What do 19th century dandies, first wave feminists, travelers, messengers, messengers, recreationists, environmentalists, and competitive athletes have in common? Many of them are (or were) cyclists.
As the exhibition “Cycling in the City: A 200-Year History” at the Museum of the City of New York shows, New York’s erratic relationship with the bicycle is due to the disparities in the social status of these groups, each one of them. which circulates in its own way. , with your 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, called Cultures, Landscapes, and Machines. The impressive collection of “machines” includes tall wheels from the 1860s, a 1930s racing bike, a double tricycle with seats side by side, and the trail bike used by the legendary New York Messenger Fast. Eddie Williams in the 1980s. Nineteen ninety.
The Cultures mural features 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, travel together, work together, and celebrate together”), as well as trends such as bike polo on the Lower East Side and lowriders in the Latino sections of the Bronx. Across the room, Landscapes highlights the contributions of figures like Robert Moses and Michael Bloomberg to the city’s bike infrastructure.
Together these three sections tell the story of the two-wheeled device initially known as the “velocipede.” In New York City, life began in 1819 as a fancy plaything for the wealthy, whose leisurely journeys quickly began to block traffic on Broadway and Riverside Drive. In the late 19th century, the popularity of bicycles grew and, in 1880, the city banned them in public parks, which, to some extent, three years later, gave “competent” cyclists from “established” clubs the right to apply for a special license.
At the same time, bicycles became a symbol of the nascent women’s rights movement, as suffragettes like Susan B. Anthony, learning to ride a bike, discovered a new way to navigate the city without the help of a man. Anthony said that bicycles “have done more to empower women than anything else in the world.”
In the 1890s, America’s first major bike path was opened on Brooklyn’s Ocean Parkway, which led to Coney Island. The “craze” for bicycles declined at the turn of the century, but returned thanks to the Great Depression, which slowed car sales.
Moses, as park commissioner, used the New Deal to build bike trails in parks for fitness enthusiasts and nature lovers, but his interest did not extend to practical, everyday cyclists on the streets. The healers here discovered letters to Moses from schoolchildren complaining that although the trails in the parks were good, they needed a way to for the parks on their bikes to be able to use them.
Mayor Ed Koch later promoted cycling in response to the 1980 traffic strike, but ended up destroying 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 goal was to allow very wealthy white commuters to get to work and get off their bikes during rush hour, while also cracking down on working-class bike messengers, often black or Latino, who had a dubious reputation in the eyes of some. (For others, they were action heroes in real life.) The messengers protested and defeated the ban.
Today, New York City has the highest number of bicycle users in the country. It also has the largest number of passengers; in fact, in 2017, only 1.3% of them used a bicycle, compared to 6.3% in Portland, Oregon, and 41% in Copenhagen, Denmark, but the New York figure still represents an increase 129% since 2006.
As Mayor Bill de Blasio added to the Bloomberg legacy, New York now has more than 100 miles of protected bike lanes, facilitating 460,000 daily bicycle trips. Citi Bike is almost as popular as all the other bike-sharing operations in the United States put together.
Still, some of the old problems persist. The two-way bike lane protests in Prospect Park West in 2010 showed that wealthy Park Slope owners still viewed bicyclists as a dangerous business. On the other hand, some Sunnyside, Queens residents saw the installation of bike lanes as a harbinger of gentrification in 2018. American studies indicate that working-class cyclists, who use bicycles because they cannot afford a car, far outnumber wealthy cyclists who may prefer bicycles for health or environmental reasons, but the opposite perception persists because city planners tend to ignore the first group: bike lanes tend to appear only when condos increase.
Importantly, De Blasio refused to legalize the throttle electric bikes used by immigrant food delivery people, allowing the New York Police Department to continue to extract millions of dollars in fines and seizures from low-income New York bicycles. A single ticket can cost $ 500. Meanwhile, the city legalized similar pedal-activated electric bikes in 2018 to pave the way for a new fleet of motorized Citi bikes.
“Cycling in the city: 200 years of history” ends on October 6. Red Hook makes two appearances at the exhibition: A clip from the annual Red Hook Crit (canceled in 2019) shows footage from other New York bike races, not far from a spectacular 2005 photo of “100 Wheels of Death: The Brooklyn Bike Brawl ”. , in which the jockeys gathered in Red Hook to play “chicken” with their companions sitting on their shoulders.
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