Evan Friss - On Bicycles: A 200-Year History of Cycling in New York City
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On Bicycles: A 200-Year History of Cycling in New York City: summary, description and annotation
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Subways and yellow taxis may be the icons of New York transportation, but it is the bicycle that has the longest claim to New Yorks streets: two hundred years and counting. Never has it taken to the streets without controversy: 1819 was the year of the citys first bicycle and also its first bicycle ban. Debates around the bicycles place in city life have been so persistent not just because of its many usesrecreation, sport, transportation, businessbut because of changing conceptions of who cyclists are.
In On Bicycles, Evan Friss traces the colorful and fraught history of cycling in New York City. He uncovers the bicycles place in the city over time, showing how it has served as a mirror of the citys changing social, economic, infrastructural, and cultural politics since it first appeared. It has been central, as when horse-drawn carriages shared the road with bicycle lanes in the 1890s; peripheral, when Robert Mosess car-centric vision made room for bicycles only as recreation; and aggressively marginalized, when Ed Kochs battle against bike messengers culminated in the short-lived 1987 Midtown Bike Ban. On Bicycles illuminates how the city as we know it todayveined with over a thousand miles of bicycle lanesreflects a fitful journey powered, and opposed, by New York Citys people and its politics.
In On Bicycles, Evan Friss traces the colorful and fraught history of cycling in New York City. He uncovers the bicycles place in the city over time, showing how it has served as a mirror of the citys changing social, economic, infrastructural, and cultural politics since it first appeared. It has been central, as when horse-drawn carriages shared the road with bicycle lanes in the 1890s; peripheral, when Robert Mosess car-centric vision made room for bicycles only as recreation; and aggressively marginalized, when Ed Kochs battle against bike messengers culminated in the short-lived 1987 Midtown Bike Ban. On Bicycles illuminates how the city as we know it todayveined with over a thousand miles of bicycle lanesreflects a fitful journey powered, and opposed, by New York Citys people and its politics.
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ON BICYCLES
ON BICYCLES
A 200-YEAR HISTORY of CYCLING in NEW YORK CITY
EVAN FRISS
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright 2019 Evan Friss
All rights reserved
E-ISBN 978-0-231-54424-5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Friss, Evan, author.
Title: On bicycles : a 200-year history of cycling in New York City / Evan Friss.
Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018045873 (print) | LCCN 2018049808 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231182560 (cloth : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: CyclingSocial aspectsNew York (State)New York. | CyclingUnited StatesHistory. | CyclingNew York (State)New YorkHistory. | Urban transportationNew York (State)New York. | Bicycle commutingNew York (State)New YorkHistory. | Bicycle sharing programsNew York (State)New YorkHistory. | CyclingGovernment policyNew York (State)New York.
Classification: LCC GV1045.5.N72 (ebook) | LCC GV1045.5.N72 F565 2019 (print) | DDC 796.609747/1dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018045873
A Columbia University Press E-book.
CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at .
Cover Design: Julia Kushnirsky
Cover Images: Nastasic / DigitalVision Vectors / Getty Images (top); New York City Skyline from Jersey City, Postcard, c. 1915 / J. T. Vintage / Bridgeman Images (bottom)
For Amanda, Miles, and Quincy
CONTENTS
N ew York is a city in motion. New Yorkers walkand walk fast. Cars lurch. Buses crawl. Intersections are battlefields. Ferries ferry. Planes take off and land. Helicopters shuttle one-percenters from Greenwich, Connecticut, to Wall Street and from Wall Street to the Hamptons. Commuter trains carry workers home at night and return them to overcrowded stations in the morning. A cacophonous symphony of subway cars, hurtling under and over the city, never ends.
On Manhattans grid, locals know that one uptown-downtown block equals one twentieth of a mile. Unfailingly (and without a compass) they can find the southwest corner of an intersection. They also know not just which subway line to take, but which subway car to stand in, on which side the doors will open, and through which set of stairs to exit the station.
How New Yorkers get from A to B is not just a means. It is a force, a shaper of the city and the life inside it.
