains and turn-arounds, by the gray towers of Central Park East,  the looming majesty connected so closely to the natural world, to the animal world, to the patter of the driver, the snorting of the horse, who paused every now and think to drink from one of the beautiful horse fountains the park planners thought to build.

I had a sense that I had come across the point of the park, lost in all of the politicking. In “Central Park, An American Masterpiece,” by Sara Cedar Miller, a beautiful book published by the Central Park Conservancy, Miller makes clear that Frederick Law Olmstead, the park’s legendary designer, had horses very much in mind when he designed the park.  “The expense of owning a pleasure vehicle or a horse for recreational riding also tended by default to separate park visitors into different socio-economic groups, as the well-to-do were in carriages or on horseback and the poorer working classes were on foot,” she writes.

The design of the park, writes Miller, was meant to echo the social situation on the city’s crowded streets. The middle and working classes of the city were fascinated by the wealthy, and Frederick Law Olmstead designed the park’s bridges and walkways so that the different classes and cultures in the city could see one another, mix with one another while on their separate but very close paths.

Olmstead had this idea that the rich and the poor, the carriage horses and the walkers, would all benefit from mingling with one another on the park paths. “…we propose to run footpaths, close to the carriage roads,” he wrote,”…it is hardly thought that any plan would be popular in New York that did not allow of a continuous promenade along the drives, so that pedestrians may have ample opportunities to look at the equipages and their inmates.”

How shocked Olmstead would be to learn that in New York in 2014, much of the city government is mobilizing to make sure that mechanical conveyances and pedestrians never mingle with horse-drawn carriages or even ever get to see them again in the park that was designed with them in mind. In Olmstead’s time, the idea that work for horses is cruel would have been beyond his imagination, there was nothing controversial about making sure the horses had paths, bridges, fountains and turn-arounds in the park he was designing. I imagine Olmstead would have banned the taxis and cars, not the horses.

The idea of the park was to provide common ground, an inclusive space for the interaction of all of the elements living in New York, those on foot, those in carriages, the rich and the poor, the Bluebloods and the immigrants. This, believed Olmstead, was the pathway to the American Dream.

This idea along was worth brooding over on my carriage ride, as Christina turned around every now and then to point out a statue, a building, a historical footnote. King seemed to know he belonged in the park, he trotted amiably along, neighing to passing horses, pausing at his drinking fountains, he seemed to need little guidance on the paths. He trotted at his own pace on rubber-rimmed wheels on flat roads, he was not working too hard.

On the way, people looked at us, photographed us, waved at us, and I thought of those poor children of the future, sticking their heads out of their eco-friendly electric cars, never imagining the park they were riding through was built for bit and beautiful animals they would never see there again.