As a proud son of Brownsville and a lifelong New Yorker, I have watched this city reinvent itself many times over my 72 years, and I have spent my life fighting for working people and communities too often left behind. If those years have taught me anything, it is that New York is at its best when it finds the courage to let go of what no longer serves it.
The fight over horse-drawn carriages is one of those moments. It sits where two currents meet: a long-overdue reckoning with a relic we should have moved past years ago, and the verdict New Yorkers have been delivering at the ballot box against the small, grievance-driven politics of the past.
Carriages belong to a New York that no longer exists. Today’s Central Park, with its traffic, crowds and noise, is no place to ask a frightened animal to haul a thousand-pound carriage.
Eighteen-year-old Romanch Mahajan came here with his family to see the best of New York. He was killed when a spooked, driverless horse bolted through the park. His death was foreseeable and preventable. The Central Park Conservancy has counted nine violent horse-related incidents since May of last year. Drivers have been thrown to the pavement and pinned beneath overturned carriages. This is not a tradition worth honoring. It is a danger we have grown used to.
The carriages are not still standing because anyone has made a serious case that they are safe. They are standing because of a style of politics New Yorkers have rejected. Voters are tired of leaders who govern by grievance and treat every disagreement as a personal war.
You would not know it from the conduct of Transport Workers Union President John Samuelsen. He could have sat down with the City Council to negotiate a fair transition for his own members. Instead, he has spent months waging a personal campaign in the press against Speaker Julie Menin.
He has aimed the same combative style at Gov. Hochul, former Transit President Sarah Feinberg and former MTA Inspector General Carolyn Pokorny. It is a pattern, and it is hard not to notice who so often ends up on the receiving end: women in positions of leadership.
That is not advocacy. It is an old and ugly kind of politics, precisely the kind New Yorkers just voted to leave behind.
I have fought for workers my entire life, and I know what real solidarity looks like. It does not look like this. Standing up for carriage drivers cannot mean chaining their futures to a dying trade that risks lives every time a horse panics in traffic. The mayor and the Council are ready to help with retraining and real jobs that carry a living wage and benefits. That is what Romanch’s Law, named for the young man this city lost, is built to deliver.
A union president serving his members would be at that table, not carrying out a feud in the headlines aimed at whichever woman in public life has most recently drawn his ire. Philadelphia, Chicago, San Antonio, Paris and London have already moved on from carriages. New York can too. Our leaders should retire a relic that endangers people and animals alike, and retire, once and for all, the small and nasty politics used to defend it.
We can welcome the world to New York without tragedy. We can honor workers without trapping them. And we can prove once again that this city meets change not with grievance, but with common sense and compassion.
Sharpton is founder and president of the National Action Network.