On Bicycles
A 200-Year History of Cycling in New York City
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- 25,99 €
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- 25,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
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 the city’s first bicycle and 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 cycling in New York City. He uncovers the bicycle’s place in the city over time, showing how it 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—reflects a fitful journey powered, and opposed, by New York City’s people and its politics.
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Friss (The Cycling City), a professor at James Madison University, traces the evolution and controversial past of bicycles in New York City in this informative history. Bicycles have been a point of contention in New York, Friss writes, since their first appearance in 1819 as velocipedes, clunky precursors to the more familiar design that were quickly derided as "whimsical inventions" and banned. Friss explores issues of race, class, and gender as cycling evolved, highlighting the discouragement of women from riding in the 19th century (the public disliked "the idea of a woman in a dress mounting a soaring bike five feet off the ground") as well as the effect the 1987 Midtown Bike Ban under Mayor Koch had on messengers of color (the ban was to prevent messengers from recklessly peddling in Midtown; its critics argued that the ban kept blacks and Latinos out of the area). Friss takes the narrative to the present day, showing how the recent Citi Bike bike share program has fueled gentrification (Friss quotes writer Jeremiah Moss, who called bike lanes "green veins that stream gentrifiers into low-income neighborhoods"). This is a thoughtful, entertaining look at an essential form of transportation in New York City.
