What do 19th-century dandies, first-wave feminists, commuters, messengers, deliverymen, recreationalists, environmentalists, and competitive athletes have in common? Many of them are (or were) cyclists.
As the Museum of the City of New York’s exhibition “Cycling in the City: A 200-Year History” shows, New York’s erratic relationship with the bicycle owes to the disparities in social status of these groups, each of which cycles in its own way, with its own needs. The exhibition opened in March at 1220 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
Curators Donald Albrecht and Evan Friss divided the exhibition into three main parts, labeled Cultures, Landscapes, and Machines. The impressive collection of “machines” includes high-wheelers from the 1860s, a racing bike from the 1930s, a tandem tricycle with side-by-side seating, and the track bicycle used by legendary New York City messenger Fast Eddie Williams in the 1990s.
The Cultures wall showcases organizations such as the Puerto Rican Schwinn Club in Bushwick and the Black Label Bike Club (an “outlaw” group in Bedford-Stuyvesant whose members “live together, ride together, work together, and party together”), as well as trends like bike polo on the Lower East Side and lowriders in Latino sections of the Bronx. On the other side of the room, Landscapes highlights the contributions of figures like Robert Moses and Michael Bloomberg to the city’s cycling infrastructure.
Together, these three sections tell the story of the two-wheeled device known first as the “velocipede.” In New York City, it began life in 1819 as an ostentatious plaything of the entitled rich, whose pleasure jaunts rapidly began to block traffic on upper Broadway and Riverside Drive. In the late 19th century, the popularity of bikes grew, and in 1880 the city banned them from public parks – relenting, to a certain degree, three years later, by granting “proficient” cyclists from “established” clubs the right to apply for a special license.
Around the same time, bicycles became a symbol of the nascent women’s rights movement, as suffragists like Susan B. Anthony, in learning to ride, found a new way to navigate the city without male assistance. Anthony claimed that bikes had “done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.”
In the 1890s, America’s first significant bike path opened on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn, leading to Coney Island. The bicycle “fad” dwindled around the turn of the century but returned thanks to the Great Depression, which slowed automobile sales.
Moses, as Parks Commissioner, used the New Deal to build bike paths in parks for fitness enthusiasts and nature lovers, but his interest didn’t extend to practical, everyday cyclists on the streets. The curators here have unearthed letters to Moses from 1930s schoolkids who complained that, although the paths in the parks were nice, they needed a way to get to the parks on their bicycles in order to be able to use them.
Later, Mayor Ed Koch promoted cycling in response to the 1980 transit strike, but he ended up tearing out his own bike lanes in Manhattan quickly after installing them. In 1987, he banned cycling in Midtown between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.
Koch’s purpose was to allow largely affluent, white commuters to get to work and leave on their bikes during rush hour, while simultaneously cracking down on working-class, often black or Latino bike messengers, who had acquired a dodgy reputation in the eyes of some. (To others, they were real-life action heroes.) The messengers protested and defeated the ban.
Today, New York City has the most bike commuters in the nation. It also has the most total commuters; in fact, as of 2017, only 1.3 percent of them use a bike, compared to 6.3 percent in Portland, Oregon, and 41 percent in Copenhagen, Denmark, but the figure for New York still represents a 129 percent increase since 2006.
Because Mayor Bill de Blasio has added to Bloomberg’s legacy, New York now has over 100 miles of protected bike lanes, facilitating 460,000 daily cycling trips. Citi Bike is nearly as popular as every all the other U.S. bikeshare operations put together.
Still, some of the old problems remain. Protests over the two-way bike lane on Prospect Park West in 2010 showed that wealthy Park Slope homeowners still regarded cyclists as dangerous riffraff. On the other hand, some residents of Sunnyside, Queens, saw the installation of bike lanes as a harbinger of gentrification in 2018. U.S. studies indicate that working-class cyclists, who use bikes because they can’t afford cars, vastly outnumber wealthy cyclists who may prefer bikes for health or environmental reasons, but the opposite perception persists because city planners tend to ignore the former group: bike lanes usually appear only when the condos go up.
Importantly, De Blasio has refused to legalize the throttle-assist electric bikes used by immigrant food deliverymen, allowing the NYPD to continue to extract millions of dollars in fines and bike confiscations from low-income New Yorkers. A single ticket can cost $500. Meanwhile, the city legalized similar pedal-activated e-bikes in 2018 to pave the way for a new fleet of motorized Citi Bikes.
“Cycling in the City: A 200-Year History” ends October 6. Red Hook makes two appearances in the exhibition: a clip of the annual Red Hook Crit (canceled for 2019) plays alongside footage of other New York City cycling races, not far from a dramatic 2005 photo of “100 Wheels of Death: The Brooklyn Bike Brawl,” in which riders gathered in Red Hook to play “chicken” with partners sitting on their shoulders.
