JiveSync

The drunk couples making out in the backseat. Potholes the size of canyons. Dangerous fares, bad traffic and poor tippers.

Driving a yellow cab has never been a cakewalk, but the most quintessential of New York pursuits has lured generations of working-class men (and they’re almost all men) through the promise of independence. While the basics of the job haven’t changed, the people doing it have — the Irvings and Aarons have become Jean-Baptistes, Ahmeds and Muhammads, and while 62% of cabbies in 1980 were born here, less than 9% are today. Gone are the infamous jocular Jewish hacks of yesteryear.

Except at one garage in Queens.

At the 55 Stan Operating Corp., a gaggle of guys driving for the Long Island City garage constitute some of the last original Jewish drivers, still cursing and kvetching.

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“We are a dying breed,” said Elliot Alboher, 61, who sported a ’70s afro when he first started driving 31 years ago. “People get in and they can’t believe they have an American driver.”

The tall, lanky hack got the taxi itch when he was a boy sitting in his dad’s yellow cab. He still remembers the feeling of speeding over the Williamsburg Bridge in the cushy vinyl seats. This was the late ’50s.

“I wanted to start driving. I loved it,” said Alboher, who has picked up Sandra Bernhard, Mel Gibson and a “very drunk” David Hasselhoff over the years.

“I wanted to have that freedom to be on the road,” he said.

But that freedom has slowly run off course.

Individual drivers once could sling enough hash to buy their own cab medallions, offering the promise of a road to the middle class as its equity increased. Today, only the big garages — or several guys who slave away to pool their money together — can afford to snap up the medallions, which go for hundreds of thousands of dollars each.

Most drivers have to lease a cab, making them much more beholden to their garages. Wages have dropped, hours have grown and rules have expanded. Today, it’s only new immigrants who are willing to work under those conditions for a chance to get ahead. Cab driving is the story of the working class in America writ small, squeezed until only the few can hack it.

The first New York cabbies drove horse-drawn carriages in the 19th century, as they did in England with the “hackney carriages” that gave the guys the name “hack.”

Harry Allen, an enterprising New Yorker who had witnessed the marvels of gas-powered cabs in Europe, introduced a fleet of them to the Big Apple in 1907. They weren’t yellow, but shiny red French Darracq cabs, equipped with fare meters.

New Yorkers took to them in droves. By the 1910s, cabs had gained a solid following among businessmen and tourists. The first drivers were typically Irish, followed by Italians and Eastern European Jews. By 1920, some 20,000 of the city’s 35,000 drivers were Jewish, according to a Jewish Daily Forward account at the time.

Back then, the industry operated fast and loose. A hack could get a chauffeur’s license and start driving that day. Without any background check, even common criminals became cabbies — and a whole segment of drivers would take revelers to speakeasies and prostitutes during Prohibition.

“If you wanted to drive a cab, you could just do it,” said Graham Hodges, a professor of history at Colgate University and the author of “Taxi! A Social History of the New York City Cabdriver.”

The fare was theoretically set at 20 cents a mile, but police enforcement was lax and hacks routinely tried to undercut each other. Drivers held up different colored flags to signify the bargain rates they offered that day, according to Hodges.

“There were fare wars,” Hodges said. “You’d get charged a dime a mile in the morning, and a nickel later that day.”

Early cabs were of all shapes, sizes and colors — including brown-and-whites and the occasional lavender. Riders had to look for the fast-moving vehicle with the fare information and company name stenciled on the door to figure out what to hail.

During the 1920s, car manufacturers dumped extra models on the city, and the legions of cabs made for chaos. By 1931, 21,000 taxis plied the streets, about 7,000 more than there are today.

“They would run people down. They would rip people off. It was a jungle,” Hodges said.

In 1937, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia decided it was time to scrub up the scruffy industry.

The number of drivers was capped through a licensing system that evolved into the medallions that control the trade today. To drive, drivers had to bid on a medallion from the city, then about $10 apiece (it’s up to $609,000 these days).

During the Depression, well-educated guys who couldn’t get jobs elsewhere drifted to the cab business. An early census counted 75,000 drivers willing to snap up the 16,700 available cabs.

Jews continued to dominate much of the industry. In the old movie “Taxi!”, for example, James Cagney plays a driver named Matt Nolan who carried on long chats in Yiddish.

Through the years, the driving business became a place for the sincere, well-meaning guy who never quite made it in the office world, Hodges said. Hollywood portrayed cab drivers the talkative, fast-driving ambassadors to New York, although films also commonly portrayed cabbies as crooks.

By the 1940s, drivers increasingly bought their own cars, many snapping up the first specifically built for the industry: the Checker cab.

Tipping became standard practice in the 1950s, and the city ordered all medallion cabs be painted yellow in 1967. At the time, Checkers were still the standard cab, but Fords, Dodge cabs and Chevrolets were joining the fleet mix.

Additionally, legions of college kids looking to score some quick cash slid behind the wheel when the city eased laws around part-time drivers and lowered the age limit to 18 in 1969. Some never slid out.

“It involved a lot of sacrifice,” Hodges said. “Some never got married. They went through a lot of personal turmoil.”

It was a world of “matzo ball soup and pizza,” Alboher said.

