It was in 1819, 200 years ago, that bicycles first arrived in Manhattan. That means two centuries of brutal battles over what proper physical and social space they deserve.
Whether they have been used for exercise, pleasure, transportation or work, bicycles have been the object of scrutiny over and over. Caught between pedestrians and later drivers, cyclists are a group that the urban environment past and present rarely prioritizes. Bike users themselves are not a uniform group — ranging from elite hobbyists and racers to messengers and commuters — which complicates advocacy efforts and policy reforms even further.
The messy diplomacy of the bicycle in the Big Apple is the subject of “Cycling in the City: A 200-Year History,” an exhibition of photographs, videos, ephemera and more, which opened March 14 at the Museum of the City of New York. Co-curating the show is Evan Friss, a history professor at James Madison University and the author of “On Bicycles: A 200-Year History of Cycling in New York City,” to be published in May. Here, Friss outlines some of the most heated debates over two wheels to take place in NYC.
1819: Bikes banned in lower Manhattan
Velocipedes, as they were called, arrived from Europe in May 1819. They looked like today’s bicycles, but they were made of wood and lacked pedals; riders pushed off the ground with their legs to propel themselves forward, reaching speeds exceeding — gasp! — 10 mph.
Early adopters navigated bumpy, muddy roads alongside “carts, carriages, pedestrians, horses and hogs,” as Friss writes in “On Bicycles.” Media reports dubbed it “outrageous” when the anonymous owner of the first velocipede charged spectators 50 cents to see him scoot around the corner of Broadway and Reade streets.
‘Those first velocipedes raised doubts … that they offered a viable form of transportation.’
But the strange fad lasted only a summer. Just three months after velocipedes landed stateside, lawmakers banned them from the downtown public spaces where they were most prevalent: City Hall Park, Bowling Green and the Battery. The penalty: a $5 fine.
“It established the velocipede not as a serious form of transport but as a ‘whimsical invention’ — an identity the bicycle would long have difficulty shaking,” Friss writes. “In essence, those first velocipedes raised doubts — doubts that persisted — that they had a right to the parks and the streets, that they offered a viable form of transportation and that their devotees were sane.”
1890s: Cycling scofflaws trigger mass NYPD response
When bicycles made their comeback after the Civil War, they had pedals. The second half of the 19th century saw the consolidation of the five boroughs and the expansion of the street grid as the city became more populated and dense. Bicycling returned in a more widespread fashion, the earlier ban was forgotten and many more two-wheeled vehicles careened through the streets and parks — causing citywide anxiety.
The Times called bicycles “nuisances which imperil life and limb, and impede free and easy locomotion.” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle called the fad “extraordinary lunacy” and later dubbed a group ride “the great army of the unattached … without organization or discipline.” Some cyclists were dubbed scorchers, Friss writes, “the pejorative term applied to riders who disobeyed traffic laws, zoomed around city streets and frightened pedestrians.”
An 1880 incident in which horses pulling a carriage through Prospect Park panicked — allegedly due to a bicycle — led to the death of a 17-year-old girl. In addition to their interference with steeds and pedestrians, cyclists were also accused of foolhardy behavior, riding in the middle of the night or, even worse, drunk. Some racers were obsessed with speed and record-setting, pulling stunts like drafting behind trains.
In 1896, as a response, Theodore Roosevelt — the future president and then-commissioner of New York City’s Police Department — created the first group of bicycle-riding officers to “rein in reckless cyclists.” What started as two cops possessing “extraordinary daring” ballooned into a corps 100 strong with their own station.
In one year, these officers made 1,366 arrests. In 1897, New York passed the nation’s first set of laws regulating bicycles, which, Friss explains, dictated “that cyclists keep to the right side of the road and off the sidewalks, carry a lantern at night, signal turns with their hands, sound a ‘bell or gong’ when turning corners or passing, travel at less than 8 miles an hour and keep their feet on the pedals.”
