At the top of the case, an illustration shows a very busy Central Park with dozens of people in horse-drawn carriages. At the bottom of the case, an illustration shows girls learning to ride horses; another shows a man and woman courting on horseback.

The opening and expansion of Central Park from 1859 to 1876 prompted major growth in the use of horses in Manhattan for leisure activities as well as power and transportation. The Park’s 843 acres of scenic landscape designed by Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux provided vastly more space for outdoor recreation than the city had previously afforded.

To build what became one of the world’s prime playgrounds and showplaces for wealthy urbanites to drive their carriages and ride their fancy horses while others strolled, picnicked, and played sports, the City displaced 1,600 poorer residents, including Irish pig farmers, German gardeners, and African American domestic workers, waiters, and laborers. This gargantuan undertaking of displacement and remaking the landscape would have been impossible without the hundreds of draft horses who labored with the workers to move the vast tonnage of dynamited boulders, felled trees, dirt, and gravel needed to reroute streams, eliminate swamps of stagnant water, sculpt vistas, and carve pathways.

Display of magazine pages depicting women riding horses.

“Ladies’ riding school,” Harper’s Bazaar (July 3, 1869) and Appleton’s Journal (Aug. 6, 1870)

Numerous stables and riding academies and clubs were built around the park to cater to the growing crowd of equestrian enthusiasts. Harper’s printed the illustration below entitled “Ladies’ Riding-School” in 1869 depicting the first generation of these post-Civil War lady riders entering the sport. Note the African American stable worker assisting the girl child who first learns to ride astride on the pony. The two young women to her right (the viewer’s left) show what would have been considered a progression to more refined and ladylike sidesaddle riding in step with a bowler-hatted white male instructor.

In the case:
Each object in the cases is marked with a corresponding number unless otherwise noted.

80. “The grand drive at Central Park” Art supplement to Appleton’s Journal (1869)
Marra Collection

81. “Ladies’ riding school,” Harper’s Bazaar (July 3, 1869)
Marra Collection

82. Appleton’s Journal (Aug. 6, 1870)
Marra Collection

Couples courted on horseback in the park, as this illustrator portrayed for the magazine cover. The two horses of this couple signal a certain lack of compatibility.