About one quarter of the earth on which New York City sits is a street, roughly equal to fifty-eight Central Parks. Those streets reveal as much of the soul of the city as any place. What they look like and whom they serve are questions so fundamental that the answers dictate what the city looks like and whom it serves. The daily dance on the streetswhat the abstract artist Piet Mondrian called the Broadway Boogie Woogie in a 1942 paintingis a definitional aspect of life in New York. Over the last two hundred years, countless vehicles (horse-drawn carriages, streetcars, elevated trains, cars, trucks, and buses, to name a few) have boogie woogied up, down, over, and across the city. But it is the bicycle that has the longest-running claim to New Yorks streets: two hundred years and counting.
This is the story of how that happened. Of how bicycles came and went and came back again. Of how the relationship among New York City, its people, and their bicycles evolved. Of how bicycles went from being a novelty to commonplace. Of how the city came to reflect the bicycles and bicyclists who occupy it, and how the city shapes our understanding of those same objects and people.
Where, exactly, the bicycle fits within the city has always been contested because New Yorkers have never been able to agree about what, exactly, a bicycle is. A 1973 New York City Department of Transportation report described it as the step-child of the transportation world. City staff knew how to accommodate cars. They knew where the walkers should go. Bicycles were a different and more complicated story.
In the nineteenth century, bicycles were compared to horses (sometimes called steel horses), to carriages (sometimes called horseless carriages), and even to flying creatures (My new wheel is a bird! one enthusiast declared, no doubt with a smile on his face, in 1896). Cyclists sometimes raced against railroad cars; other times they brought their bicycles on board. Toddlers rode them in playgrounds, but so did racers in velodromes. Over the years, bicycles have also been exercise machines for the health-conscious, surveillance units for cops, a way to explore for the curious, instruments of commuters, and cargo ships for messengers.
Since the bikes first appearance, cheerleaders have lauded its many uses. But the bicycles versatility has also raised critical questions that dominate the two-century, on-again, off-again history of cycling in the city. Who is a real cyclist? What is a bicycle really for? How New Yorkers viewed cyclists (whether as childish, hypermasculine, countercultural, white, ethnic, elite, or working-class) and what they believed the bicycles principal purpose was (recreation, racing, commerce, or transportation) has forever shaped where and how bicycles belonged in the cityif they belonged at all.
In short, as New Yorkers understanding of the bicycle changed, so did the city.
From the moment the very first velocipedes (early bicycles) arrived in 1819, residents fought about what to do with them. Should they be allowed on the streets? In the parks? On the sidewalks? The answer was, apparently, none of the above, as lawmakers soon banned them from the places they had been most used. Those first velocipedes lasted only a summer, but the wheeled contraptions, and the questions, would return.
And so began a recurring patterna peak of interest followed by a period of decline. Yet, each time, the booms lasted longer. Just as a novice rider is first able to balance only a few seconds without falling, then a minute, then two, then three New Yorkers rode for longer and longer with each revival. Ever since the 1870s, whether velocipedes, high-wheelers with their almost comically oversized front wheels, safety bicycles, tricycles, cruisers, ten-speeds, fixed-gears, BMX bikes, Citi Bikes, or e-bikes, there have always been bicycles in New York.
The question about where they belonged never disappeared either. New Yorkers remained divided on the issue because they remained divided on the nature of cyclists and cycling. In the nineteenth century, carriage drivers may well have frequented the six-day-long bicycle races at Madison Square Garden, but they objected to cyclists scorching through Central Park. CEOs in the 1980s may have enjoyed mountain biking at their summer cabins, but they did not want tank-topped messengers tramping through their lobbies. And twenty-first-century Hasidic Jews in Williamsburg may have been happy to put their children on a bicycle, but they did not want hipsters wheeling through their neighborhood. Calls to restrict bicycles came with each boomin 1819, 1869, the 1890s, the late 1930s, the early 1970s, and the twenty-first centuryand each new notion of cycling.
Bike critics were not simply lumped together either. In recent years, articles railing against cyclists could be found just as easily in the tabloid New York Post (bubble-brained traffic-busting bike lanes serve only amphetamine-propelled deliverymen) as in the highbrow New Yorker (it is time to call a halt to [Transportation Commissioner] Sadik-Khan and her faceless road swipers). Both truck drivers and passengers leering from limousines grumbled about the cyclists. Even cyclists complained about other cyclists.
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