1980s: The war on bike messengers
Ed Koch kicked off his dozen years in office in 1978 on a high note for cycling aficionados, quickly implementing painted-off routes designated “Bicycles only” from Central Park South down Broadway to Washington Square Park and then back up Sixth Avenue. Transit workers went on strike in 1980, leading to a tenfold increase in bicycle commuters. Not long after, Koch added concrete barriers along the paths for extra protection.
The newly demarcated lanes were lambasted and quickly dismantled. Opponents took issue with their cost — $290,000 — which they claimed could be better spent filling potholes or upgrading public housing.
Safety was also a concern: Messengers were paid per delivery (about $5), and they weaved through the streets at a breakneck pace — à la Kevin Bacon in “Quicksilver” — often on speedier fixed-gear bikes with no brakes. The same year “Quicksilver” came out, 1986, a 17-year-old messenger hit and killed a pedestrian.
Koch was pilloried for not doing more. Enlisting the NYPD to study bike safety, he concluded within months that the solution was a Midtown bike ban. Starting in August 1987, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on weekdays, cyclists would be banned from riding on Park, Madison and Fifth avenues from 31st to 59th streets. Violators — messengers who Koch said “imperil the lives of New Yorkers every day” — would face a $40 to $60 fine.
Koch ‘saw in the mostly nonwhite messengers a group of outlaws.’
Outcry erupted almost immediately. Friss says there was a racial element, as Koch “saw in the mostly nonwhite messengers a group of outlaws.” Messengers and their sympathizers crept up Sixth Avenue at an intentionally glacial pace in order to hit every stoplight and stall traffic for protracted periods. Motorists lobbed raw eggs at cyclists while cursing them out, and one car even ran over a protester’s bike.
Eventually, a group of messengers, their employers — who didn’t want courier delivery fees to get any higher — and supporters sued the city, and a judge handed down a verdict in September 1987 that the city had neither given the public enough advance notice nor allowed input or comment. At first, Koch dug in his heels, and his administration doled out more tickets and increased penalties for offenders even without a ban. But, realizing public opinion was not on his side, he withdrew the ban, which was never truly enacted, in 1988.
2007-2013 Bike bashing in the Bloomberg era
After announcing 2007’s PlaNYC to make the city bigger and greener, Mayor Mike Bloomberg tapped Janette Sadik-Khan as transportation commissioner. Her first project was a protected bike lane — the first since Koch’s 1980 installed-and-promptly-removed trial run — along Ninth Avenue in Chelsea.
From skinny-jeaned hipsters to suit-clad commuters, more New Yorkers began to ride regularly as Sadik-Khan’s ambitious bike-lane building continued — and was met with opposition.
In 2008, a two-way bike greenway along Kent Avenue in Williamsburg proved contentious for the area’s Hasidic community. In online comments, Friss writes, anti-bike hard-nosers “labeled cyclists as ‘arrogant,’ ‘radical,’ ‘attention-seeking whiners,’ ‘trust-funders,’ ‘idiot hipster[s],’ and ‘gentrifying yuppies.’ ”
There was an even bigger uproar in 2010 from the stately co-ops along Prospect Park West, where a two-way bike line would reduce three lanes of car traffic to two.
High-profile residents opposed its construction, including then-US Rep. Anthony Weiner, who said, “When I become mayor, you know what I’m going to spend my first year doing? I’m going to have a bunch of ribbon-cuttings tearing out your f–king bike lanes.”
Fast-forward to 2012, when the city laid the groundwork for hotly contested bike-sharing network Citi Bike, which included docking stations that took up precious sidewalk real estate and parking spaces.
“A restaurateur in Tribeca, concerned about a new station opening outside his bistro, staged a one-man sit-in,” Friss recounts. “The board of a co-op building on Bank Street sued the city, arguing that nearby docks would ‘severely endanger the health and safety’ of its residents. Neighbors of the United Nations predicted that the bikes and the stations could be used to abet terrorists.”
Eventually — not without some compromises and some disgruntled New Yorkers — Citi Bike launched on May 27, 2013. Now approaching its sixth birthday, it has 750 stations, more than 147,000 annual members and some 62,000 individual rides taken daily.