Click on the picture to see a larger version.
"Doing" New York. Photo by Arthur Hewitt.

These tourists have climbed aboard an early motorized tour bus. The driver's seat is front and centre behind the single headlight.

Source:
Outing magazine, vol. XLIX no. 2, November, 1906, p. 136.

Vance Thompson's Cab Drivers / 38

The New York Cab Driver and his Cab / 10

Cabbing, I repeat, is for the young man the beginning of wisdom. Its study might profitably replace Greek in every college curriculum.

Some day the cab business of New York will shake itself down into an orderly trade; the various drivers' unions will be welded into one; the many owners' associations will combine; the idle aldermen will pass proper ordinances; the mysterious marshall of the mayor will see that only proper men are licensed; the police will exercise effective supervision; the public, enlightened, will not ask how much.

("How much?" I asked.

"Ten dollars," said he – she was an ardent and desirable girl, golden-brown from tip to toe, like a meadow-lark.

"It was worth twenty," said I.)

In the meantime, the poor, dislocated trade goes darkly through piracy and disfavor. He who comes oversea to us is beaten upon by the worst of it. You know the rusty hacks with the rusty horses and the rusty darkey that lie in wait at the docks. Even so, I have been informed by naturalists, the alligatorMississippiensis, more commonly called thecrocodilus Lucius, lies basking on the muddy shore, waiting, too, for the unwary. If I were writing a five-act tragedy, "The Cab," I would put in just here very blood-curdling things. Many and many a young Englishman, rosy and fatted and innocent, has been seen for the last time as a rusty darkey bundled him into a rusty cab at the dock. He never arrived at any destination. In faraway English homes they waited, heart-sick and hope-sick, for news of him. No word ever came. He was never heard of, never seen. There was no trace – not so much as anh dropped from the hack-window as a signal of distress. He took a hack at the docks – and was not.