On Bicycles

A 200-Year History of Cycling in New York City

Evan Friss

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780231544245
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Subways and yellow taxis may be the icons of New York transportation, but it is the bicycle that has the longest claim to New York's streets: two hundred years and counting. Never has it taken to the streets without controversy: 1819 was the year of not only the city's first bicycle but also its first bicycle ban. Debates around the bicycle's place in city life have been so persistent not just because of its many uses—recreation, sport, transportation, business—but because of changing conceptions of who cyclists are.

In On Bicycles, Evan Friss traces the colorful and fraught history of bicycles—and bicyclists—in New York City. He uncovers the bicycle's place in the city over time, showing how the bicycle has served as a mirror of the city's 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 Moses's car-centric vision made room for bicycles only as recreation; and aggressively marginalized, when Ed Koch's battle against bike messengers culminated in the short-lived 1987 Midtown bike ban. On Bicycles illuminates how the city as we know it today—veined with over a thousand miles of bicycle lanes and dotted with bright blue Citi Bikes—reflects a fitful journey powered—and opposed—by New York City's people and its politics.

CHAPTER ONE

ROUGH START

The history of cycling in New York begins in 1819—and not with the bicycle but with its ancestor, the velocipede.

Also known as the draisine, hobby horse, dandy carriage, accelerator, Tracena, and pedestrian curricle, the wooden velocipede looks like a bicycle even to twenty-first-century eyes, with one notable exception: no pedals. Instead, like on today’s balance bikes for toddlers, riders propelled the “swift walkers” by pushing off the ground with their feet or coasting down hills.

Word had traveled from Europe, where velocipedes were invented, that they could be put to practical use, achieving speeds upward of ten miles per hour. The first shipments of velocipedes had already floated to Boston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, drawing curious crowds in each harbor, and in May 1819 the first of the wheeled contraptions reached New York. It was the beginning of what one magazine would dub “the summer of velocipedes.”1

Ever dubious, New Yorkers demanded “ocular demonstration to be convinced” of its merit. The owner of the first imported velocipede was happy to oblige, offering a public unveiling outside Washington Hall, the headquarters of the pro-Federalist Washington Benevolent Society on the corner of Broadway and Reade Street. In an act that the local papers termed “outrageous,” “the self styled proprietor” demanded a half-dollar admission fee from the inquiring spectators.2

Velocipedes could soon be found in action. Riders wheeled through Vauxhall Gardens, bobbed down the hill to City Hall Park, and circled Bowling Green. Although there was talk that a special ladies’ version with four wheels for two women was on its way, it seems that only men rode this first generation of velocipedes in New York. But all New Yorkers could play the part of spectator. On a rainy summer evening (according to a perhaps hyperbolic press report) crowds lined the street and women and children gathered at “every window” to watch a velocipedist who promised to go from Chatham Square to St. Paul’s Church in under two minutes. Much to the chagrin of the women whose “lovely tresses of every curl” had been ruined by the humidity, the braggart and his velocipede were no shows. In truth, there were never that many velocipedes to be found.3

Yet within three months of seeing their first one, New York lawmakers enacted the city’s first “bike” ban. With roughly 120,000 residents, New York (composed only of Manhattan at the time) was the most populous city in the country, and the bumpy cobblestone or muddy dirt-paved streets were already crowded by carts, carriages, pedestrians, horses, and hogs. Riders were more likely to take to the parks—City Hall Park, the Battery, and Bowling Green—or the sidewalks, and it was from those spaces that velocipedes were officially banned in August 1819. Failure to comply resulted in a hefty five-dollar fine. If slaves somehow managed to violate the ordinance, then their masters were on the hook.4

Whether as a result of the prohibition or of a natural decline in demand, New Yorkers and Americans at large stopped riding velocipedes within months of when they started. Neither the city nor the bicycle was quite yet ready, and velocipedes were rarely seen for the next fifty years.5

Nevertheless, the summer of velocipedes foreshadowed some of the challenges to come and, in certain ways, shaped those later experiences. 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. In essence, those first velocipedes also 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.6

“By all means let the age of velocipedes be hastened,” the Brooklyn Daily Eagle cheered in 1868, welcoming what it thought would be a new era of “every-man-his-own-team, and every-woman-her-own horse.” The velocipede was back.7

Most New Yorkers had not seen or thought about a velocipede for decades. In the papers, they were more likely to read about the English steamer, The Velocipede, than the kind with wheels. Yet during the interregnum, inventors kept tinkering. A Brooklyn man earned a rare American patent in 1858 for a three-wheeled velocipede propelled by a complicated mix of treadles, springs, levers, and a bearing board. For the most part, though, bicycle innovation occurred in Europe.8

In the 1860s, when Frenchmen began attaching pedal cranks to the front axle, the modern bicycle was born. Exactly how this happened and who deserves credit was controversial then (with lucrative patents at stake) and remains so today among bicycle historians. However they came to be, the new velocipedes seen spinning on Parisian boulevards by 1867 and warmly welcomed by the Eagle in 1868 were in fact bicycles—and while still commonly called velocipedes, started to also be referred to as bicycles.9

Nowhere in the United States was bicycle enthusiasm greater in the late 1860s than in New York and adjacent Brooklyn, which, thanks to decades of explosive growth, were particularly poised for bicycle mania. When the first velocipedes arrived in 1819, most New York residents lived on the crooked streets of Manhattan’s southern tip. That began to change as the grid transformed rolling hills and farms into a network of rectilinear streets and avenues, inviting residents to imagine an entire island brimming with life.10