When Allen Szmerkes first started driving in 1975, plenty of Jewish kids from Brooklyn College were tooling around in cabs. His Williamsburg garage was a dead match for the TV show “Taxi,” with a notoriously moody dispatcher named Izzy who would regularly fly off the handle.

“He would be like, ‘Get away, get away from me!’ He would go crazy,” said Szmerkes, 58, who started driving when he was 18 and bought a Checker cab for $5,700 at age 19.

Back then, the cabs were ramshackle. The chain holding the Checker’s mammoth battery in the trunk was constantly breaking and the entire chassis would shift forward. There was no air conditioning or radio, and the shock absorbers were always shot.

“It was a piece of junk, but it worked,” said Szmerkes, who would carry his own radio around in the front seat for diversion.

Driving was dangerous in the 1970s. Many cabbies harbor war stories about being held up at gunpoint, and the cabs came with a safe under the front seat to store money. “A lot of guys had guns hidden in the car. You had to be very careful,” said Douglas Zeilnhofer, 62, a Queens hack with 32 years under his belt.

Still, corporate black cars had yet to become widespread, and even the wealthy put up with the clunky cabs.

Over the years, Szmerkes drove Carroll O’Connor, former mayor John Lindsay, Rodney Dangerfield and Jacqueline Kennedy (who tipped him a dollar). Several drivers remember picking up John F. Kennedy Jr., who tended to dress down and frequent the New York Racquetball Club.

“Business was much better then,” said Szmerkes, who remembers guys getting into street brawls to ride in his cab.

Hacks who owned their own cabs could squeak out a living, plus the job came with some degree of respect.

“You were more independent. There was a certain level of prestige,” said historian Hodges.

When he had his Checker, Szmerkes took home about $70 a day after expenses (back when buying a cup of coffee cost 15 cents). His peers were able to eventually sell their medallions and buy homes, he recalls.

“It was all right compared to today. I’m going backwards, not forwards,” said Szmerkes, who still lives with his mother in Williamsburg.

Everything changed in 1979.

That year, Mayor Ed Koch ended the longstanding practice of having drivers and garages split the day’s profits down the middle. Instead, drivers had to pay a fee up front to lease a cab for the day, while also covering the gas. Whatever was left, he got to keep.

The growing livery cab sector operated by these terms, putting pressure on the city to stop having garages provide basic benefits. These were also the heydays of deregulation, and as in other industries, the focus was on making things easier for business owners.

“The job has changed dramatically. It became much harder,” said Hodges, who drove a cab back in the 1970s.

With the new leasing system, drivers became independent contractors, and garages no longer had to offer vacation, pensions or job security. Fed up, the older drivers started migrating from the industry, and new immigrants stepped in their place.

In the 1990s, Indians, primarily from the state of Punjab, flocked to the trade after rural unrest caused them to flee the country. India already had a vibrant cab culture, and migrants spread the word about the job. Pakistanis and Bengalis soon joined them en masse, settling behind the wheels of the Ford Crown Victorias that dominated city streets. Today, nearly 40% of drivers are from those three countries.

“You had the Jews, the Italians, the Greeks, the Haitians and now Pakistanis. God knows what the next generation will be,” said Jawaid Toppa, 42, a cabby originally from Pakistan, who started driving in 1990.

New and veteran cabbies agree that the gig has become a lot tougher.

“There’s too much traffic. You are dealing with the public,” said Jacque Dangervil, 64, a driver since 2004 originally from Haiti. “That’s the life of the cab driver.”

Whereas drivers used to be able to pick up a few hours work here and there, today’s leasing system has made long shifts the norm. Drivers have to plunk down $105 to use a cab for 12 hours a day during the week, and $129 on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights.

Nationally, drivers only make about $27,000 a year, according to the most recent US Census figures.

Then there’s a mandated defensive driving course, 80 hours of taxi school, exams, a physical and a drug test for New York hacks.

“Today’s driver is a professional in every sense of the word,” TLC Commissioner David Yassky said.

And if one guy can’t make it, there’s no shortage of people trying to take his place. The TLC received more than 6,200 applications from those looking to start driving a yellow cab this year.

As one industry expression goes, “You have to have nerves of steel, and the balls the size of a bull” to be a driver these days.

“You really have to be on top of your game now. There is no margin for errors,” said Toppa, who keeps a list of all the new bike lanes and restricted streets.

“Guy are always under tremendous pressure. That’s why they are always speeding,” he said.

Echoes of the overall economy can be seen running through the cab industry.

The early pioneers who got a piece of the medallion action were able to sell and move out when the getting was good. The veterans mostly exited as the entry-level service job got harder, and now only the newest Americans are willing to put up with concrete canyons behind the wheel of a cab.

For the old cabbies at 55 Stan, the changing world hasn’t always sat so well. One quit last year, moved to Florida and died months later. Some are bitter but have few other job prospects after so many years behind the wheel.

“I want out of this business,” said one older driver with thick-rimmed glasses, who refused to give his name. “I hate the passengers and the TLC. All I want to do is get an epileptic fit.”

But for all the grumbling, the appeal of a boss-free existence and the open road keeps many of the old guard going.

“Hey, what am I going to be, miserable?” said longtime hack Zeilnhofer, who recently received a TLC commendation letter after he went out of his way to pick up a rider in a wheelchair.

“I get compliments every day. What am I going to be miserable for?”

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