The horse trough was the drinking fountain of the street before the street belonged to cars. Granite and iron. Filled with water by the city and emptied by the horses and the dogs and on hot days by the children. The horse trough sat at the curb and the horses drank from it after pulling a cart or a wagon or a carriage through streets that were not designed for anything heavier than a man on foot. The horse trough was the gas station of the nineteenth century.

There were thirty thousand horses in Manhattan in 1900. Thirty thousand horses meant thirty thousand mouths and every mouth needed water and the troughs were on every other block. The horses stood at the trough and drank and the driver waited and the city waited because when a horse drinks you wait. You do not rush a horse. The horse trough taught the city patience and the city failed the lesson.

The troughs are still there. Some of them. You walk past them and you do not see them because they are empty and they are low and they look like stone benches that nobody sits on. There is one on University Place. There is one on Greenwich Avenue. They are filled with dirt now. Some have flowers. The horse trough became a planter. The planter does not know it used to be a fountain. The flowers do not know they are growing where horses drank.

The ASPCA put troughs in Central Park. Henry Bergh himself in 1866 because the horses were collapsing on the streets and the drivers were beating them and Bergh said the horse deserves water. The horse trough was the first act of public mercy in New York. Before the city built shelters for people it built fountains for horses. The horse came first. The horse earned its water by pulling the city into the twentieth century.

The last horse trough that worked as a horse trough was probably in the nineteen-twenties. The car replaced the horse and the gas station replaced the trough and the granite sat there empty and nobody filled it because there was nothing to fill it for. The horse trough is a ghost. It marks the spot where the city used to stop and the horse used to drink and the driver used to wait and the waiting was not wasted time. The waiting was the city being an animal. The car does not drink. The car does not wait. The car does not know the trough is there. The horse knew.

See also: Cobbler, Pushcart Market