Manhattan’s carriage horses aren’t the only ones whose livelihood is under threat. When the ritzy Claremont Riding Academy on West 89th Street closed down in 2007, many thought that it was the last riding school on the island. Not true. The New York Riding Academy was founded by Dr George Blair in 1988, and offers free lessons to local kids every summer in Randall’s Park in Harlem. Former governor Mario Cuomo gave Blair permission to use a scrap of wasteland he’d cleared of debris, and, five years and several hundred thousand dollars of his own money later, Blair had the stable up and running. For thirty years, the kids of Harlem have been learning to ride in the park. But.
all that changed this summer when the Parks Department blocked off access to a road that the couple used to bring supplies to the stables, stopped mowing their lawn, and took about 100 feet of the grazing land, Blair said.
The Parks Department asked for permission to use a bit of their land to install a container to store rental bikes, said his wife, Ann Blair, 74.
“When they asked for a small piece of land, of course without hesitation we said, ‘Sure it’s fine,’” she said. “But then we saw a large area that we cleaned up for the horses be gone and taken with the blink of an eye.”
Dr. Blair was furious that the Parks Department would take over land used to provide free services to children in order to store bike rentals that local children can’t afford and the park profits from, he said.
More about the subsequent negotiations can be found here at DNA Info, but it doesn’t look good.
Ebony Horse Club in Brixton, London and Stepney Bank in Newcastle are two community riding programmes that have found support and continue to make a difference to local kids, although it looks like the project working with Dublin “pony kids” has evaporated (if it hasn’t, I’d love to find out more). The Emilie Faurie Foundation provides riding lessons at schools across the country. Wormwood Scrubs Pony Centre is (among other things) a Riding for the Disabled facility of long standing. Horses in the Hood works with youth in South Central LA. However, lately it’s seemed that many of the campaigns to ostensibly improve the welfare of urban horses seem to involve working against their owners rather than with them.
Most of the establishments targeted recently by campaigners and city authorities happen to be those run by people who are both poor and, often, not white: some Baltimore “street arabbers” lost horses earlier this year, Fletcher Street Riding Club in Philadelphia was bulldozed, and the Cedar Lanes Stables of the Federation of Black Cowboys was shut down. The Westway stables in London are underthreat of being replaced with a skate park.
Stables are not viewed as contributions to communities, perhaps because horses are still seen as the domain of the rich and the spoiled. And my goodness, the space they take up that could be converted into nice luxury apartments… AHEM.
To me there also seems to be a bit of a disconnect between the generosity of horselovers to rescues or therapy programmes, and the cold shoulder shown to potentially life-changing urban projects for kids. We horse-crazy people know just what gifts we were lucky enough to experience in our own horsey childhoods, and yet beyond charity appeals for great organisations like Riding for the Disabled, I don’t see much fundraising to help bring that joy to children who don’t have much else.
Go to any equestrian chat forum and you’ll see one familiar refrain come up among the battles over barefoot vs. shod and feeding regimens: other people don’t understand equestrianism. Why aren’t there more horse sports on the TV like there used to be? Why don’t cyclists and motorists slow down for horses? Are people really complaining about horse manure on roads? Why do people dismiss me as a posh idiot when I say I own horses? Why don’t people understand how important the issue of horse slaughter is, or what’s happening to mustangs? Why don’t they know how great equine-assisted therapy is?
And yet in cities everywhere there are projects that have the potential not just to improve the lives of locals, but to educate the world in general about what horses are, and what they can contribute. Stables that could give homes to rescued horses (look at Zig Zag, rescued by Redwings and now at Ebony Horse Club). That provide a place of comforting routine and daily escape for children in trouble. That could help bring fresh, healthy food to “food deserts“. That could be the heart of communities.
And all of these projects need our support.
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