Imagination turned into reality quicker than anyone thought, in no small part thanks to the Erie Canal, which, when it opened for business in 1825, expedited shipping times, lowered costs for merchants, and brought foodstuffs, timber, and other heartland resources to the nation’s financial capital. Soon, factories, markets, and storefronts dotted the increasingly large urban canvas. But New York was not just investing in industry; in 1858, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won first prize in a design competition for the giant playground to be known as Central Park. Although the city was not immune from riots and damage during the Civil War, it was hardly destroyed. In fact, by the time the newest version of the velocipede arrived in 1868, New York was the vibrant home to more than 900,000 people.11

Brooklyn, which would remain independent from the City of New York until 1898, was growing too. In 1820, “Brooklyn town” (one of several towns that composed King’s County) had only 7,175 residents and, as a period painting from Francis Guy makes clear, looked like a rural village. Guy’s painting shows dogs, cows, pigs, and chickens roaming snowy streets. Off to the side, though, stand two men—a carpenter and a fat-bellied speculator fluffed by a fur coat—portending the expansion and industrialization soon on the way. By 1870, Brooklyn had nearly 400,000 residents of its own, making it the third largest city in the country.12

Into this expanding metropolis arrived the bicycle, seen by its boosters as an antidote to the ills of urban life. As the bicycle ascended, horses and their stench would disappear, the evil railroad companies would go bankrupt, the countryside would be brought nearer, suburbanization would boom, space would be annihilated. Instead of riding on the ever-delayed streetcars, which “never take you exactly where you want,” the second-generation velocipede offered a “convenient means of locomotion” that would “revolutionize travel for all time.”13

Not only an instrument of change in terms of transit, the bicycle was also lauded as a cure-all in a city prone to outbreaks of smallpox, yellow fever, measles, and cholera. Doctors predicted a new age of “Velocipathy,” declaring the velocipede “the most excellent tonic and appetizer of our modern Pharmacopoea.” New Yorkers on wheels could “fly from infection” and infectious sufferers. The velocipede would be the hero to finally defeat the city’s dark side.14

With velocipedes reappearing (now with pedals) on city streets, the New York Times and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle soon began publishing regular columns on all things velocipede. Enthusiasts formed the Brooklyn Velocipede Club, which may have been the first bicycle club in the country. Entrepreneurs began setting up production facilities, making New York the American capital of velocipede manufacturing with firms like Pickering & Davis (144 Green Street), A. T. Demarest (620 Broadway), Mercer & Monod (3 William Street), and Calvin Witty (638 Broadway). Over the course of two years, New York designers registered fifty patents—a subject of frequent discord between producers—and sold bicycles not just to local Brooklyn and Manhattanites but also to people in cities across the United States. At first, they could not keep up with the demand.15

The early bike builders were more than just designers—they were also marketers, publishers, riders, and racers. Pickering & Davis, for example, put out The Velocipedist, an industrywide magazine with the broad and not so humble goal of “record[ing] everything of interest in the Velocipede world.” It was the first bike-centric periodical in the United States. The manufacturers also opened their own riding academies.16

At the time, no one knew how to ride a bike. Compared to later bicycles that sported lighter frames, pneumatic tires, multiple gears, and soft saddles, the new velocipedes in 1869 were particularly difficult to master. There was a reason people called them “boneshakers.” Staying atop them required learning a new set of skills: pedaling, balancing, and steering, all at the same time. They also required courage. “To get on is not difficult. To stay on is a labor of genius,” one rider quipped.17

FIGURE 1.1 Like other New York builders, Thomas Pickering of Pickering & Davis contributed to a particularly American form of the velocipede. In this 1869 patent drawing, Pickering introduced a number of mechanisms intended to make the device lighter, less top-heavy, and easier to ride, including a tubular “back-bone” (A) (instead of a solid bar), a hollow fork (C), and a specially designed “polygonal-shaped stirrup” (H). Pickering’s velocipede also featured a sprung steering handle and saddle, smaller wheels, and a lower frame, all intended to make riding on America’s bumpy roads more comfortable.

Thomas R. Pickering, Velocipede, US Patent 88,507, issued March 30, 1869

In 1869—the year of peak use—dozens of bicycling schools opened. On Broadway alone there was an academy at Tenth Street, another at Twenty-Second Street, another at Twenty-Eighth Street, and yet another at Forty-Seventh Street. Elsewhere across Manhattan and Brooklyn, the uninitiated could take a lesson at the Empire City Velocipedrome, the Capitoline Velocipede School, the Phoenix Velocipede School, Fearing’s Velocipede Rink, Burnham’s, Byldenberg’s, Pangburn’s, Steinway Hall, Merchants Hall, or Central Hall. Art galleries and armories turned into riding academies. Really, any space big enough could be transformed. The popular schools hosted 200 “scholars” a day and catered to thousands of patrons, each of whom typically paid a monthly membership fee. With membership came access to the facilities, sometimes rather expansive. The Pearsall School, for example, hosted beginners on its upper floors, reserving space on the ground floor for spectators to watch the more accomplished riders. There was even a twenty-foot “artificial hill.”18

Adult students often required several one-hour lessons from “professors” before they could roll around the rinks themselves. From there they graduated to the streets, sidewalks, and parks. (The original velocipede ban from 1819 seems to have been forgotten.) Inside the academies there were smooth wooden surfaces, railings to grasp, experts on hand, and only selective, and presumably sympathetic, onlookers, making the prospect of falling just “a little embarrassing.” The bumpy, muddy streets were a different story. “Sliding down hill on a hand-saw, tooth side up, would be two degrees more comfortable” than riding a velocipede, one novice reported, lamenting that the ex...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Rough Start
• 2. Up and Down
• 3. Moses
• 4. The Ban
• 5. Bloomberg
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index