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A group of drivers ham it up for the camera. But in cities large and small arriving train passengers had to run a gauntlet of aggressive touts and drivers who tried to herd them onto rival cabs and buses. Many of these characters were paid by local hotels eager to capture potential guests.
Source:
At the railway station 'tis: "Have a hansom – keb, keb, keb?". Photo by Arthur Hewitt.
Outing magazine, vol. XLIX no. 2, November, 1906, p. 137.
Vance Thompson's Cab Drivers / 39
The New York Cab Driver and his Cab / 11
Only the native New Yorker (and preferably one with the stripes of the B wery on him) should adventure his fortunes in one of the old arks that crawl about the docks or gather, when night is deep, in Chatham Square. If there be wicked old men in New York, they sit upon the boxes of these rumbling carriages. He is a strenuous criminal, too, who takes his seat by the driver as the hack starts off, toward what defiled paradise I know not. All will not be well with the countryman who sits, full of bucolic pride and wickedness, within; faster than he knows he is bearing down upon a zone of trouble. Some day they will drive away – rusty coachman and creaking hack – into half-forgotten local history. In the meantime they should be left to the kind of gentleman who sings by night and derives a subtle pleasure from riding with one leg through the window frame. It doesn't matter what happens to him anyway. But you and I, being self-respecting cabbers – proud of our clean bodies and our clean minds – will have none of this night-faring. Not even for the sake of acquiring "local color" will we go down into that nocturnal world where the night-hawk circles for his prey. Arcadian airs are blowing in the Park; the sunlight falls prettily on pretty women and the lordly-shining coats of horses, bay and brown; let us go drink tea at the Casino – yonder at one of the white tables; and as twilight comes we shall go swaying home in a hansom down the gray reaches of the avenue, where only a few lights flicker here and there. (And if you are good – pray, when are you not good? – you may take the white beauty of your hand out of that brown glove and I will see that no harm comes to hand or glove. This is better; the rhythm of the flyng cab; the gray beauty of the avenue we love – an ungloved hand.) "It was worth twenty," said I. [The End]