The ice wagon was a horse and a box and three hundred pounds of frozen water. The horse knew the route. The driver knew the floors. The ice came from the Hudson River in winter and they stored it in sawdust in warehouses and in July they delivered it to your apartment in blocks that were already melting. The ice wagon was the refrigerator before the refrigerator. The ice wagon was a delivery service that ran on hay and iron tongs.

The ice man carried the block on his shoulder with tongs that bit into the ice like teeth. He carried it up the stairs and he put it in your ice box and the ice box was a wooden cabinet with a zinc lining and a drip pan and the ice sat on top and the cold fell down and the food sat below and stayed cold until the ice melted. The ice man came twice a week. Monday and Thursday. If the ice melted before Thursday the milk went sour and the meat went bad and you ate what you had because the ice man did not come on Wednesdays.

The kids followed the ice wagon the way kids follow the ice cream truck now. When the driver chipped a block with his pick the chips fell to the street and the kids grabbed them and sucked on them and the chips tasted like sawdust and river and summer. The ice chip was the popsicle before the popsicle. Free. Cold. Gone in thirty seconds. The best things in the city were always free and temporary.

My grandmother had an ice box on Rivington Street until 1955. She did not trust the refrigerator. She said the ice box keeps food cold because you can see the ice and you know how much cold you have left. The refrigerator hides the cold. You open the door and the cold is there but you do not know why or how much is left. She said the ice box was honest. The refrigerator was a magician. She did not trust magicians.

The last ice wagon in New York ran in the nineteen-fifties. The horse went to a stable and the stable became a parking garage and the parking garage became a condo. The ice business became the refrigerator business and the refrigerator business became the smart refrigerator business and the smart refrigerator tells you when you are out of milk. The ice man knew you were out of milk because he saw the empty bottle on the landing. The ice man did not need wifi. The ice man needed a horse and a pair of tongs and the memory of which floor you lived on.

See also: Horse Trough, Milk Box