HISTORY

As carriage driver, Christina Hansen put it, in the 2018 film, The Last Horsemen Of New York,
“[Central Park] was designed for carriage driving, and the big day for carriage driving back in the 1800’s actually used to be on Wednesdays, Wednesday afternoons. That was when the Rockefeller’s, and the Astor’s, and the Carnegie’s, and the Vanderbilt’s, and pretty much anybody who was anybody in New York high society, would come out with their very best horses and carriages and have a carriage parade and they’d show off for each other and everybody else. Everybody else wanted to see the park the way the wealthy folks were getting to see it, the way that Olmsted had designed it. The working class people, people from out of town, people who couldn’t afford to have horses in the city, which has always been most people, they’d all go up to the public cab stands on 59th Street and hire a cab: ‘Don’t take me downtown to go shopping, just drive me around the park for a while’ –And that’s how our business got started. So, we’ve been giving carriage rides for hire to the public in Central Park since the day the park opened.”
 

In 1967, Maggie Cogan was the first woman to be hired as a carriage driver in New York City. Maggie chose the profession because in her words, she didn’t like to be indoors, she loved horses, she was interested in antiques, and everything just went together. She drove a carriage for five years, eventually purchasing her own antique carriage. A true animal person, old news reels capture her cat riding along in her carriage and she was later known to own many dogs.